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Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

I think the advice is actually good, all around. I also think it takes a certain degree of courage for a CEO to advise workers to quit on this sort of basis. Bezos's stature just grew a bit in my eyes.

Additionally it's a bit of an inspiring story.

There's another time and place to quit too which seems to me to be touched on in the article. If you are in a position that is well below your skills, very often times HR won't give you a chance to work to your capacity. It's usually better to quit and later re-apply than to try to work your way up within a company. I saw this at Microsoft and have reason to believe it happens everwhere else.

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> I saw this at Microsoft

As a bit of MSFT-specific advice, if you're in the dev/test/pm org and an IC and feel this way, you should make sure that you're having a regular (e.g. every six months) 1:1 with your manager's manager. During that, you should try to get a deeper understanding of what the next level means. There are certain levels (63, 65, 68) whose promotions are significantly different than the other levels and can be intimidating, particularly to first-time leads. For example, at 63, your lead might have to justify the promo to your PUM, and at 65, your lead has to convince your discipline manager to justify it not only to your PUM but has to provide enough info about your comparable work to have it justified with all the discipline managers across your division at the calibration meeting.

Unless you are in an extraordinarily technically deep area (e.g. compiler frontend, database internals), you should not expect your lead to be an amazing manager. If they were, they'd have left you behind and be a manager of managers within ~3 years because there aren't nearly enough of those to go around.

Granted the departments I worked at were sent off to India but I was basically triaging and routing tech support calls. What impressed me about the people I worked with was how underemployed they were. We had folks with masters degrees in math who were solid programmers, solid sysadmins, etc. in the team as FTE's, and people who worked there with similar credentials as temps tended to get good jobs at Microsoft elsewhere, but if you took an FTE position in that department you had a really hard time getting into something better.

In fact there was only one way to do it: get a job somewhere else, and then apply back. Things were so bad at one point that HR was actually recommending this as a career path.

I would certainly agree that the path from product support to any of the product development arms is not an easy one internally, particularly for an FTE role where it is generally expected that you would have a CS degree. Especially after the move to eliminate the software test engineer position in favor of software design engineer in test, which basically eliminated the career path for people who were solid developers or sysadmins but didn't also have a good theoretical CS background.

The temp positions are much more lax in almost all groups. The individual with budgetary authority has nearly complete control over the vendor choice and individual hires, so long as they don't do anything unethical. So, if you can sell to that person that you are qualified, smart, and motivated, they will probably give you a chance. It's typically only a 6-11 month commitment, anyway, and so many of the contractors are checked out that anybody with a spark of enthusiasm really shines in the interview process.

Maybe this explains why so many of the great open source software engineers I have worked with used to also work at Microsoft's Product Support Services ;-)

@larsberg's comment tells me (as an outsider) why Microsoft will die. It has the corporate equivalent of arteriosclerosis. Whether theirs products are good or not is beside the point.

All companies are both predator and prey. With inscrutable insider rules like this Microsoft cannot move fast enough to survive as either.

I was recently reading what I had written about Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle in 2004 as part of a business plan. My outlook for Microsoft was simple: Painful days are ahead but Microsoft has what it takes to succeed. Sun, not so much. Oracle could go either way.

Seems I was right about Sun, not sure yet about Microsoft. I now think Oracle is in a better position than they used to be.

One of the major things I noted was that Microsoft, despite a major institutional aversion, has been slowly developing and expanding services businesses. They have continued to do this, for example now offering to host Linux VPS's via Azure. Their services offerings in 2003 were more anemic than they are today. They are on the right track to deal both with open source competition and long-extended upgrade cycles.

I don't think Microsoft is about to die. They may be cut down to size but I think their offerings are large and diverse enough that they are more likely to be pressured to evolve than disappear. Many businesses in fact do this, see IBM's transformation into one of the world's largest IT services firms in the world.

Just as a note on the factors I looked at:

1) Cash positive operations and cash reserves

2) Healthy services business (customer satisfaction, etc) These are important because they are a hedge against open source software and upgrade cycles that extend as hardware matures.

3) Lack of vertical integration/insularity

4) Organizational awareness of issues.

Sun scored relatively low on these, Oracle depended on how heavily you rated customer satisfaction and customer perceptions, and Microsoft scored high on everything but healthy services businesses, but there they were growing and trying lots of things.

To be fair (and like others have said re: Amazon), this sounds pretty particular to a specific team. In other teams, it's pretty clear what you have to do in order to get promoted. I overheard from some employees that at the last meeting they had on the subject, management was very straightforward, saying that they had X spots available and Y people to consider. If you did the right things, they would consider you, and promote the best X people. I think this approach is about as good as it can be in a large org.

Realize that my info is ~10 years old. At the time I was leaving Microsoft, they were working on adding more transparency to the process since, as you'd guess, people wanted to know more. Part of that was explicit titles tied to levels; part was just informing people of the process.

And at least there _are_ guidelines. Have you ever worked at a small company? There are certainly exceptions (I'd gamble that Fog Creek is one), but most of the ones I've worked at or for have had salary and promotion schemes that basically came down to some mix of hiring manager's whim, highest priority for the company today, your public visibility before joining, and whether you have some family connection to the owners.

I haven't heard of any organization with ~100k+ people without rules like these.

Remember when Microsoft was a scrappy company who made fun of IBM for being so bureaucratic?

>If you are in a position that is well below your skills, very often times HR won't give you a chance to work to your capacity.

Exactly, the lesson i learnt. Most of the times, once you are within an organization, switching roles/jobs/responsibilities is pretty impossible. I am not sure exactly how and why this works out to be so, but would probably blame it on social group-think and the fear of the unknown being amplified, when every individual states and restates the uncertainty. It's as if when it's time to make a decision, the number of people agreeing something is uncertain multiplies the actual uncertainty/risk. I don't understand how groups of people make decisions in that manner, but then i never was good with people.

I think it's a fear on the part of HR and others that you are working at your ability. They don't see evidence of your ability even if it's there.

I think it could also be fear of sticking your neck out and failing. Now, a lot of places simply don't recognize execellence. I had to quit my job at Software GlobalCorp because my manager didn't know anything about technology or the project we were working on.

I did however, continue to stick my neck out.

I witnesssed that too. An other thing I saw were managers treating emplyees like, well "property" would be to harsh but not far from it. At my future ex-employers place internal changes (supposed to be conluded within three months to months end of the agreement between you and the new department) aren't done anything faster than 4 to 5 months due to "negotiations" between the current and the future boss. Most people swallow that, but once you actually quit, everybody is shocked since THIS was considered impossible. At least the three months are adhered to. :-)

I have developed a theory about this:

Suppose you were hired to do X, and after doing X for a few years, you have developed the skill to do Y instead. But that skill does not guarantee that your current employer will have an opening for a job doing Y. Even if they do have the opening, from their point of view, if they let you transfer, they will definitely need to hire a replacement X, and you might turn out to suck at Y. So a rational manager will feel a strong pressure to leave well enough alone and let you keep doing X.

There are a variety of ways for an employee to escape this situation, but the simplest one is just to find another company with an opening for Y.

Really? This post made it a little bit more unlikely for me that I'll take a job under Bezos.

"Yeah, my managers suck. I should fix that. But you know, they're extracting enough value out of you for me so that I'm OK with them sucking. I don't really care about lowly workers"

It's a valid stance, but I'd rather work under a CEO who actually cares that the managers perform well, too.

Dude, I left Microsoft and almost doubled my salary in less than 2 years. Just quit. (Or find a job then quit, it's good advice)

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