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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”

Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.

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For the most part, "career matrixes", "development plans", and the like are just generic internal marketing to placate people and create the illusion that managers / the company care about their career development, and they don't have to do anything.

To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.

In my experience (mainly IT related), when one first starting a career, first 5-10 years are standardized are promotion/title change for an average employee. After that if one is known by at least 1-2 level above their managers and/or other team managers, to have any chance of further growth. IME as time go by current managers have less and less power to promote as gap between manager and employee reduces.

Where I've seen them they tell you exactly what you should have been doing for the previous 5 years. People who guessed correctly what the career matrix would be 5 years ago and did that get promoted when they release it. However they change those all the time (or because budget is short kill it for a few years and then create a new one). Still there is enough in common that you can often guess right enough to get promoted.

The important part is when you do something that saves the day make sure people know. Never save the day quietly, if you write some defensive code so you don't get an emergency call at 2am you won't get promoted for saving the day at 2am! You have to make sure everyone knows you wrote that code. I've seen many people over my career who did those quiet works - they got a small senior position at best, then when they left the company quickly discovered how important those things were and suddenly they have a small department of very senior people doing that thing one person was quietly doing before. (this isn't just code - I know of a company that laid of their maintenance person because nothing ever went wrong so they must not need them - then needed 3 people to replace him in 6 months)

I can't disagree more. Performance reviews can absolutely highlight improvement areas and performance issues. Development plans are harder though, as it takes concerted effort on behalf of the IC to follow through, and often times changing priorities can make it hard to stay on track with a plan. Matrices give a clear outline of what the expectations are for certain roles... they're basically a mini job description.

Amazon has a career matrix (former employer). But they didn’t proactively help me with my career - not that I cared. My entire goal was to survive my 4 year initial offer and get the f** out of dodge. I was 46 when I was hired.

I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.

I work at Amazon and I’ve had almost the opposite experience. There are dedicated career check ins twice a year that managers are required to have (separate from pay change discussions). Each of the orgs I’ve worked in have also had their own career growth things - one of them required quarterly “how are you doing on your career goal?” questionnaires that you were supposed to review with your manager.

Frankly I’ve had _too many_ managers at Amazon wanting to talk about career growth. Maybe it’s just my org, but everyone is obsessed with it.

Are they actual career growth plans or just internal milestones for you to chase after, including promotions towards the next "level"?

A real career advice should sound like "You are too good for this company. Find you future opportunities and growth elsewhere."

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