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Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder

wheaties 13y ago
Skip 9 but you have 11? Obligatory "this ladder goes to 11." Really, what's the point of removing a wrung on the ladder if you're only going to put it back at a different/higher place. You could have steps 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and then say you've removed 5 different wrungs but have you really?
marincounty 13y ago
Maybe it should be difficult? There's usually nothing more useless than someone who wants to beome a Manager. What even surprises me more is the amount of people out there who really don't care about the money; they want authority. They want a Title in life. They need a title in life? 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.
- buckbova 13y ago
  I'm sure there's a lot of younger brothers out there that caught savage beatings from one of your "non-abusing" types. Just another type of leadership I suppose, do as your told.
phaus 13y ago
In many organizations a promotion will depend on your supervisor's ability to sell it to his superiors. The system at Amazon just makes it more noticeable. I'm highly opposed to establishing quotas, either for promotion, demotion, hiring, or termination. In all cases, quotas establish a destructive environment.
CountHackulus 13y ago
So it's stack ranking by a different name.
cylinder 13y ago
You should almost always avoid working for low-margin businesses. Sure, if they are new and growing, there's an exception, but if their whole growth plan is premised around being low-margin, it's not going to be a great place to work and advance your career. Expenses such as compensation are always on management's radar.
- switch007 13y ago
  You've just given me an amazing moment of clarity!
- aaronbrethorst 13y ago
  It's pretty well known around Seattle that Amazon pays their employees very well, and has a tendency of giving ridiculous signing bonuses.
  - gummadi 13y ago
    That's paid over two years and you usually don't get yearly bonus during that time.
  - don_draper 13y ago
    Can you give some specific numbers? What does very well mean? Here are salaries at glassdoor. Nothing amazing here: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E6036_D_KO11,28.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Software-Engineer...
  - WalterSear 13y ago
    In silicon valley, they just pay a silicon valley wage, which belies the fact that they are in the south bay. Consequently, managers here have constant trouble convincing San Franciscan talent to work there - they just aren't very competitive. I have not seen anything spectacular in terms of a signing bonus, either. Furthermore, they don't increase your salary over time, so after a while, that OK starting salary drops below the average.
  - bane 13y ago
the_hangman 13y ago
I think the most interesting part of the article is when it mentions that anecdotes about an employee's performance most-often dominate these OLRs. It seems that a company with as concrete of a business goal as Amazon's would have the ability to use a more objective means of measuring employee performance.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  The nice thing about knowing everything going on in your company is being able to judge it easily when it exceeds expectations. The shitty thing about standardized metrics is gaming those metrics.
patmcguire 13y ago
"Ambitious employees tend to spend months having lunch and coffee with their boss’s peers to ensure a positive outcome once the topic of their proposed promotion is raised in an OLR." Sounds like all those Microsoft stories that came out a few months ago.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  its a trend others and I have seen elsewhere. Far too much a popularity contest, trying to ensure during your daily and weekly routine you don't piss off someone who might be sitting on the review panel. 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.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
I wonder if Jeff is a Discworld fan.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  Do you mean the dead mans shoes/wizard levels thing?
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Pretty much.
joebolte 13y ago
How can it be harder to climb Amazon's corporate ladder unless they have less management or do more outside hiring at a senior level than other companies? Somebody has to get promoted to fill the positions, right?
- icodestuff 13y ago
  They do have a lot of outside hiring.
allritenow 13y ago
Article rings true from my perspective as a "level 5" manager in Amazon's fulfillment operation. 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.
- vladimirralev 13y ago
  Tread lightly :) hehe But yes, nothing worse than passive-aggressive management.
mrbgty 13y ago
Sounds to me like no matter what system is used, the problem is that there's a limited number of promotions/raises to give out. If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?
- sokoloff 13y ago
  Because promotions are generally to a new role, and have been perverted at some places to simply be a new title. Want to get promoted from a Developer to a Developer-2? Those are unlimited. Want to get promoted from a developer-15 to Amazon's CTO? Those are limited.
  - icodestuff 13y ago
    The Developer to Developer-2 (in Amazon parlance, SDE-I to SDE-II) is VERY limited at Amazon as well. OLR doesn't just hold back managers, it holds back everyone, and it badly hurts their competitiveness in the labor market. After 18 months as an SDE-I there, I received a 4% raise, which was huge, for Amazon (though cost of living in my area went up substantially more during that time). But there was never a chance I was going to be promoted at that time, even though I had been very close to being hired as a II, and if I'd been interviewing then instead of being reviewed, I would have had the II title and compensation. So I left a couple months later (mostly for other reasons, but I won't pretend this wasn't a factor), and got that at my new job. Their loss.
- ffrryuu 13y ago
  Hence Finance companies call everyone Vice President, because they know their only asset are people.
oh_sigh 13y ago
Ex-amazonian here. Another problem is if your manager doesn't want you to get promoted. For whatever reason, sometimes people don't click, and I've seen the careers of some extremely talented developers be hampered by a bad or non-relationship with their manager. It didn't matter that their entire team, and other teams viewed these people very highly, and sought out their advice and consultation on a number of matters - they still couldn't get promoted unless their manager signs off on it.
- taude 13y ago
  I feel this same thing happens at almost all companies I've worked for. I had to leave one of my favorite jobs at a company doing really well because I was never going to get to work on what I wanted, in the group I wanted...
