> There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years.
I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but if that's your take them either you haven't been paying attention or you're not in the company for that long. The whole org was designed so that all employees are ephemeral. Managers are encouraged to promote employees up and out. At each career level you're evaluated against your direct colleagues in the same level, and those lagging behind are bound for PIPs.
Check out the old fart tool. The average tenure is below 3 years. Do you it screams upward mobility?
Those are just churn and burn lower level employees. I am talking about at the L7+ level. L6 and below is almost a completely different company.
I have worked on major tier 1 services in every major part of the company: Retail, Alexa, and AWS. I know many of the people running the important orgs
The amazon people I know are purposely lounging at L6 because they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios for their dept are completely out of wack.
> (...) they claim L7 responsibility/compensation ratios for their dept are completely out of wack.
I have to call bullshit on this take. Last time I checked, less than 1% ever make it to L6, let alone L7. because it is extremely competitive.
It takes a very special person with all the stars aligned to even be considered for a L7 position. We're talking about Principal Engineer/Senior Manager.
Claiming they are not promoted to L7 because they don't want to screams of Aesop's the fox and the grapes.
First of all, they were not making this comment in order to justify why they didn't get promoted. They were describing levels in amazon to people that were clueless about it.
You also seem to be inadverdently supporting their point. If it takes "a special person" to be an L7, doesn't it also require "effort" to become that person? The person is simply saying that they are not even making the effort they think is necessary to be considered for an L7 since they think there is too little upside to justify that effort. To support their point they mentioned that another friend we hardly see anymore became an L7, their intense schedule and workload being the reason we don't see them anymore. It seemed pretty believable in that context.
> First of all, they were not making this comment in order to justify why they didn't get promoted.
You claimed they were purposely lounging at L6. I called bullshit on that, and explicitly mentioned Aesop's "The fox and the grapes". It's unbelievable to claim that they are not L7 because they don't want it. You need to outrun everyone in the whole company, and even then you are limited by circumstances and track record.
I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but if that's your take them either you haven't been paying attention or you're not in the company for that long. The whole org was designed so that all employees are ephemeral. Managers are encouraged to promote employees up and out. At each career level you're evaluated against your direct colleagues in the same level, and those lagging behind are bound for PIPs.
Check out the old fart tool. The average tenure is below 3 years. Do you it screams upward mobility?