Amazon relaxes drug testing policies and will lobby the government to legalize marijuana

I think people are misunderstanding my meaning here.

I'm literally a software developer who works in the field.

Read the part where I said "although thats probably true" with regards to being the largest human element.

When you log into AWS, configure new instances, etc - no human is involved besides the developer doing the AWS deployment - external to amazon.

Developers built the tooling, automation, etc to control that, and they develop new products, enhance existing products, perform bugfixes and maintenance, etc.

My overarching point is that the scale is not linear - yes, a bigger business requires more workers, but its not a linear scale - AWS does not need one more developer for every X number of customers - things scale at an inverse exponent. As the scope grows larger and larger over time, you need less and less humans per customer to maintain.

Automation (my field) is key to that - and is employed MASSIVELY by AWS. They do not have humans constantly manually spinning up server instances. That's not how it works.

Developers, engineers, architects, all of the above - yes. And yes, AWS is probably the largest single "software" project on the planet.

But that does not mean that, as AWS continues to grow, they are also going to exponentially grow their employee needs. The opposite is true, whereby at a certain point they will trend exponentially down on human resource growth while still supporting an ever larger swath of clients and businesses.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - cnbc.com