  - phillmv 13y ago
    It's amazing to me how much money companies can waste hiring new people - albeit a not unwelcome redistribution of profit from shareholders to developers - yet once you're hired you're stuck in that role unless your manager signs off irregardless of other internal opportunities. 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.
- mrjatx 13y ago
  I worked for a fairly large company that previously required your team manager to approve of you moving to another team. You could spin wheels all you wanted, but if they didn't like you for whatever reason they could immediately stop any lateral movement. This wound up pushing a lot of employees out, they'd eventually quit because they were miserable. Couldn't get shifts they wanted, bootcamps, training, unfairly poor reviews, etc. It was one of those "who.. thought of this?" ideas. I believe they recently removed it.
  - 13y ago
WalterBright 13y ago
Any organization is going to have a very limited number of top slots, and so the larger it is the harder it will be to climb into one of those positions. I guess I don't see why this is news.
pothibo 13y ago
Maybe the problem is promotion altogether? Work your ass off for 1 year and then, you may or may not win the promotion lottery. I guess a more flexible style of salary increase could be created? 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.
- vladimirralev 13y ago
  Much more simple than that. Just take a cut from the profits your project generates or supervises. If the project doesn't generate or supervise anything just get a cut from the overall budget which is allocated based on how valuable the project is to the company.
  - ajiang 13y ago
    Favors near term profits far more than long term growth, which you could argue is not good for the longevity of the company. Plus, there would be competition over the seemingly most profitable projects. And there are projects that don't generate any profit, but has benefits that are very difficult to quantify.
    - vladimirralev 13y ago
      But if that's true then it applies to shareholders and execs as well. Should we change their compensation plans? Yes there will be competition over the profitable projects and that's how it should be. Projects without profit don't exist. If the project doesn't have profit then the company wouldn't allocate budget. If they allocate budget then the project is profitable. It is up to the project leaders to have the fight and justify budgets if it's not that obvious.
      - a_c_s 13y ago
        Then there would be no technical support staff - upgrading computers generates $0 new revenues and has significant costs. 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.
nsxwolf 13y ago
There's a strange gap between levels 4 and 5. 4 is for new graduates, and 5 is for product managers? What about experienced engineers?
- noir_lord 13y ago
  4.5
- bethling 13y ago
  That's not really accurate. 4 are usually college hires, at 5, other job families can split off. Engineers, Managers, TPMs, Product managers, etc. they're all in parallel. So you have Level 4,5,6,7 and higher engineers as well.
Kapura 13y ago
I think that there's a lot of subtlety that gets lost talking about the corporate structure in Amazon. The levels were more or less correct, so far as it goes, but it's not the full story. For instance, a senior developer could be level 6, while his manager might be level 5. That doesn't mean that the dev gets to override what his manager says; they're different promotion paths. 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.
- aluskuiuc 13y ago
  At Amazon the individual contributor path goes up to level 10 (VP level).
AsymetricCom 13y ago
This article is poorly sourced and fails to establish any evidence for it's main point, that it's "difficult to climb Amazon's corporate ladder," which is probably true considering it's a Fortune 100. 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.
- Terretta 13y ago
  > This article is poorly sourced... 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".
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    Not sure how Wikipedia is relevant here.. Saying "I have sources" and actually quoting those sources are two different things. I'm sure you can appreciate this difference.
    - Terretta 13y ago
      Sounds like if one wants the quotes, buy the book. This article seems to be a synopsis of the research, so one wouldn't expect all actual quotes. // 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.
      - AsymetricCom 13y ago
        In that case, it's not an article, it's an advertisement. 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.
peterwwillis 13y ago
Why don't companies just ask employees what they would like to be doing, and pay them to do that? It's stupid to promote someone into a job they don't want, or keep them doing a job they don't want.
southphillyman 13y ago
Worked at a firm that used the same method for raises and promotions. It builds animosity and decreases synergy between teams. When there is a limited pool of reward money and you know the split hinges on the perception of your department there will be a lot of blame games and outright sabotage.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I used to get angry when I read about supposedly progressive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, et al) having psychotic, brutal review processes, stack ranking, internal mobility issues, closed allocation. 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.
- yuhong 13y ago
  Here is a fun thing to read: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html And on Google: http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game-of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...
snorkel 13y ago
Non-Amazonian here but I can tell you this so-called OLR process is same as how most companies with more than 100 employees deal with the promotions process. 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.
- gadders 13y ago
  And that someone who doesn't like you can black ball your promotion efforts anonymously.
ffrryuu 13y ago
Software is the modern sweatshop job. It's mostly dead end. Oh, and non-technical managers.
31reasons 13y ago
Reading stories like these make me sick to my stomach and stay away from big corps.
ayushedu 13y ago
This type of review system also exist in my job and I think this is crazy, as they expect you to please every other manager in the team, which further leads to favoritism and bootlicking.
rdl 13y ago
Whenever I read one of these articles, I wonder which medium to large size companies actually are good places to work. This is from a "startup type person perspective" -- i.e. largely defined by work or career, even if you don't want the financial risk of a startup. Lots of places are fine if it's just a job. 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.

