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A number of key engineers who I loved working with left my team around the same time, and their departure made me uninterested in continuing on that team any longer. I applied internally to a few other teams, and found out a couple weeks into that process that I was on the devlist when the manager of the team I wanted to join suddenly said he couldn't take me. Through some backchanneling with a manager I had been friends with before he joined Amazon, I found out I had been placed on the devlist the same week my friends left the team. No performance issues were ever discussed with me, and at that point in my career I'm very confident I didn't have any. I am pretty sure management of my team guessed (correctly) that I would try to leave once my friends were gone, and worried the entire team would implode with additional departures, and all institutional knowledge of a shitty old perl/mason/codigo codebase that needed to be maintained would implode with it. So I am pretty sure they placed me on the devlist purely as a mechanism to make it difficult for me to leave (I would have needed to get the director / L8 level manager of the team I was attempting to join to override the devlist block. this pretty much never happens unless you have a relationship with that person, and I didn't). I was never able to get a manager in my org to have an open conversation with me about that, despite lots of effort. Lots of hemming and hawing and a few canceled meetings. I was eventually told I was taken off the devlist, but when I again tried to transfer a year later, found out I was still on it. I'm not sure if it was a case of "forgot to take you off" or "lied" and will never know, but that happened to me circa ~2018. Edit: Unrelated to your question, but I also suspect having been on one of those lists once and escaped makes you a target to get put on again. No manager backchanneling confirmed that for me, it's just an educated guess. My performance suffered for a couple months at the start of the pandemic for obvious reasons, and I was placed on the devlist again (now called "Focus") around late April / early May 2020. I was never told this, nobody ever said the word "Focus", nor was I given any performance coaching. I was only able to infer it because my manager told me "I don't think you should try to change teams right now", and at that point in my Amazon career I knew what that really meant. I started job hunting immediately, kicked my feet up for a while, and took the severance the moment I was finally pip'd. Worked out extremely well for me actually, but a less experienced employee who might not connect the dots between "don't try to change teams ;)" and "your performance is considered below the bar" would have been blindsided. |
To be honest, it's quite possible this kind of focus-listing exists elsewhere that's not FAANG level exposure.