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Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

businessweek.com

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Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#51

Post by pothibo »

pcrh wrote: post #41
pothibo wrote: post #16

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.

A 20% salary increase might be nice, but a 0.20% increase would be an insult.

Well, it depends on the length of the project. 0.2% for 1 month work equals to a 2.4% raise by the end of the year (12*0.2).

The thought would be like this: You give impacting projects to your best talent. Higher the impact, higher the % after the completion. So your less efficient talent would have a salary that follows inflation while people thriving could get very nice salary increase.

If you want to step up, you request bigger responsibilities. Management test you out by giving you 1. You get better % on it. If you fail, you go back to step-1. If not, you just open the door for bigger salary increase and more interesting projects.

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#52

Post by snorkel »

oh_sigh wrote: post #13

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…

It's not so much manager doesn't want to promote you as manager has no role to promote you into. Sometimes you can create a role and demonstrate to your manager that you are willing and responsible to manage that topic, and perhaps it needs added investment to grow that topic (more money and more people) which you will manage ... in other words don't wait for your manager to create the role to promote you into. Most managers are happy to team leads with this kind of initiative and will support them.

If you create the role but still your manager is unsupportive about it then you're probably in a team with a very narrow scope and there's just no further room to grow in that team, so time to move on.

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#53

Post by Terretta »

AsymetricCom wrote: post #46
Terretta wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Not sure how Wikipedia is relevant here.. Saying "I have sources" and actually quoting those sources are two different things. I'm sure you can appreciate this difference.

Sounds like if one wants the quotes, buy the book. This article seems to be a synopsis of the research, so one wouldn't expect all actual quotes.

// Wikipedia is relevant because their "Verifiability" page is the top result for the phrase "poorly sourced" and Wikipedia tends to be the only context I hear the phrase. Outside of Wikipedia, "poorly sourced" doesn't mean how extensively phrases are in quote marks. it means where the information came from.

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#55

Post by jsolson »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #8
cylinder wrote: post #4

You should almost always avoid working for low-margin businesses. Sure, if they are new and growing, there's an exception, but if their whole growth plan is premised around being low-margin, it's not going to be a great place to work and advance your career. Expenses such as compensation are always on management's radar.

It's pretty well known around Seattle that Amazon pays their employees very well, and has a tendency of giving ridiculous signing bonuses.

Anecdotally, Amazon's pay scale is only competitive with other companies in the area if you ignore on-call and only look at starting salary/bonus (including stock compensation).

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#56

Post by munificent »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #50
oh_sigh wrote: post #13

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've heard that at Google, the team votes for the person they would like to see promoted. This seems to be a pretty good idea from the outside - can someone comment on this? There must be some Googlers lurking...

Googler here.

If you want to seek a promotion, you can nominate yourself or others can nominate you. When that happens, a packet is assembled for you. It includes your self-review, and reviews from a number of your peers as well as your managers.

That packet goes to a committee likely made up of people who don't know you who then reach a decision about your promotion.

That's a simplification, but that's the basic idea. Your manager has a large influence on your success: to get promoted you need to show accomplishments, and that depends on you being given important work to do. But, compared to other companies, the process is much less biased by your manager. Your peers have a huge influence on your ability to get promoted.

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#57

Post by keketiko »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #8
cylinder wrote: post #4

You should almost always avoid working for low-margin businesses. Sure, if they are new and growing, there's an exception, but if their whole growth plan is premised around being low-margin, it's not going to be a great place to work and advance your career. Expenses such as compensation are always on management's radar.

It's pretty well known around Seattle that Amazon pays their employees very well, and has a tendency of giving ridiculous signing bonuses.

That doesn't refute the original argument. Amazon might very well be a low-margin business that pays competitively (they gotta attract that talent) while working at a "grinding pace" (as in the article).

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#58

Post by ffrryuu »

mrbgty wrote: post #12

Sounds to me like no matter what system is used, the problem is that there's a limited number of promotions/raises to give out. If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?

Hence Finance companies call everyone Vice President, because they know their only asset are people.

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#59

Post by munificent »

vladimirralev wrote: post #22
pothibo wrote: post #16

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.

Much more simple than that. Just take a cut from the profits your project generates or supervises. If the project doesn't generate or supervise anything just get a cut from the overall budget which is allocated based on how valuable the project is to the company.

I worked at EA when they tried a similar model. It was astonishingly effective at slaughtering any technology shared across game teams. Large companies get economies of scale by being able to reuse technology across multiple revenue generating products. If your compensation system can't accommodate that, you'll lose it.

Re: Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

#60

Post by buckbova »

marincounty wrote: post #37

Maybe it should be difficult? There's usually nothing more useless than someone who wants to beome a Manager. What even surprises me more is the amount of people out there who really don't care about the money; they want authority. They want a Title in life. They need a title in life? I have noticed the one factor that can produce a good Manager. That one factor is birth order, and it's the first born. If you're an o…

I'm sure there's a lot of younger brothers out there that caught savage beatings from one of your "non-abusing" types.

Just another type of leadership I suppose, do as your told.

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