I work at Amazon. Was hired in at L4 and promoted to L5 within one year, which is a little early, but not by much. I think 18 months is typical. I want to say

I work at Amazon. Was hired in at L4 and promoted to L5 within one year, which is a little early, but not by much. I think 18 months is typical. I want to say that I like their promotion process. It’s designed to be transparent and owned by the employee. I’d much rather have an ongoing conversation with my manager, using the doc as an excuse, that keeps the conversation on how close I am and exactly what I need to do to progress. This is far better than just working heads down and quietly wondering when you’ll be picked. It’s also designed to persist in the event your manager leaves, which is a high likelihood event in the tech world on the scale of years. It would be really bad if your promotion totally depended on the support of one person who then leaves and you’re left at square one. At Amazon, boxes are ticked and they stay ticked if your manager leaves. Yes, it takes time to maintain this doc. But it mostly is an excuse for you to have an open conversation with your manger and focus the conversation in a way that helps you grow and progress. It may not be perfect, but it’s designed with all the right intentions and in my experience has been very helpful and effective. I also struggled with trust early on, but that’s not an amazon thing, that’s a human thing. People will tend to not take the new guy whose preaching big changes seriously, especially if he’s at a lower level. In that case, I found the best strategy was to find the high trust members, get their buy in first, and then present it as “I was talking with X and we think...”. That way, you get to borrow their trust level and he heard, and stengthen the relationship with them. Plus, they probably are better and smarter than you, so the conversation will likely lead to you learning something and being better off than just pushing your ideas on people that aren’t really listening.