The problem is there’s a fair amount of tech CEOs that insist this is the future and everyone needs to hop on which between the hype train, the amount of software peeps out of a job because of layoffs and the amount of snake oils salesmen out of a job because this eats google’s lunch this bubble is just ballooning. You have a lot of people hitching on this bandwagon hoping to sell shovels to the next gold rush.
And for awhile everything is just gonna get shittier.
“At this time, at this moment, we are focusing on what this big, ugly bill is going to do,” he said about the big Trump tax breaks package making its way through Congress. “I think anything outside of that is a distraction because this is the most important thing that we can focus on.”
If you tilt the photo around on your phone you can start to see it turn black and blue. IIRC it’s because the phenomenon depends on the angle viewed at
Every Engineer starts at L4. That’s the junior position.
L5 is the mid-senior level. Most SDEs in Amazon are L5 and that’s considered a terminal position. For management this is the “junior” (for lack of a better term) tier
L6 is Senior but it’s closer to staff engineers at other companies. You tend to do more cross team work. This is also where a glut of managers are at
L7 is Principal engineer and senior manager. Only about 2% of engineers get here. Managers at this lever oversee multiple teams.
L8+ is fancy external hires and directors.
The problem is that Amazon expects a lot of people to churn out before you hit the L6/7 levels. They dangle a carrot of super high pay for those tiers but don’t actually expect to pay it long term. There’s quite a few that have stayed longer than expected. And it’s hard to get out because they know how to game the system to demonstrate “impact”. Now that isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of good managers and engineers at this tier either. There are really good people at this tier. It’s just Amazon doesn’t want that many at this tier for long.
Also if the idea of having an expected churn and dangling pay that no one can hit sounds dystopian and awful it is. Amazon sucks.
No. Amazon has been trying to cut head count for years now. They were hoping RTO5 would do the trick but because every company is trying to do the same thing people didn’t have a ship to jump to.
“Our AI is so great!” Is a way to mask that their finances aren’t good and they dramatically made the wrong bet in 2021 hiring so much.
Honestly most of the time at Amazon you’re doing more meetings and red tape than you are coding so I don’t expect AI to magically fix shit for them.
I was gonna say they’re my favorite type