Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D
Judging from things Steve Yegge has written about Amazon, and from friends of mine who have worked there, I don't get the impression that Amazon is a company dedicated to technical excellence.<p>In particular I seem to recall something about 40 million lines of C++ code in their core product, and about mediocre engineering talent and high levels of burnout due to the technical debt they're required to deal with...<p>In fact, ever-increasing engineering costs would be just as indicative of mounting technical debt as it would of an increasing commitment to R&D.