> It also helped me realize there was nothing I could do at my level of responsibility to change the number in any meaningful way
That doesn't sound right. If your role is worth having around then it should have impact on the numbers on some time scale. If you literally did nothing (or tried working 120hr weeks and then burned out and effectively did nothing when compared to a proper week), would that not move the needle by an amount greater than your salary?
Even if their employment is a positive ROI for the company (which is obviously nearly impossible to even guess at for most ICs at a company the size of Amazon), doesn't mean they can meaningfully improve (or diminish) that ROI by modulating their amount of effort. Sure, we can contrive unrealistic scenarios like doing literally nothing for years while collecting a huge salary or lucking into finding and fixing a trillion dollar bug, but for most BigCo workers in most positions? BigCo financials will be BigCo's financials, even if you work every weekend and skip every little league game. You are a passenger on the BigCo bus, not the driver.
Makes a good point. I wonder how many management decisions in my career that made no sense to me would have been clearer if the financial data had been shared.