🎉 Sign up to get 20% off a year of Brilliant Premium → brilliant.org/alifeengineered 📈Transform your tech career with my free weekly newsletter - newsletter.alifeengineered.com/general 💥 Continue the conversation on my Discord server with like-minded viewers. The advice section is **chef's kiss** - discord.gg/HFVMbQgRJJ 💥 My UA-cam content will always be free of charge but if you'd like to support the channel, I'd be honored if you supported me on Patreon - www.patreon.com/ALifeEngineered 🚀 If you want to get promoted fast, I'd love to work with you personally: speedruntopromotion.com
Story 2 is exactly me at Amazon right now. L6 here, was on "fast track to L7 for this quarter" until this clown showed up. Now not only is my promo stuck, life is hell and the org is on the verge of collapse. Pulling the rip cord as my skip level seems unflinchingly supportive of this narcissist.
Today in Amazon passing from Lvl 6 to Lvl 7 become a Unicorn. Before we had clear role matrix dimensions and if you were able to prove your impact, you were able to hit a promo. Now frugality and further layoffs have extremely tighten the promo belt.
I got down-levelled when interviewing for AWS and only accepted the the L4 position because i wanted the name on my CV. Early on, it was obvious to my colleagues that i should be an l5, but when trying to communicate with my manager, he either didn't respond to my messages or dismissed me. 14 months later, I have found a senior role elsewhere earning a lot more money. I don't like to live with regret, but sometimes i wish i didn't accept the position, but i recognise that i was only contacted for certain roles because of AWS.
Hi Steve! Could you elucidate the responsibilities at each SWE level from L3 to L8, specifically with an eye towards promotion? Understanding these benchmarks is crucial for excelling in our current roles and for making informed decisions about seeking opportunities elsewhere if progress isn't recognized by management. Thanks for shedding light on this!
Thanks for answering my question regarding the miserable manager I had. You had an absolutely amazing prediction. Long story short, he was fired 2 months before this video was made.
6:03 I'm not so sure on this part. I've been at a startup for almost 3 years now and it is night and day on the growth rate. The downside of being the small fish in a big pond is that you don't need to stretch as much to accomplish tasks. At smaller company, so many more problems fall to you that you are forced to grow.
1:40 I think anyone outside of tech can universally relate to this case. I encountered something similar when I worked for a facilities department where leaving the team for a promotion with a different employer to grow my career helped me level up.
It's interesting how things are working elsewhere. My biggest gripe with promotions is rather that you move up the hierarchy and then need completely different skill sets. From technical skills you go more to soft skills, organizing stuff, company politics, etc.. not everywhere you have the option of a technical career, but you still gain wage rises without promotions. A lot of what you do is defined by how your company is set up and how work and responsibilities are divided/ distributed. No matter what you do, you just see one aspect of the big picture. No matter how good you are, colleagues, other departments or the organization itself can slow you down.
Should I accept a promotion (to senior) without salary bump? The company told me moneys tight so there are no raises, but it doesn’t make sense as the revenue and outlook are both positive.
Exactly what@@fa11en1ce said. Take the title and start looking elsewhere. Most of the companies these days are doing these. Promoting their engineers to get more work off of them and when it comes to pay, they make an excuse. Just research on what senior engineers do in your field of work, focus on growing in that area so you have some experience about it and then make a switch in next few months. Hoping market gets better later this year.
My old company did that as standard practice (only moves in/out of "management" entailed an immediate change)--super dumb and great way to tell your employees you don't value them, but as already mentioned: higher title looks good on the resume. Also nicely allows you to split your experience sections for a job by role so you can brag that you were promoted and have another section to list more stuff you did there if resume length was a concern. Lastly, if you can't find something else when raises do come back--you're de facto underpaid for your title and that's leverage for you and your management to push for right sizing you.
AS long as there no hit to your WLB, do it. Then leverage your title to make more $$ elsewhere. But if they tell you you'll have more work and/or stress, with no raise, politely decline. And start looking elsewhere anyway.
Hi Steve! You have in a previous video said that you don't have a lot of women viewers, I am one, thank you for your videos! Do you have some specific advice for women in particular to reach Staff level? Any good or not as good examples you have seen of women trying to reach that level? Thanks!
