[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).