Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Here are salaries at glassdoor. Nothing amazing here: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Software-Engineer...
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 cap" was used or not, but it was definitely implied.
I offered to accept a lower base with alternative compensation options (even vacation days), but it was already too rich for their blood.
I think they gave it some serious thought, but I got a call a week later that they simply couldn't do it.
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".
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.
I also felt that future compensation was more anchored to your starting compensation than at other companies.
Furthermore, they don't increase your salary over time, so after a while, that OK starting salary drops below the average.
It was one of those "who.. thought of this?" ideas. I believe they recently removed it.
I don't know why a manager would want to prevent this from happening though. If I were a manager, and one of my employees said they wanted to switch teams, the last thing I'd want to do is force them to stay on my team knowing that they didn't want to be there, even if I was feeling vindictive towards that employee.
I've heard that the policy requiring informing the manager was motivated by a desire to allow employees to switch teams if they wanted to, but at the same time to dissuade managers from actively poaching employees from other teams in the same company. Also, it gives the manager a chance to possibly make things right with the disgruntled employee, instead of just losing that employee with no warning.
It's not a perfect system at all, but I can at least understand the rationale. It totally doesn't make sense that a manager would be able to prevent it from happening though.
I wonder if having a more liberalized internal labour market wouldn't be beneficial; it's destructive in so far that being undermined by more popular projects keeps siphoning off your best talent, but if the alternative is "quit and find another job" it strikes me that keeping that person within the organization may be more beneficial overall.
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.
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.
Does that happen in the company?
...that said, I didn't apply last cycle, because the form was changed so that promo candidates have to fill out a more in-depth self-assessment and get more in-depth peer feedback, and me and my peers were heads-down on a deadline at the time. I suppose one way to deal with the externalities of everybody always going up for promo is to make the process easier on people who don't.
BTW, there are regular performance reviews at Google - you can (and should) get your peers' feedback without actually going up for promotion. I did every cycle until I made senior, then I stopped caring quite so much. Promotions beyond senior have a large "impact and leadership" component to them, and so you basically know what you have to do to get promoted, you have to lead a major project that succeeds.
Sounds like all those Microsoft stories that came out a few months ago.
It has taken getting good work done and placed it second to making sure to not tread on any toes, even if that means things that should be done don't get done.
Remember that Amazon core value to "have backbone" and "don't be afraid to disagree"? This is where that would bite you in the ass. That Senior Operations Manager you disagreed with that one time in a staff meeting in front of the GM? Yeah, they just sunk your promotion during the OLR because your direct manager didn't want to put their spine out there to get snapped.
Not sure how different it was in Seattle, but in order to get that promotion, you had to tread lightly and make sure everyone thought of you as the perfect little angel.
But yes, nothing worse than passive-aggressive management.
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.
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.
For example, does a backup generator add any value if the electricity never goes out? Do you only assign it 'profit' if electricity goes out? How do you calculate the value of the downtime if electricity does go out? Does it encourage people who've worked on setting up a backup generator to 'wish' for outages?
It's a challenge. Even if you do have answers to all of these questions, there will always be levels of subjectivity resulting in politics, and the effort involved will be itself an administrative workload of which the 'profit' would be difficult to assess.
Clearly there is value in not forcing developers to use 15 year old machines, but it isn't so clear to quantify.
Since whomever 'quantifies' this data then has enormous influence as to what projects are worked on, you risk just shuffling around the politics: instead of fighting over what projects to work on it becomes about how many dollars each project is worth.
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.
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 responsibilities then your manager suggests and advocates for your promotion. The promotion candidates are then considered across all teams during an annual or semi-annual review process.
This practice ensures that a lenient manager isn't promoting their junior interns to VP roles, every team has the same performance standards, and managers of other teams can endorse or disapprove of someone being promoted based on whether they work well with other teams rather than just performing well within their own team.
This is key. If you want to work as a dev at Amazon, you'll go from level 4 to level 7 as a dev. I don't know if devs are ever integrated into the corpocracy, vice presidents and so on. I suspect that they generally aren't; at least, I've never heard of it happening.
A manager's levels are different. I'm not and have never been a manager at amazon, but the responsibilities at each level are different from the dev side.
I guess I don't see why this is news.
I'm highly opposed to establishing quotas, either for promotion, demotion, hiring, or termination. In all cases, quotas establish a destructive environment.
Apple seems like it could be awesome if you're on the right time, and horrible otherwise, which is about the best I've seen of anywhere.
By definition, any job where you're not revenue generating and in the main (and especially main and growing) line of business also sucks. I guess there are limited exceptions when it is clear a new product could become the main line of business, and you're early in it.
Amazon, Microsoft, Intel seem painful at best, and Google seems like it had a rough few years with a mass culling of less important products.
On the other hand, even the most pathological organizations (government!) can be ok as a consultant, if you're on an important enough assignment and have buy-in at the right levels. If nothing else, it's an amazing opportunity for comparative anthropology.
If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?
Want to get promoted from a developer-15 to Amazon's CTO? Those are limited.
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 only child, sorry you are one of the worst. But the first born has been conditioned into not abusing power, and just getting the job done.
Just another type of leadership I suppose, do as your told.
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 industries) for 25 years, and I (like quite a few on HN) could single-handedly do a better job just because I, unlike the McK morons who think stank-ranking's a good idea, understand talent and what it takes to succeed.
Any company that relies on closed allocation and rank-and-yank is fucked in the long run.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html
And on Google:
http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...
Instead, the article paints a picture that Amazon as a place ruled by fiefdoms and popularity contests, but again without any actual evidence, no you have to buy the book for that.
I have a feeling that if I read the book, that I would find that there is nothing here salacious, but that's not how you sell a book.
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".
Saying "I have sources" and actually quoting those sources are two different things. I'm sure you can appreciate this difference.
// 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.
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.