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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

In my current role I am writing a promotion packet to go to the next level. The bar is relatively low, it must only demonstrate that I have been performing as an N+1 level. It requires extensive documentation and close to a dozen personal internal references.

The external interviewing process into that role must demonstrate that the candidate has been performing at a level that is higher than average for that role. The promotion process takes 1-2 orders of magnitude more time for a known internal quantity than it does for an external unknown quantity.

There is a marked focus on improving the recruitment process but little on improving the promotion and retention process.

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This is an incredibly important contributor to all of this.

At a prior company, in order to be promoted from associate to senior staff, you had to demonstrate and be evaluated performing at senior level while associate for a year. In order to get hired as a senior, you just talked with a hiring manager and an HR rep, checked off some boxes based on a few blurbs about what you did at prior jobs, and boom, you were a senior. Same thing with getting a raise. To get a raise to 150K (just as a randomly selected round number), it was an enormous bureaucratic process going up 5 levels of management that would take months with lots of aggravation - and unlikely to really pan out. To get hired at 150K for the same role, it was a couple phone calls with an HR rep and hiring manager - about 15 minutes in total.

On the subject of money - the other issue is that new hires, being certified as better than average in that role, are getting compensation packages in the top half of that band. The people getting promoted to that role are in many cases getting nothing or maybe a few thousand extra that vests in 24 months, because the stock appreciation on their N-level compensation package has lifted them into the bottom of the N+1 payband even before they were promoted.

May I ask if you're at Amazon? That particular bar raising process is fairly unique to Amazon, or at least started with Amazon.

One struggle as a result is that the levels themselves slowly shift upward; it's harder and harder to get promoted as time passes. Other companies tend to have level compression, which Amazon's approach attempted to address. Now Amazon has a problem in that level 6, accepted as the typical terminal/career level, has become larger and larger as it stretches upward.

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