AWS itself was one of the biggest innovations in technology, of all time. Cloudformation, IAM policies, and creating these services as independent composable blocks was revolutionary. S3 was completely new, and is still a dominant force in cloud computing. But my point was that all of the best ideas in AWS came long ago.
There are newer companies, like temporal.io, whose platform capabilities make AWS look outdated at this point.
I think your understanding of leetcode is not correct. It filters for:
Can learn computer science concepts
Is willing to sit in front of a screen and learn said concepts for a while
Is willing to follow directions and recipes
Is willing to follow the rules
Has some minumum bar of intelligence
Unfortunately, these interviews do work. Some percentage of people that pass the interview are actually very good. The amazon firing process will weed out the rest.
Meta has released the best open source software in the last 20 years, and their hiring process is all leetcode memorization
I guess we disagree on what innovation is. I define innovation as technology that either no one has, or capability to do things for a lower material cost.
For example, lets say I have a server rack at home. There is nothing in AWS that exists that I can't replicate on my server rack at home. The only difference is that time required to implement all of it on my server rack vs in AWS, which is optimization.
If AWS comes out with some closed source ML model that is good at doing something, thats innovation - i can't replicated that at home without knowing specifics. Likewise, if they have super cheap EC2s with RISC or dedicated ML hardware that are cheaper per hour to run than anything I can build at home with power costs, thats also innovation.
The interviews aren't fully useless, I agree that leetcode provides valuable insight. However IMO it should be the bare minimum.
There are newer companies, like temporal.io, whose platform capabilities make AWS look outdated at this point.
I think your understanding of leetcode is not correct. It filters for:
Can learn computer science concepts
Is willing to sit in front of a screen and learn said concepts for a while
Is willing to follow directions and recipes
Is willing to follow the rules
Has some minumum bar of intelligence
Unfortunately, these interviews do work. Some percentage of people that pass the interview are actually very good. The amazon firing process will weed out the rest.
Meta has released the best open source software in the last 20 years, and their hiring process is all leetcode memorization