The perspectives of disgruntled employees have been known to be worse than reality, on occasion. Not definitively saying that's the case here, just saying.
I work at Amazon - a lot of teams are like this. They're stuck managing a woefully broken product and spend all of their time propping up the beast, leaving no capacity left for meaningful fixes (in these cases, meaningful fixes are always gigantic engineering projects).
The team develops a reputation internally for being glorified firefighting, and have trouble recruiting. More senior engineers eventually flee (having, well, choice in the matter) leaving a team heavy with junior talent with no seasoned gurus leading the way.
The company is also growing at ludicrous speed, and hiring is difficult. When the product is in such a painful state, attrition from the team is high, and with slow hiring you are barely countering attrition (exacerbating the junior talent problem), and not even close to growing the team to be in a position to take care of the problem for good.
I suspect this is an industry-wide problem though, and is hardly unique to this place.
This is quite disturbing to read about the place that tons of companies rely on to host their apps. As EC2 (and friends) grows, it's growing undoubtedly more complex. Combine that with many of the original/senior devs leaving to greener pastures and seems like as more time passes it becomes more risky to host with Amazon. Doesn't really inspire confidence ...
This is very accurate of many teams within Amazon. Also, I don't know the exact story of what is happening with EBS now, but I have heard an increasing number of horror stories about EBS.
I wonder if it's time for AWS to open a development office in a more startup-oriented city (i.e. SF). It might help them attract and retain more talent.
A.) Amazon isn't a startup.
B.) A lot of Bay Area companies (Zynga, Facebook, Salesforce) are opening Seattle offices to take advantage of the Amazon and Microsoft talent pools.
C.) They already have a Bay Area office. http://public.a2z.com/index.html I believe some core SimpleDB guys (Jim Larson) were based out of there.
