Considering they cleared $2.6 billion on last year's Prime Day, and membership is up YOY, I'd say this comment is 100% knee-jerk/over analysing. Stuff breaks, things go wrong, planning for the worst sometimes isn't enough.
I don't see how "they sold a lot a year ago" and "membership is up YOY" is meant to dispute the idea that engineering talent is leaving. I agree we don't have enough evidence to say for sure, but those figures don't seem relevant.
My comment has nothing to do with Amazon's current financial success or growth. It's regarding their engineering team and their ability to recruit and retain top talent.
It is not a binary state of absolute destitute and top notch brilliance, it's a trend that can move one way or another and will show itself in more frequent outages, poorly rolled out products, lazy design and etc.
The plumping can keep on working for a few years even after it begins to erode. Historically there are many examples of this.
Maybe but your evidence is annecdotal. Good engineers leave huge companies all the time but it is usually balanced by inflow. I guess we have no evidence of inflow as compared to outflow of good engineers.
I didn't reach a conclusion, I presented a possible reason knowing very well that I don't have the evidence to back it. Hence why I said "could it be that the engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be?" and not "The engineering force at Amazon is no longer what it used to be."
