41–50 of 82 posts
Maybe the problem is promotion altogether? Work your ass off for 1 year and then, you may or may not win the promotion lottery. I guess a more flexible style of salary increase could be created? Work on a project for 3 months. If it attain its goal, everyone on the team receives 0.20% increase. This way you want to make sure your team will succeed. I'm just thinking outloud here. It could be a rubbish idea.
How can it be harder to climb Amazon's corporate ladder unless they have less management or do more outside hiring at a senior level than other companies? Somebody has to get promoted to fill the positions, right?
I think that there's a lot of subtlety that gets lost talking about the corporate structure in Amazon. The levels were more or less correct, so far as it goes, but it's not the full story. For instance, a senior developer could be level 6, while his manager might be level 5. That doesn't mean that the dev gets to override what his manager says; they're different promotion paths. This is key. If you want to work as a…
Now, I'm more inclined to laugh at their rookie mistakes. These MBA/McKinsey hotshots have been (very expensively, I might add) setting up the same exact defective corporate culture (in a variety of different industries) for 25 years, and I (like quite a few on HN) could single-handedly do a better job just because I, unlike the McK morons who think stank-ranking's a good idea, understand talent and what it takes to succeed.
Any company that relies on closed allocation and rank-and-yank is fucked in the long run.
This article is poorly sourced and fails to establish any evidence for it's main point, that it's "difficult to climb Amazon's corporate ladder," which is probably true considering it's a Fortune 100. Instead, the article paints a picture that Amazon as a place ruled by fiefdoms and popularity contests, but again without any actual evidence, no you have to buy the book for that. I have a feeling that if I read the bo…
> This article is poorly sourced... On the contrary, it's first party interviews: "In dozens of interviews ranging over two years for my book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, employees often sounded... But in my interviews with rank and file employees... No one I talked to..." Just because Wikipedia has a "no original research" policy doesn't make first party research "poorly sourced".
Saying "I have sources" and actually quoting those sources are two different things. I'm sure you can appreciate this difference.
Ex-amazonian here. Another problem is if your manager doesn't want you to get promoted. For whatever reason, sometimes people don't click, and I've seen the careers of some extremely talented developers be hampered by a bad or non-relationship with their manager. It didn't matter that their entire team, and other teams viewed these people very highly, and sought out their advice and consultation on a number of matter…
I worked for a fairly large company that previously required your team manager to approve of you moving to another team. You could spin wheels all you wanted, but if they didn't like you for whatever reason they could immediately stop any lateral movement. This wound up pushing a lot of employees out, they'd eventually quit because they were miserable. Couldn't get shifts they wanted, bootcamps, training, unfairly po…
I don't know why a manager would want to prevent this from happening though. If I were a manager, and one of my employees said they wanted to switch teams, the last thing I'd want to do is force them to stay on my team knowing that they didn't want to be there, even if I was feeling vindictive towards that employee.
I've heard that the policy requiring informing the manager was motivated by a desire to allow employees to switch teams if they wanted to, but at the same time to dissuade managers from actively poaching employees from other teams in the same company. Also, it gives the manager a chance to possibly make things right with the disgruntled employee, instead of just losing that employee with no warning.
It's not a perfect system at all, but I can at least understand the rationale. It totally doesn't make sense that a manager would be able to prevent it from happening though.
In most companies your line manager does not solely decide your performance rating and promote you based on that, but rather the manager should be telling you how your are performing, how to improve and grow, and once you have proven you can manage added responsibilities then your manager suggests and advocates for your promotion. The promotion candidates are then considered across all teams during an annual or semi-annual review process.
This practice ensures that a lenient manager isn't promoting their junior interns to VP roles, every team has the same performance standards, and managers of other teams can endorse or disapprove of someone being promoted based on whether they work well with other teams rather than just performing well within their own team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Favors near term profits far more than long term growth, which you could argue is not good for the longevity of the company. Plus, there would be competition over the seemingly most profitable projects. And there are projects that don't generate any profit, but has benefits that are very difficult to quantify.
But if that's true then it applies to shareholders and execs as well. Should we change their compensation plans? Yes there will be competition over the profitable projects and that's how it should be. Projects without profit don't exist. If the project doesn't have profit then the company wouldn't allocate budget. If they allocate budget then the project is profitable. It is up to the project leaders to have the figh…
Clearly there is value in not forcing developers to use 15 year old machines, but it isn't so clear to quantify.
Since whomever 'quantifies' this data then has enormous influence as to what projects are worked on, you risk just shuffling around the politics: instead of fighting over what projects to work on it becomes about how many dollars each project is worth.
Ex-amazonian here. Another problem is if your manager doesn't want you to get promoted. For whatever reason, sometimes people don't click, and I've seen the careers of some extremely talented developers be hampered by a bad or non-relationship with their manager. It didn't matter that their entire team, and other teams viewed these people very highly, and sought out their advice and consultation on a number of matter…