Skip 9 but you have 11? Obligatory "this ladder goes to 11." Really, what's the point of removing a wrung on the ladder if you're only going to put it back at a different/higher place. You could have steps 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and then say you've removed 5 different wrungs but have you really?

marincounty 13y ago

Maybe it should be difficult? There's usually nothing more useless than someone who wants to beome a Manager. What even surprises me more is the amount of people out there who really don't care about the money; they want authority. They want a Title in life. They need a title in life? 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.

buckbova 13y ago
I'm sure there's a lot of younger brothers out there that caught savage beatings from one of your "non-abusing" types. Just another type of leadership I suppose, do as your told.

phaus 13y ago

In many organizations a promotion will depend on your supervisor's ability to sell it to his superiors. The system at Amazon just makes it more noticeable. I'm highly opposed to establishing quotas, either for promotion, demotion, hiring, or termination. In all cases, quotas establish a destructive environment.

CountHackulus 13y ago

So it's stack ranking by a different name.

cylinder 13y ago

You should almost always avoid working for low-margin businesses. Sure, if they are new and growing, there's an exception, but if their whole growth plan is premised around being low-margin, it's not going to be a great place to work and advance your career. Expenses such as compensation are always on management's radar.

switch007 13y ago
You've just given me an amazing moment of clarity!
aaronbrethorst 13y ago
It's pretty well known around Seattle that Amazon pays their employees very well, and has a tendency of giving ridiculous signing bonuses.
- gummadi 13y ago
  That's paid over two years and you usually don't get yearly bonus during that time.
- don_draper 13y ago
  Can you give some specific numbers? What does very well mean? Here are salaries at glassdoor. Nothing amazing here: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E6036_D_KO11,28.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Amazon-com-Software-Engineer...
- WalterSear 13y ago
  In silicon valley, they just pay a silicon valley wage, which belies the fact that they are in the south bay. Consequently, managers here have constant trouble convincing San Franciscan talent to work there - they just aren't very competitive. I have not seen anything spectacular in terms of a signing bonus, either. Furthermore, they don't increase your salary over time, so after a while, that OK starting salary drops below the average.
- bane 13y ago

the_hangman 13y ago

I think the most interesting part of the article is when it mentions that anecdotes about an employee's performance most-often dominate these OLRs. It seems that a company with as concrete of a business goal as Amazon's would have the ability to use a more objective means of measuring employee performance.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
The nice thing about knowing everything going on in your company is being able to judge it easily when it exceeds expectations. The shitty thing about standardized metrics is gaming those metrics.

