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.
Ex-amazonian here. Another problem is if your manager <i>doesn't want</i> 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.
"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."<p>Sounds like all those Microsoft stories that came out a few months ago.
Article rings true from my perspective as a "level 5" manager in Amazon's fulfillment operation.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>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.<p>I'm just thinking outloud here. It could be a rubbish idea.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I guess I don't see why this is news.
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.<p>I'm highly opposed to establishing quotas, either for promotion, demotion, hiring, or termination. In all cases, quotas establish a destructive environment.
Whenever I read one of these articles, I wonder which medium to large size companies actually <i>are</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?
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?
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.
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? <i>Somebody</i> has to get promoted to fill the positions, right?
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.
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.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Any company that relies on closed allocation and rank-and-yank is fucked in the long run.
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.<p>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.<p>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.