Where does engineering rep come from? Here's a Google engineer slagging on Amazon engineering, which they say mediocre.

I don't think this is an unusual opinion, I've heard this from people both inside and outside of Google. Google has the best engineering, Amazon is mediocre.

When I worked on cloud at MS, it was the same -- although AWS was clearly in the lead, a major concern was that Google's superior engineering would allow them to crush AWS and Azure; "preparing for a knife fight with Amazon, but Google is going to bring a gun to this knife fight"

But when I looked at execution speed on actual projects (via backchannel communications), AWS was smoking both us and Google. In one case, I heard that they got the idea for a project from our product announcement and they still shipped before we did.

They weren't moving fast and breaking things -- when I looked at 3rd party measured uptime, AWS was clearly #1 and we were going back and forth with Google for #2.

This understates AWS's edge since they had fewer global outages and less flakiness that didn't count as downtime.

The more I looked into this, the more impressed I was with Amazon engineering. But AFAICT this never translated into any kind of reputational change.

I don't think this is unique to Amazon either. When I compare general reputation to what I can observe, they seem uncorrelated.

BTW, I don't mean this thread as an attack on MS or Google.

It's more that if I could take a sabbatical from my job and intern somewhere to learn from them, Amazon would be at the top of my list and I don't think many others would put any company in my top 3 in their top 50.