
Why It's So Difficult to Climb Amazon's Corporate Ladder - mysterywhiteboy
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-15/careers-at-amazon-why-its-so-hard-to-climb-jeff-bezoss-corporate-ladder
======
cylinder
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.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
It's pretty well known around Seattle that Amazon pays their employees very
well, and has a tendency of giving ridiculous signing bonuses.

~~~
bane
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.

~~~
res0nat0r
I'd describe AWS pay as "competitive". Most all gigs provide you a decent
signing bonus and stock grants. This lowers your base salary as all these
items together are taken into your total compensation, which I believe is
pretty much the norm up in Seattle for AWS/Google/Microsoft.

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".

~~~
bane
Yeah, that jives with what I was told. I think the stock grants mature over 4
years? I think the schedule was kind of interesting as well but I don't
remember what it was, it wasn't 25/25/25/25 either.

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.

~~~
nostrademons
If they're like PM roles in the rest of the Internet industry, then yes, they
are basically CEOs of a specific project or program for part of a company. The
problem is that in most large software companies, projects are generally quite
small. So a PM might be in charge of an engineering team of 4-6 engineers that
are working on one tiny widget on the page. The product as a whole is usually
the responsibility of a VP.

------
oh_sigh
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.

~~~
mrjatx
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
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.

------
patmcguire
"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
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.

------
allritenow
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
Tread lightly :) hehe

But yes, nothing worse than passive-aggressive management.

------
pothibo
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
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
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
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.

~~~
dingaling
> Projects without profit don't exist.

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.

~~~
vladimirralev
Well, any prevented loss can also be interpreted as profit. So depending on
what kind of money is at stake you can reasonably claim a cut. You provide
insurance and your cut is the price of the insurance policy. It's a well
established business.

~~~
ajiang
Not arguing at all that things have inherent value, but the challenge is
having an objective way of putting a dollar value to those activities.

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.

------
the_hangman
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
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.

------
CountHackulus
So it's stack ranking by a different name.

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

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

------
WalterBright
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.

------
phaus
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.

------
rdl
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.

------
mrbgty
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
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
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.

------
wheaties
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?

------
southphillyman
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.

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

------
joebolte
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
They do have a lot of outside hiring.

------
31reasons
Reading stories like these make me sick to my stomach and stay away from big
corps.

------
peterwwillis
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.

------
ayushedu
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.

------
nsxwolf
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?

~~~
bethling
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.

------
moocowduckquack
I wonder if Jeff is a Discworld fan.

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

~~~
moocowduckquack
Pretty much.

------
marincounty
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
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.

------
michaelochurch
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
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-
it...](http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game-
of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9)

------
AsymetricCom
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
> _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
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
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
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.

