alt Hacker NewsI'm going to play devil's advocate here: _what if_ most of lower level engineers are actually not able to self-organize themselves like this dedicated, I bet hand-picked group of PE can? I'm pretty sure AWS ruthless culture would gladly use less middle-managers and be swifter in time to market if it were so easy, no? What works for a single, highly-focused project (or a handful of similar situations) doesn't scale when you have to take care of bazillion customers, do boring/smaller tasks and keep the machine ticking.
Having seen how the sausage is made, Amazon's internal engineering culture is a textbook example of the principal/agent problem. You only get a raise from a promo, and you only get a promo from scope. It's way easier for management to demonstrate scope and so those folks build out empires of crap. In the best case they're just consuming oxygen, but I have definitely seen orgs created that were a negative influence on productivity.