I think there’s a meaningful difference between “a ton of organizational knowledge has departed over the past few years” and “they let people go last week so now their site fell over.”
And I object strongly to the mischaracterization of my point as “the smart engineers left.” It’s unfair to the incredibly talented folks that work at AWS to cast the tenured folks as being any more or less skilled—it’s just that they definitively have more experience with the environment.
If you're in the mood to object to mischaracterization, maybe the best thing would have been to object to your piece being published with a headline including the phrase "brain drain" and a subheadline involving the phrase "When your best engineers log off for good". Whatever you may have meant I do not have a publicly appropriate adjective for how this from somebody prominent felt to see while eating lunch with the other "incredibly talented folks" in the light haze of foundational services event-recovery sleep deprivation.
And I object strongly to the mischaracterization of my point as “the smart engineers left.” It’s unfair to the incredibly talented folks that work at AWS to cast the tenured folks as being any more or less skilled—it’s just that they definitively have more experience with the environment.