Some of the information is Amazon-specific, e.g. tech survey is a great resource for internal transfer but not available if you're applying to another company or at a company that doesn't have tech survey. Also, it would be better to use the job titles rather than Amazon-specific leveling to refer to roles. (i.e. Principal engineer instead of "L7")
I left a company which had pretty bad management for what I thought it was a better one. I intervewed carefylly, asked all the right questions and ended up in a company with a manager who is micro managing and forcing his technical opinion on the whole team of 5 senior software engineers, nobody can say anything. I mean we say and challenge but he is abusing his power to get his way. My point is that I asked how the team work and everything to try and understand how they operate and was happy. They have outright lied to me and I am now looking to get out. Its awful but its just the way some companies operate. Also, none of the other senior engineers seem to be doing anything about it, as if they are scared to voice their opinions and jus keep silent and go with whatever the manager sets as a technical direction. Truly awful. I am thinking as I hand in my notice to give him feedback and explain my reasoning for leaving - Steve, do you think this is a good idea or just not even bother? The guy is not responsive to feedback from what I have seen, but I want to pass that feedback higher as well so the people above understand what is actually going on but I am not sure if I should even bother
I would say leave it... that's not your battle. Most of the times managers and higher management is aware of what is going on, but they ignore it since the work is getting done. They consider employees opinions or them standing up for themselves as another hurdle they need to handle and hence they force their power on the employees. I am in same situation where I wanted to leave my previous company because I had dealt with a toxic manager in past in that company which left me with emotional scars. While interviewing I had asked all relevant questions to ensure I don't get into similar team or with similar manager. I was lied to and my manager turned in my current company out to be worst than the one from my previous company. He would yell at everyone if things wouldn't go as per his plans or if people couldn't meet deadlines due to change in scope or worst devalue you saying something in lines of that are not a good engineer. I tried standing up for myself couple of times and he labeled me unprofessional, abrasive, domineering and blocked my promotion for 2 years. I learnt that people who had left in past has complained about him multiple times to HR and higher management, but nothing changed. I got stuck in the company due to bad market and it affected my self-confidence and I am even scared to find jobs thinking I might meet same members/team members at other places. I too have team members who come and talk to me about how bad the manager is, but will never speak in front of him and sometimes when I tried speaking up some of them even backstabbed me to make themselves look better.
Hey Steve, Martin here. Interviewing for Amazon as a SDE on Monday. Pretty nervous but I’ll get through it. My question is: any tips for interns to get return offers? It’s a short time we get to have at the company so the time we have for showing our value is limited.
The goal of an internship from the company perspective is the same as from the Intern perspective - they want you to be successful and get a return offer if possible. It is the best way to know someone is good before giving them a full-time offer. Besides the advice others have given (good advice like "crush your project" and "be coachable"), I'd add: * Be communicative. Let your mentor/manager know where you are at. If you are stuck, let them know. Ask questions. Ask if you are asking the right questions. The hardest thing to figure out is when to ask for help - If you ask too soon, you never learn and you become a time sink. If you wait too long, you spin your wheels and waste time. Your mentor should give you feedback about when to ask for help. * Be a team player. Try to think of yourself as a normal team member. Sure, you are junior, but at most placecs (Amazon is no exception), interns are treated almost exactly the same as SDE1s (i.e. new grad FT hires) * It is possible for your project to go badly and still get a return offer - some projects just have unavoidable problems. A good mentor will make sure the projects are well suited to an intern, by being independent, severable (not dependent on specialized knowledge or for things to happen outside your control), and non-critical enough that it's not the end of the world if you screw it up. At the end of the day, the question your mentor is asking to decide if they think you should get a return offer or not is, "knowing what I know now, would I hire this person for a FT role?" Your internship is basically a 3-month interview. Who am I? I was a SWE at Amazon 2006-2009 during which I mentored an intern, and I have since worked at several other places and I am now a SWE Manager at Indeed.
I think it's not worth for me to go up the ladder, I've worked in the past in managing positions and I don't enjoy the stress of being responsible of other's work. I think I live way better as a developer with more time and less money. Am I missing something?
Well the reason most people climb the ladder is primarily for money. If you have decent amount of net worth and value other things other than money, sure.
Hi Steve. Would you say that the feedback from your rejections could've been summed up with a "work more" solution. Or were there specific things to actually work on and if you've managed to do it simply by shifting priorities.
