My coworkers were in AWS ProServe with me. Any of us who were halfway decent would have contracts for AWS implementations falling out of the sky if we left.

Companies loved to contract ex AWS ProServe folks. It was a win win for both sides. Even if we charged $100-$120 hour W2 contract, that was still much less than the same companies would pay AWS or any of the well known 3rd party cloud consulting companies where consultants work full time for the consulting companies.

All of the people I know who were laid off from ProServe during the great Amazon purge starting in 2023 just reached out to former clients and got jobs or contracts almost immediately.

Remember all of us worked remotely at the time so $100-$120 hour as a W2 contractor went a long way.

Now for the software developers who worked at AWS, that would be a different story. I don’t know any of them up to and including a senior that would have been capable of both talking to a customer and sussing out their needs and going from an empty AWS account to leading a full working solution.

Since leaving AWS, I’ve been in a position to hire directly for the company and recommend candidates for clients [1] and I’ve never been impressed with software developers from BigTech when I needed to hire at smaller companies. They just don’t know how to operate in green field, ambiguous environments where they don’t already have infrastructure and processes in place.

[1] I don’t do or lead staff augmentation projects. My goal is to have success criteria at the beginning of the project, teach the client how to support and expand the implementation and move on. Sometimes they need us to be in their internal hiring loop to make recommendations on who to hire.