patmcguire 13y ago

"Ambitious employees tend to spend months having lunch and coffee with their boss’s peers to ensure a positive outcome once the topic of their proposed promotion is raised in an OLR." Sounds like all those Microsoft stories that came out a few months ago.

Shivetya 13y ago
its a trend others and I have seen elsewhere. Far too much a popularity contest, trying to ensure during your daily and weekly routine you don't piss off someone who might be sitting on the review panel. 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.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

I wonder if Jeff is a Discworld fan.

noir_lord 13y ago
Do you mean the dead mans shoes/wizard levels thing?
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Pretty much.

joebolte 13y ago

How can it be harder to climb Amazon's corporate ladder unless they have less management or do more outside hiring at a senior level than other companies? Somebody has to get promoted to fill the positions, right?

icodestuff 13y ago
They do have a lot of outside hiring.

allritenow 13y ago

Article rings true from my perspective as a "level 5" manager in Amazon's fulfillment operation. 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.

vladimirralev 13y ago
Tread lightly :) hehe But yes, nothing worse than passive-aggressive management.

mrbgty 13y ago

Sounds to me like no matter what system is used, the problem is that there's a limited number of promotions/raises to give out. If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?

sokoloff 13y ago
Because promotions are generally to a new role, and have been perverted at some places to simply be a new title. Want to get promoted from a Developer to a Developer-2? Those are unlimited. Want to get promoted from a developer-15 to Amazon's CTO? Those are limited.
- icodestuff 13y ago
  The Developer to Developer-2 (in Amazon parlance, SDE-I to SDE-II) is VERY limited at Amazon as well. OLR doesn't just hold back managers, it holds back everyone, and it badly hurts their competitiveness in the labor market. After 18 months as an SDE-I there, I received a 4% raise, which was huge, for Amazon (though cost of living in my area went up substantially more during that time). But there was never a chance I was going to be promoted at that time, even though I had been very close to being hired as a II, and if I'd been interviewing then instead of being reviewed, I would have had the II title and compensation. So I left a couple months later (mostly for other reasons, but I won't pretend this wasn't a factor), and got that at my new job. Their loss.
ffrryuu 13y ago
Hence Finance companies call everyone Vice President, because they know their only asset are people.

oh_sigh 13y ago

Ex-amazonian here. Another problem is if your manager doesn't want you to get promoted. For whatever reason, sometimes people don't click, and I've seen the careers of some extremely talented developers be hampered by a bad or non-relationship with their manager. It didn't matter that their entire team, and other teams viewed these people very highly, and sought out their advice and consultation on a number of matters - they still couldn't get promoted unless their manager signs off on it.

taude 13y ago
I feel this same thing happens at almost all companies I've worked for. I had to leave one of my favorite jobs at a company doing really well because I was never going to get to work on what I wanted, in the group I wanted...
- phillmv 13y ago
  It's amazing to me how much money companies can waste hiring new people - albeit a not unwelcome redistribution of profit from shareholders to developers - yet once you're hired you're stuck in that role unless your manager signs off irregardless of other internal opportunities. 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.
mrjatx 13y ago
I worked for a fairly large company that previously required your team manager to approve of you moving to another team. You could spin wheels all you wanted, but if they didn't like you for whatever reason they could immediately stop any lateral movement. This wound up pushing a lot of employees out, they'd eventually quit because they were miserable. Couldn't get shifts they wanted, bootcamps, training, unfairly poor reviews, etc. It was one of those "who.. thought of this?" ideas. I believe they recently removed it.
- 13y ago

WalterBright 13y ago

Any organization is going to have a very limited number of top slots, and so the larger it is the harder it will be to climb into one of those positions. I guess I don't see why this is news.

