Former AWS/Alexa engineer. Totally forgot about the whole badge color thing. Can't stand that crap.
Things are very dependent on team and manager and org but I will say that one of the things I'll never miss is our Re:Invent launch. That was horrible. Our team (startup acquisition) basically had a giant retro after the launch to figure out how we could avoid doing that again. Most of the startup members left the team of the company 2 years in. I learned a lot.
yellow = vendors (and DSP employees, if I remember right).
It's more or less their way of tagging you with a yellow star so they know who they can treat like shit. Hah, just kidding, they treat everyone like shit.
If you saw any blue badge employees with a yellow/red/purple border around their badge, then that signifies how long they've been at the company.
Saying someone is a yellow badge badge is saying that they are a full time employee with 5-9 years of tenure, most SDEs don't work with contractors so we don't talk about yellow badge contractors all that often.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, the color is actually supposed to be orange, but the color came out yellow.
Honestly, I never ran into many blue badges down in logistics. Mostly all white and yellow badges, with a few exceptions... and most of the time I was in and out so fast I wouldn't have noticed any colored border on their badge. The only time I would've interacted with a blue badge is if there was a problem on-route.
TL;DR DSP drivers don't encounter many blue badges.
The article you linked is from five years ago when the new badges were being initially tested. They have been rolled out for years with color photos. Both styles still work and if you don't go into one of a few big offices you might not have easy access to the newer style.
Not speculating as to the reason why mtmail is being downvoted, but for those wondering, the reason the nazi Yellow Badge comparison is almost always off-limits is because there's really only one hard and fast rule as to whether the comparison is valid:
Is an entity imposing an identification system for quickly singling out populations with invisible but immutable characteristics? If so, the Yellow Badge comparison is apt because that's exactly what the nazis did with their badging system.
Amazon identifying people within certain buckets of employment doesn't fit this comparison because opportunities exist (in theory) for people to take other roles, to quit, or to be terminated, making Amazon badges identifiers of a mutable characteristic.
Now, is badging people by employment class a crappy thing to do? Probably. Easy way to enable eyeballing a worker and denying certain perks, for instance. But it's also useful in determining whether a person is qualified to hear certain company-confidential information.
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tl;dr: There's never a good reason to compel visible identification for an immutable trait, but that's also not what Amazon's badging scheme is, so using the comparison risks cheapening the original sin.
Hope this helps anyone reading. And to any historians who probably know better than I do, kindly fact-check me. I only know enough to be dangerous, not useful.
Things are very dependent on team and manager and org but I will say that one of the things I'll never miss is our Re:Invent launch. That was horrible. Our team (startup acquisition) basically had a giant retro after the launch to figure out how we could avoid doing that again. Most of the startup members left the team of the company 2 years in. I learned a lot.