Stripped of fluff, the main point of the article seems to be that their engineers are doing too much manual repetitive work, due to bad tooling and processes. Why would that be caused by their performance review system?
Easy: tooling and process are often seen as being of little importance because they’re not easily associated with metrics that are important in toxic review process cultures. Engineers who like working on these things are treated as second class citizens and performance reviews will reflect that.
(I don’t know that this is the case with Amazon: I’m just providing an anecdote based on my observations at places I’ve worked.)
Not just engineers, but also engineering managers and product managers. Shipping bugfixes and tooling improvements is often harder than shipping new features, and is generally less visible to the people who make hiring/firing/promotion decisions.
I’ve found tooling lags behind in places where incentives are too short term, or most of the funding comes from projects (rather than durable product teams). I’m not saying this is Amazon.
> Why would that be caused by their performance review system?
May be because their performance review prioritizes employee contributions that impact bottom line immediately instead of building infra that might improve developer productivity?
You can't manage what you don't measure. Developer tooling quality impact on revenue is very difficult to measure. Therefore, a rationally managed organization cannot authorize any work on developer tooling.
