That's opposite of my experience at AWS. It's likely that the culture at AWS has changed over the past few years, it's also likely that there's a difference in culture between teams.
Having talked to dozens of Amazon engineers, the only consistent picture I've formed in my head is that the culture varies wildly between teams. The folks on the happiest teams are always aghast at hearing the horror stories.
I have no doubt it varies from team to team. Like I said, my other friends at Amazon had more positive experiences.
I assume there's some selection bias going on whenever we're able to hire people out of FAANG companies. We compensated similarly, but in theory had a lower promotion ceiling simply because we weren't FAANG. I assume he wanted out of Amazon because he wasn't on a great team there.
One has to be wary of the differences between what is said in places like the employee handbook and espoused as official policy, and what actually ends up happening.
AWS and amazon in general espouse all sorts of values relating to taking responsibility and owning problems.
Whats left unstated is that the management structure hammers you to the wall as soon as they find somebody to blame.
Echoing what Aperocky said, I worked for Amazon for about 10 years, across a number of different teams. Amazon has its share of problems, but assigning blame for outages was not one of them.
During my 10 years, I had multiple opportunities to break and then fix things. The breaking was always looked at as "these things happen" while the fixing was always commended.
I'm speaking from experience, not handbooks or policies.
In fact, AWS is the least 'blame game' playing company I've worked at. The mindset of fix the problem and not to find some scapegoat is strong at least in my org, I really do appreciate this because it aligns with my personal belief.
Same here, I've made some huge fuck ups in my time at Amazon, one of which I was pretty new and assumed I would be fired for; but one of the principal engineers on my team told me not to worry, these things happen and it's a blameless process where we're just trying to get to the root cause of the problem and ensure it never happens again; and it was exactly as he said. The CoE we presented said "An engineer from the xyz team..." and never mentioned a name once.