pothibo 13y ago

Maybe the problem is promotion altogether? Work your ass off for 1 year and then, you may or may not win the promotion lottery. I guess a more flexible style of salary increase could be created? 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.

vladimirralev 13y ago
Much more simple than that. Just take a cut from the profits your project generates or supervises. If the project doesn't generate or supervise anything just get a cut from the overall budget which is allocated based on how valuable the project is to the company.
- ajiang 13y ago
  Favors near term profits far more than long term growth, which you could argue is not good for the longevity of the company. Plus, there would be competition over the seemingly most profitable projects. And there are projects that don't generate any profit, but has benefits that are very difficult to quantify.
  - vladimirralev 13y ago
    But if that's true then it applies to shareholders and execs as well. Should we change their compensation plans? Yes there will be competition over the profitable projects and that's how it should be. Projects without profit don't exist. If the project doesn't have profit then the company wouldn't allocate budget. If they allocate budget then the project is profitable. It is up to the project leaders to have the fight and justify budgets if it's not that obvious.
    - a_c_s 13y ago
      Then there would be no technical support staff - upgrading computers generates $0 new revenues and has significant costs. 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.

nsxwolf 13y ago

There's a strange gap between levels 4 and 5. 4 is for new graduates, and 5 is for product managers? What about experienced engineers?

noir_lord 13y ago
4.5
bethling 13y ago
That's not really accurate. 4 are usually college hires, at 5, other job families can split off. Engineers, Managers, TPMs, Product managers, etc. they're all in parallel. So you have Level 4,5,6,7 and higher engineers as well.

Kapura 13y ago

I think that there's a lot of subtlety that gets lost talking about the corporate structure in Amazon. The levels were more or less correct, so far as it goes, but it's not the full story. For instance, a senior developer could be level 6, while his manager might be level 5. That doesn't mean that the dev gets to override what his manager says; they're different promotion paths. 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.

aluskuiuc 13y ago
At Amazon the individual contributor path goes up to level 10 (VP level).

AsymetricCom 13y ago

This article is poorly sourced and fails to establish any evidence for it's main point, that it's "difficult to climb Amazon's corporate ladder," which is probably true considering it's a Fortune 100. 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.

Terretta 13y ago
> This article is poorly sourced... 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".
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  Not sure how Wikipedia is relevant here.. Saying "I have sources" and actually quoting those sources are two different things. I'm sure you can appreciate this difference.
  - Terretta 13y ago
    Sounds like if one wants the quotes, buy the book. This article seems to be a synopsis of the research, so one wouldn't expect all actual quotes. // 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.
    - AsymetricCom 13y ago
      In that case, it's not an article, it's an advertisement. 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.

peterwwillis 13y ago

Why don't companies just ask employees what they would like to be doing, and pay them to do that? It's stupid to promote someone into a job they don't want, or keep them doing a job they don't want.

southphillyman 13y ago

Worked at a firm that used the same method for raises and promotions. It builds animosity and decreases synergy between teams. When there is a limited pool of reward money and you know the split hinges on the perception of your department there will be a lot of blame games and outright sabotage.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I used to get angry when I read about supposedly progressive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, et al) having psychotic, brutal review processes, stack ranking, internal mobility issues, closed allocation. 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.

yuhong 13y ago
Here is a fun thing to read: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html And on Google: http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game-of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...

snorkel 13y ago

Non-Amazonian here but I can tell you this so-called OLR process is same as how most companies with more than 100 employees deal with the promotions process. 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.

gadders 13y ago
And that someone who doesn't like you can black ball your promotion efforts anonymously.

ffrryuu 13y ago

Software is the modern sweatshop job. It's mostly dead end. Oh, and non-technical managers.

31reasons 13y ago

Reading stories like these make me sick to my stomach and stay away from big corps.

ayushedu 13y ago

This type of review system also exist in my job and I think this is crazy, as they expect you to please every other manager in the team, which further leads to favoritism and bootlicking.

rdl 13y ago

Whenever I read one of these articles, I wonder which medium to large size companies actually are good places to work. This is from a "startup type person perspective" -- i.e. largely defined by work or career, even if you don't want the financial risk of a startup. Lots of places are fine if it's just a job. 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.