[ozzythecat]

Ads = revenue = promotions.

I was at Amazon for over a decade. Show YoY growth in terms of revenue, you’ll get a bigger empire. Sr. Managers become Directors. Directors become VPs. The senior engineers who worked on the low latency performance optimization becomes principals. The tech program managers become principals as well.

All the other cogs in the chain either get burned out, managed out, or they bounce to AWS, maybe Alexa.

All the analysis and commentary in this thread is interesting, but there’s nothing complex here. It’s basic incentive structures incentivizing undesirable outcomes.