The best managers I’ve ever known were some guys who came over to Amazon from Capital One. They were deeply embedded into the EC2 infrastructure systems, including the team I was on — EC2-Chronos. We were responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all of Amazon and AWS, in every single region, availability zone, and datacenter. That includes the isolated and classified regions.

That was also one of the best teams of technical people I’ve ever known.

Sadly, there was also the Amazon and AWS S-Team leadership, who came up with things like RTO and mandatory co-location with your manager. They lost a lot of good people, and I think that was entirely intentional.