At AWS you generally get good feedback on rejected promos, i.e. they say, 'Do X and you'll be ready'. Sometimes you're unlucky and there's really not much chance for you to work on your weakness, but often you just have to start saying 'no' to anything that isn't going to help you reach that next level. It's weird saying 'no' when you're pushing for promo, but you have to be a bit selfish because the only person looking out for you is YOU in most cases. The company certainly isn't...
Hi Steve! I'm was a Principal software engineer in my last job that was a big video game company, and I moved to a mid size company where the code lacks of structure, so I started to push for Pair and Mob programming to try to find the culture in the team, but I find it like a slow process, but I think is going some place. Do you have any recommendation to help get a strong team culture? If you have a book to recommend, better. Thanks for the videos!
Some great books for building a strong team culture are: The 5 Dysfunctions of a team (I have a video summarizing it on my channel) - Patrick Lencioni What you do is who you are - Ben Horowitz Build - Tony Fadell Good To Great (Chapter on Level 5 Leaders) - Jim Collins
Is it a red flag if your manager isn't giving clear high level requirements to get to the next level and just saying keep doing your job? It sounds like they are hesitant to outline it clearly because they are afraid if I do them all then I will expect a promo right away - even though I've made it clear that I know there also needs to be a business need for it.
🎉 Sign up to get 20% off a year of Brilliant Premium → brilliant.org/alifeengineered
📈Transform your tech career with my free weekly newsletter - newsletter.alifeengineered.com/general
💥 Continue the conversation on my Discord server with like-minded viewers. The advice section is **chef's kiss** - discord.gg/HFVMbQgRJJ
💥 My UA-cam content will always be free of charge but if you'd like to support the channel, I'd be honored if you supported me on Patreon - www.patreon.com/ALifeEngineered
🚀 If you want to get promoted fast, I'd love to work with you personally: speedruntopromotion.com
Story 2 is exactly me at Amazon right now. L6 here, was on "fast track to L7 for this quarter" until this clown showed up. Now not only is my promo stuck, life is hell and the org is on the verge of collapse. Pulling the rip cord as my skip level seems unflinchingly supportive of this narcissist.
L6 to L7 promo requires so many stars to align
I can help you join quant finance if you're open to considering it - what's your linkedin page?
Even L5 to L6 requires so many stars to align (SDE), I'm sure more than stars would be required for L6 to L7
Today in Amazon passing from Lvl 6 to Lvl 7 become a Unicorn. Before we had clear role matrix dimensions and if you were able to prove your impact, you were able to hit a promo. Now frugality and further layoffs have extremely tighten the promo belt.
I got down-levelled when interviewing for AWS and only accepted the the L4 position because i wanted the name on my CV. Early on, it was obvious to my colleagues that i should be an l5, but when trying to communicate with my manager, he either didn't respond to my messages or dismissed me. 14 months later, I have found a senior role elsewhere earning a lot more money. I don't like to live with regret, but sometimes i wish i didn't accept the position, but i recognise that i was only contacted for certain roles because of AWS.
Hi Steve!
Could you elucidate the responsibilities at each SWE level from L3 to L8, specifically with an eye towards promotion? Understanding these benchmarks is crucial for excelling in our current roles and for making informed decisions about seeking opportunities elsewhere if progress isn't recognized by management. Thanks for shedding light on this!
Thanks for answering my question regarding the miserable manager I had. You had an absolutely amazing prediction. Long story short, he was fired 2 months before this video was made.
6:03 I'm not so sure on this part. I've been at a startup for almost 3 years now and it is night and day on the growth rate. The downside of being the small fish in a big pond is that you don't need to stretch as much to accomplish tasks. At smaller company, so many more problems fall to you that you are forced to grow.
Such good advice about managers. If the manager isn't on your side, they are basically against you
1:40 I think anyone outside of tech can universally relate to this case. I encountered something similar when I worked for a facilities department where leaving the team for a promotion with a different employer to grow my career helped me level up.
Exciting to see more of these videos!!! Great video idea. Takes one to know one, to relate to this
It's interesting how things are working elsewhere. My biggest gripe with promotions is rather that you move up the hierarchy and then need completely different skill sets. From technical skills you go more to soft skills, organizing stuff, company politics, etc.. not everywhere you have the option of a technical career, but you still gain wage rises without promotions.
A lot of what you do is defined by how your company is set up and how work and responsibilities are divided/ distributed. No matter what you do, you just see one aspect of the big picture. No matter how good you are, colleagues, other departments or the organization itself can slow you down.
