> COEs are such a huge annoyance for teams that they create a strong incentive to be proactive in preventing issues like this from happening.

Absolutely not my experience at AWS.

All the teams I was on treated them as "not a big deal", kind of a non-punitive exercise in technical writing, and the COE was always assigned to be written by an engineer who was not involved in causing the COE.

Also, the kinds of issues that did or didn't lead to COEs appeared to be largely random. I was considered to be an extremely good operational trouble-shooter on the team where I spent most of my time at AWS, and I was never able to predict what an L7-8 manager would decide was COE-worthy.

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RandomThrow321 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Obviously experiences vary greatly, but I was on one of the largest AWS orgs and they were quite punitive. People would demand them for perceived slights, then assign reviewers that were tough or on their side. Many of my friends had different experiences, though.

	▲	swiftcoder 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Some orgs also use them to extract concessions from dependencies further up the chain. Upstream service won't fix an issue that's been causing problems for us? "unintentionally" let it become a SEV, so that we can send the CoE up the chain and get Jassy to drop the hammer on that team...
	▲	dlenski 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Hmm. I'm curious about which org that was. I spent the slight majority of my time at AWS in RDS.