[strivingtobe]

Money, mostly.

But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.

Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.

[kccqzy]

Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership that squanders it.

[BryantD]

I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.

[mmcconnell1618]

Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.