Amazon was an innovative, day 1 company, but it is not any more. They are becoming an IBM.

Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.

Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.

Who cares?

And yet the organization is the closest thing we have in the West to industrial-scale slavery

I am sorry, but none of this is about engineering culture, it might as well apply to Walmart.

It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.

The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.

(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)

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