| I watched (most of) this video on YouTube, an interview with a former VP at Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc The TL;DR about promotions seems to be that: 1. There are guidelines on what you need to do to reach each level 2. Your direct supervisor will work with you on how they can game the system to get you the promotion For example, they might propose a re-org that will take a product or feature (and therefore some direct reports) from another team and put them on your team so that you have enough direct reports to qualify for getting the promotion you want. They pitch that re-org to other people to get buy-in, either by being straight ("I want this so that my direct report can get promoted") or by justifying it business-wise ("bringing this feature over to our team will reduce overhead by allowing these two groups to communicate more directly"). In some cases, you just bring them over for six months until the promotion goes through and then you give them back; in others, you just cannibalize that team for good. In other words, it's a zero-sum game where you're taking away the ability for other teams to accomplish their goals so that someone can reach an arbitrary milestone for promotion that their team's current situation doesn't allow for. I was talking to a CEO of a small/mid-sized startup recently who was interviewing for an exec position and someone from Facebook was intervewing; CEO asked directly "why are you applying for this position? We can't pay anything remotely close to what you're getting at Facebook, surely you know that". His reply was that working at Facebook was so toxic, so stressful, that he just couldn't do it anymore. He was willing to cut his pay by 50-75% just to not have to deal with the constant toxic back-and-forth necessary to get anything done there (and/or to keep your job in the first place). People ask why I don't go apply for Google or Facebook or Amazon; part of it is that I don't know that my experience would get me in the door, to be honest, but part of it is also that working at those places sounds so stressful and toxic that the pay isn't worth it, at least not at my age. |