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

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

#61

Post by gadders »

snorkel wrote: post #48

Non-Amazonian here but I can tell you this so-called OLR process is same as how most companies with more than 100 employees deal with the promotions process. 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 respons…

And that someone who doesn't like you can black ball your promotion efforts anonymously.

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

#62

Post by lmm »

pothibo wrote: post #51
pcrh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You originally said 0.2% for 3 months. In any case, 2.4%'s a pretty crappy raise, and 90% of projects fail. Success should be worth 10% a year easily.

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

#65

Post by dingaling »

vladimirralev wrote: post #35
ajiang wrote: post #25

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…

> Projects without profit don't exist.

Depends on your industry. In finance there are many, many projects which have to be done for legal compliance. There is no 'profit' for the company; the goal is to be permitted to remain in business.

Funds have to be allocated to do the project, but it brings in no new revenue. It might actually incur new costs, such as ongoing storage for audit logs.

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

#66

Post by res0nat0r »

bane wrote: post #40
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I actually didn't get a job at Amazon because my pretty normal base salary requirements were higher than most of the execs in the company. The deer in headlights wide-eyed look on my recruiter's face (after I had finished all the interviews) when I told him what I currently made in a smaller metro and what I was looking for is something that will be seared into my memory forever. I can't remember if the word "salary…

I'd describe AWS pay as "competitive". Most all gigs provide you a decent signing bonus and stock grants. This lowers your base salary as all these items together are taken into your total compensation, which I believe is pretty much the norm up in Seattle for AWS/Google/Microsoft.

Your signing bonus is pro-rated and you pay it back if you quit before one year, and your moving expenses are also paid back over two years if you quit before then. Your stock grants vest heavily in the back-end over four years. Every year you get a review and new grants are included in your total compensation package as your "salary". It's a sort of lock-in system that helps keep you invested in the company as you keep earning stock etc, but that was my perspective. Nothing exorbitant, and that fits with the Amazon ethos of "frugal".

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

#67

Post by AsymetricCom »

Terretta wrote: post #53
AsymetricCom wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

In that case, it's not an article, it's an advertisement.

the term "sources" and "poorly sourced" are also often paired with "source confidentiality", "source checking" and other similar terms are often subjects in press and media establishments of notable quality.

I imagine Wikipedia has co-opted this kind of standard operational diligence in an effort to not suck. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this article does not burden itself with such impedimenta.

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

#68

Post by bane »

res0nat0r wrote: post #66
bane wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually didn't get a job at Amazon because my pretty normal base salary requirements were higher than most of the execs in the company. The deer in headlights wide-eyed look on my recruiter's face (after I had finished all the interviews) when I told him what I currently made in a smaller metro and what I was looking for is something that will be seared into my memory forever. I can't remember if the word "salary…

I'd describe AWS pay as "competitive". Most all gigs provide you a decent signing bonus and stock grants. This lowers your base salary as all these items together are taken into your total compensation, which I believe is pretty much the norm up in Seattle for AWS/Google/Microsoft. Your signing bonus is pro-rated and you pay it back if you quit before one year, and your moving expenses are also paid back over two yea…

Yeah, that jives with what I was told. I think the stock grants mature over 4 years? I think the schedule was kind of interesting as well but I don't remember what it was, it wasn't 25/25/25/25 either.

To be honest, I think it was a miss-match in positional terminology. I was going for a PM role, which in my current career path is basically the CEO of a specific project or program for part of a company. (These programs can be very big, the largest program I ever worked on as part of the PM staff was north of $130m/yr. but for a wide variety of reasons I prefer the smaller $5-20m work, much more fun to run). Typical compensation is a base salary + specific performance bonuses + contract win bonuses (+ large option grants as bonuses in the kinds of companies that do that sort of thing).

I got the sense that at Amazon PM roles are much lower down the totem pole positionally and act more like coordinators in the organization and don't have as much agency as I was assuming. I was honestly just looking for a change of pace and probably would have accepted whatever they offered even if it was quite a bit lower than what I considered my market rate, but I fouled it up early on and didn't recover well.

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

#69

Post by CodeMage »

jsolson wrote: post #55
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

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

#70

Post by yuhong »

michaelochurch wrote: post #45

I used to get angry when I read about supposedly progressive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, et al) having psychotic, brutal review processes, stack ranking, internal mobility issues, closed allocation. 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 indus…

Here is a fun thing to read:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html

And on Google:

http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...

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