Steve is the techlead we need, but not the one we deserve.
Should I accept a promotion (to senior) without salary bump? The company told me moneys tight so there are no raises, but it doesn’t make sense as the revenue and outlook are both positive.
Absolutely. You can always leverage that senior title into better pay somewhere else.
Exactly what@@fa11en1ce said. Take the title and start looking elsewhere. Most of the companies these days are doing these. Promoting their engineers to get more work off of them and when it comes to pay, they make an excuse. Just research on what senior engineers do in your field of work, focus on growing in that area so you have some experience about it and then make a switch in next few months. Hoping market gets better later this year.
My old company did that as standard practice (only moves in/out of "management" entailed an immediate change)--super dumb and great way to tell your employees you don't value them, but as already mentioned: higher title looks good on the resume. Also nicely allows you to split your experience sections for a job by role so you can brag that you were promoted and have another section to list more stuff you did there if resume length was a concern.
Lastly, if you can't find something else when raises do come back--you're de facto underpaid for your title and that's leverage for you and your management to push for right sizing you.
AS long as there no hit to your WLB, do it. Then leverage your title to make more $$ elsewhere.
But if they tell you you'll have more work and/or stress, with no raise, politely decline. And start looking elsewhere anyway.
Your video is very inspiring. Thank you very much.
Hi Steve! You have in a previous video said that you don't have a lot of women viewers, I am one, thank you for your videos! Do you have some specific advice for women in particular to reach Staff level? Any good or not as good examples you have seen of women trying to reach that level? Thanks!
Hey Steve! How would you recommend I can keep connections active with previous colleagues and mentors who are not in my company anymore?
Yesn't
Some of the information is Amazon-specific, e.g. tech survey is a great resource for internal transfer but not available if you're applying to another company or at a company that doesn't have tech survey. Also, it would be better to use the job titles rather than Amazon-specific leveling to refer to roles. (i.e. Principal engineer instead of "L7")
exactly the guidance i needed right now. Thanks!
I left a company which had pretty bad management for what I thought it was a better one.
I intervewed carefylly, asked all the right questions and ended up in a company with a manager who is micro managing and forcing his technical opinion on the whole team of 5 senior software engineers, nobody can say anything. I mean we say and challenge but he is abusing his power to get his way.
My point is that I asked how the team work and everything to try and understand how they operate and was happy. They have outright lied to me and I am now looking to get out. Its awful but its just the way some companies operate. Also, none of the other senior engineers seem to be doing anything about it, as if they are scared to voice their opinions and jus keep silent and go with whatever the manager sets as a technical direction. Truly awful.
I am thinking as I hand in my notice to give him feedback and explain my reasoning for leaving - Steve, do you think this is a good idea or just not even bother? The guy is not responsive to feedback from what I have seen, but I want to pass that feedback higher as well so the people above understand what is actually going on but I am not sure if I should even bother
I would say leave it... that's not your battle. Most of the times managers and higher management is aware of what is going on, but they ignore it since the work is getting done. They consider employees opinions or them standing up for themselves as another hurdle they need to handle and hence they force their power on the employees. I am in same situation where I wanted to leave my previous company because I had dealt with a toxic manager in past in that company which left me with emotional scars. While interviewing I had asked all relevant questions to ensure I don't get into similar team or with similar manager. I was lied to and my manager turned in my current company out to be worst than the one from my previous company. He would yell at everyone if things wouldn't go as per his plans or if people couldn't meet deadlines due to change in scope or worst devalue you saying something in lines of that are not a good engineer. I tried standing up for myself couple of times and he labeled me unprofessional, abrasive, domineering and blocked my promotion for 2 years. I learnt that people who had left in past has complained about him multiple times to HR and higher management, but nothing changed. I got stuck in the company due to bad market and it affected my self-confidence and I am even scared to find jobs thinking I might meet same members/team members at other places. I too have team members who come and talk to me about how bad the manager is, but will never speak in front of him and sometimes when I tried speaking up some of them even backstabbed me to make themselves look better.
@@acecala3576which country are you in? And during interviewing who lied to you?
Excellent video! Can't wait for the next one.
Hey Steve, Martin here. Interviewing for Amazon as a SDE on Monday. Pretty nervous but I’ll get through it. My question is: any tips for interns to get return offers? It’s a short time we get to have at the company so the time we have for showing our value is limited.
