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

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-15/careers-at-amazon-why-its-so-hard-to-climb-jeff-bezoss-corporate-ladder

65 81 13 years ago

phaus• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

So it's stack ranking by a different name.

cylinder• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

You've just given me an amazing moment of clarity!

aaronbrethorst• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

That's paid over two years and you usually don't get yearly bonus during that time.

don_draper• 13 years 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...

WalterSear• 13 years 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.

bane2• 13 years ago

I actually didn't get a job at Amazon because my pretty normal base salary requirements were higher than most of the execs in the company.

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.

jsolson2• 13 years ago

Anecdotally, Amazon's pay scale is only competitive with other companies in the area if you ignore on-call and only look at starting salary/bonus (including stock compensation).

keketiko• 13 years ago

That doesn't refute the original argument. Amazon might very well be a low-margin business that pays competitively (they gotta attract that talent) while working at a "grinding pace" (as in the article).

the_hangman• 13 years 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.

AsymetricCom4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

I wonder if Jeff is a Discworld fan.

noir_lord2• 13 years ago

Do you mean the dead mans shoes/wizard levels thing?

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

Pretty much.

joebolte• 13 years 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?

icodestuff2• 13 years ago

They do have a lot of outside hiring.

allritenow• 13 years 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.

vladimirralev6• 13 years ago

Tread lightly :) hehe

But yes, nothing worse than passive-aggressive management.

mrbgty• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

icodestuff2• 13 years 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.

ffrryuu2• 13 years ago

Hence Finance companies call everyone Vice President, because they know their only asset are people.

oh_sigh• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

mwfunk• 13 years ago

Variations on this are pretty common, although what I've seen more is that you're obligated to inform your manager before seeking a position on another team- your manager has no power to prevent it from happening.

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.

MrBuddyCasino• 13 years ago

I've heard that at Google, the team votes for the person they would like to see promoted. This seems to be a pretty good idea from the outside - can someone comment on this? There must be some Googlers lurking...

munificent2• 13 years ago

Googler here.

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.

snorkel2• 13 years ago

It's not so much manager doesn't want to promote you as manager has no role to promote you into. Sometimes you can create a role and demonstrate to your manager that you are willing and responsible to manage that topic, and perhaps it needs added investment to grow that topic (more money and more people) which you will manage ... in other words don't wait for your manager to create the role to promote you into. Most managers are happy to team leads with this kind of initiative and will support them.

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.

WalterBright• 13 years 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.

pothibo2• 13 years 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.

vladimirralev6• 13 years 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.

ajiang2• 13 years 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.

vkou• 13 years ago

How much profit does QA generate? What about internal build/test tools?

munificent2• 13 years ago

I worked at EA when they tried a similar model. It was astonishingly effective at slaughtering any technology shared across game teams. Large companies get economies of scale by being able to reuse technology across multiple revenue generating products. If your compensation system can't accommodate that, you'll lose it.

pcrh• 13 years ago

A 20% salary increase might be nice, but a 0.20% increase would be an insult.

pothibo2• 13 years ago

Well, it depends on the length of the project. 0.2% for 1 month work equals to a 2.4% raise by the end of the year (12*0.2).

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.

nsxwolf• 13 years 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_lord2• 13 years ago

4.5

bethling• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

At Amazon the individual contributor path goes up to level 10 (VP level).

AsymetricCom4• 13 years 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.

Terretta2• 13 years 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".

AsymetricCom4• 13 years 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.

peterwwillis• 13 years 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.

wheaties• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

southphillyman• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Here is a fun thing to read:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html

And on Google:

http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...

snorkel2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

ffrryuu2• 13 years ago

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

31reasons• 13 years ago

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

ayushedu• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

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

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