[adamsmark]

I worked at Amazon too. This outcome of a 5 why,

"Why?" "Because our culture has product managers demanding things with short deadlines and no concern about the code quality."

Does not sound like anything would change. I could chalk up a lot of failures, missed goals or mistakes to this culture of shipping the bare minimum because that's all the time you have. Sometimes it works well, others lead to tech debt that metastasizes because the engineers don't have to use what they built leading to instances like pricing errors that lost significant amounts of money.

Working at Amazon sometimes felt like everyone was gaming the system to hit impossible numbers/deadlines - Goodhart's law at scale.

[shepherdjerred]

Hah. I cannot count the number of times we made action items as a result of five COEs and the ultimate result was a SIM issue permanently sitting in our queue because there was always something more important to do.

[8note]

That makes sense. I remember some principal saying "COEs are a chance for engineers to drive work priority" at a coe review.

[ajkjk]

It worked pretty well in my org (fulfillment/supply-chain) but maybe I just got lucky. As you might imagine that org was pretty functional, being the backbone of the retail business.

[delecti]

In my experience at Amazon, orgs which deal with physical things operate differently from orgs which deal solely with digital things. So the advertising org was more very "move fast and break things", while the Kindle org was more "if we ship a broken build then we brick millions of pieces of hardware, so we're going to manual verification on daily builds". Fulfillment having a healthy/diligent development culture fits that experience pretty well.