In Seattle, US
Full time SDE here, just crush your main intern project, that as well as being coachable is the main thing they look for.
The goal of an internship from the company perspective is the same as from the Intern perspective - they want you to be successful and get a return offer if possible. It is the best way to know someone is good before giving them a full-time offer. Besides the advice others have given (good advice like "crush your project" and "be coachable"), I'd add:
* Be communicative. Let your mentor/manager know where you are at. If you are stuck, let them know. Ask questions. Ask if you are asking the right questions. The hardest thing to figure out is when to ask for help - If you ask too soon, you never learn and you become a time sink. If you wait too long, you spin your wheels and waste time. Your mentor should give you feedback about when to ask for help.
* Be a team player. Try to think of yourself as a normal team member. Sure, you are junior, but at most placecs (Amazon is no exception), interns are treated almost exactly the same as SDE1s (i.e. new grad FT hires)
* It is possible for your project to go badly and still get a return offer - some projects just have unavoidable problems. A good mentor will make sure the projects are well suited to an intern, by being independent, severable (not dependent on specialized knowledge or for things to happen outside your control), and non-critical enough that it's not the end of the world if you screw it up. At the end of the day, the question your mentor is asking to decide if they think you should get a return offer or not is, "knowing what I know now, would I hire this person for a FT role?" Your internship is basically a 3-month interview.
Who am I? I was a SWE at Amazon 2006-2009 during which I mentored an intern, and I have since worked at several other places and I am now a SWE Manager at Indeed.
It is a lost that Amazon can’t keep you.
A loss for us too, content will never be the same
I think it's not worth for me to go up the ladder, I've worked in the past in managing positions and I don't enjoy the stress of being responsible of other's work. I think I live way better as a developer with more time and less money. Am I missing something?
Exactly my thinking. Additional stress only means you pay the govt more tax affecting your longevity in life.
Well the reason most people climb the ladder is primarily for money. If you have decent amount of net worth and value other things other than money, sure.
Hi Steve, thanks for the video! Several good points that will stay with me!
Really nice video! i was wondering if i could help you edit your videos and make them more engaging as well as create short content out of them.
Great content 🎉 Always looking for new videos from you!
Thank you so much❤ guys like you are Like Light in darkness in this cruel world🙏🏻
What's the best way to ask to move teams without cutting ties with your current team and still have the door open to coming back?
You should become batman. be vengeance!! (Batman theme intensifies)
is there any chance you could talk about how to get an interview with Amazon(or FANNG) on Staff+ level from the resume/application perspective
this video really should have bookmarks or time stamps
Love this video!
Hi Steve. Would you say that the feedback from your rejections could've been summed up with a "work more" solution. Or were there specific things to actually work on and if you've managed to do it simply by shifting priorities.
At AWS you generally get good feedback on rejected promos, i.e. they say, 'Do X and you'll be ready'. Sometimes you're unlucky and there's really not much chance for you to work on your weakness, but often you just have to start saying 'no' to anything that isn't going to help you reach that next level. It's weird saying 'no' when you're pushing for promo, but you have to be a bit selfish because the only person looking out for you is YOU in most cases. The company certainly isn't...
Hi Steve!
I'm was a Principal software engineer in my last job that was a big video game company, and I moved to a mid size company where the code lacks of structure, so I started to push for Pair and Mob programming to try to find the culture in the team, but I find it like a slow process, but I think is going some place.
Do you have any recommendation to help get a strong team culture? If you have a book to recommend, better.
Thanks for the videos!
Some great books for building a strong team culture are:
The 5 Dysfunctions of a team (I have a video summarizing it on my channel) - Patrick Lencioni
What you do is who you are - Ben Horowitz
Build - Tony Fadell
Good To Great (Chapter on Level 5 Leaders) - Jim Collins
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay, it will be double
This is a such an under-rated video.
The manager who's recalcitrant to submit the promotion material probably didn't want to lose you. That works one time, maybe.
L4 is not junior
Is it a red flag if your manager isn't giving clear high level requirements to get to the next level and just saying keep doing your job? It sounds like they are hesitant to outline it clearly because they are afraid if I do them all then I will expect a promo right away - even though I've made it clear that I know there also needs to be a business need for it.
Nice scotches on the shelf!
And not only scotches as far as I can see
Random Engineer: hi steve!
Steve(as any Bay area engineer): you should leave!
Thanks Daddy Steve
leave, so they can hire someone else who wants to be there