Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere. Employees who feel they are not valued find a new job elsewhere. If you can find them a new job in the company you can have them train their replacement - years later the replacement can ask "do you remember why you did...". It also means if the old project has an emergency you have a bunch of people who can jump in much faster - to some extent this adding people to a late project won't make it latter (only some extent, it isn't perfect).
People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).
> The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere.
But this one didn’t. 20 years at one place, at least 10 with minimal support. Maybe all those managers were bad; but maybe they realized this individual wasn’t a flight risk, and had a reasonable strategy for maximizing what they got out of them, since they knew they didn’t have to guard against departure.
I think most managers prefer the status quo; why wouldn't they? Charitably, you can think of it as an assumption on the manager's side that you're fine with the way things are, because you haven't said anything. Similar things can be said about salary.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
From my experience it is futile to ask for any meaningful salary changes. Bands are usually fixed. Unless you're severely underpaid, they won't increase your salary by much. There are only two ways to increase your salary: leave for bigger salary, or threaten to leave and stay for bigger salary.
yeah this is exactly it - 'oh we cannot raise you as we have to be fair to everyone else becuz you are at the higher end of the band, unless we promote you but we wont' - sometimes its equality vs merit, no matter how well you do, its still discretionary unless you are in a place where there is a formula, like sales.
I've seen companies that do and companies that don't. I've actually had managers try to dissuade me from growing my scope of work or growing my career. "I don't know why you'd want to be promoted to manager, just stay an IC" was a common phrase to push back against my expressed desire for career growth. Definitely happens. Lots of companies erect career-ceilings over you.
Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
I was even the “lead” at a SaaS in daily firefighting mode and pushing new features out quickly on a team of three engineers and one half-time one. I was 99% sure they’d go down the next day I left but somehow they kept on trucking. We’re all replaceable whether we like to think it or not
At every job I’ve had, across all the managers I’ve had, my immediate manager (and usually their manager as well) genuinely cared about me and my team and our well being as well as our careers. My _company_ and its executives surely didn’t give a damn if they even knew our names, but the actual humans I work face to face with definitely do.
Managers are human (at least so far). As humans they care about other people they know.
Managers will sometimes not help you because they are lazy. In a few cases culture will make them discriminate against you. However in general managers like you and want you to do well.
I’ve been part of organizational discussions. Every manager ive worked with has actively fought, and fought hard, to keep, promote, or get pay raises for their employees. They don’t just bend over and say “okay boss” if asked to cut people.
If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
Well in my 30 year career across 10 jobs - everything from startups to BigTech and now working full time at a consulting company, I’ve found line level managers to be absolutely useless - not soulless.
When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.
Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.
It’s not “bad managers” - it’s “powerless managers”. If you are a line level manager, you don’t control budgets, company wide re-org decisions, or really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor” and “do I need to come into an office?”. Those are all decisions above your head
I don't expect them to move the world for me. But I don't equate "powerless managers" with "useless managers". If they feel like they do what they can within their means, I'd say that's a good manager.
>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”
That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
I don't think any of my managers has ever been directly involved with having to deal with business expenses, so I don't think that's really a thing that they think about when managing me.
Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".
Well, the manager who railroaded me into a PIP at AWS also kept checking my LinkedIn profile. While my pre-PIP (“focus”) was 70% my fault. I was objectively railroaded toward my PIP. I kept meeting all of my goals and they kept adding more.
Not that I gave a shit. I was 46-50 and on my 8th job and knew what I was getting myself into from day one. I came in with a plan and had a job and multiple offers within 10 days
> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
This is certainly the most risk averse, conventional take on the topic to keep you safe and avoid vulnerability.
That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.
That's one way to look at employment in a purely capitalist manner. Doesn't mean it's the only way. If the capitalists intend for AI to take all our jobs, perhaps we should entertain alternatives?
> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
What many of these articles miss is that even if you do everything they say you will still not get the promotion you want for several reasons.
My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.
I always talked with the people I managed about their career goals, and always tried to adapt their job to be a closer fit to those goals. When I couldn't do that I would acknowledge that and even help them find a different job that did fit.
How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
Just gonna say that while thinking through your direct reports' career progression is not the only job you have as a manager, it is definitely an important part of the work and something that is prioritized at some companies. This article paints a dire picture of what managers could be like if they worked in healthier organizations (mentally, anyway?).
There are two reasons for this.
1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here)
2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies.
#2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.
There is good advice here for sure, but the tone seemed focused on growing your career rather than "saving" it. Most people now want to know how to still be employed in this industry 10 years from now. Maybe this advice will be consistent with this goal, but I fear climbing the corporate ladder could make you more vulnerable to cuts and lead to burnout.
> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything?
Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.
It used to be that managers would take capable workers under their mentorship and prepare them to move into their old role, as their manager was helping them do the same. Everyone extended a hand down to pull someone up, because companies promoted internally and hired from within.
That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves.
If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.
I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?
Every manager I ever had has spent time working on career growth with me. This is in fortune 100 companies, and smaller late stage startups.. heck, even when I worked in retail in the 90s they would have these conversations. What is going on at amazon?
I recently went through an internal transfer at my company, moving to a very distant organization.
My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision".
I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined. (It's not like they were offering anything for me to stay.) I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it's my decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."
Is a manager “good” if they’re not talking about your career growth? I disagree with the author on this point so the rest of it really doesn’t follow. Then again, he also had 20 managers in 18 years… so yeah I can see why none of his managers ever got around to asking about his career growth.
I'm retired from working in the trades. My bosses only cared if I could do the job, period. Put up or shut up and go home. The only slight exception was when I went to work for an airline, for obvious reasons.
Although I once worked at a data center, I was on the facility side of things, but was always around the white shirt workers. All of us were happy to be gainfully employed and raising families, paying taxes, pursuing hobbies,etc.
I heard a radio article yesterday which said AI was very concerning for the future of data/tech workers, which was worrying to me. To paraphrase: it claimed that tens of thousands of tech workers are entering data in many different fields and in the process are doing what humans are doing as mentioned above. It claimed that the fear was that AI will replace these workers and instead of all those worker paying taxes/providing for families, perhaps ten or fifteen companies will be using AI to replace them and, as we all know, will pay a fraction of the taxes. (I don't mean to imply that paying taxes and employing people are equal, just that taxes are an important part of any economy.)
I don't have any expertise in business or economics, but it seems to me if AI isn't regulated somehow, not only will this threaten workers, it will further widen the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Steve makes the key point precisely: "AI is compressing the value of routine expertise... If your entire value is built on repeating what you already know how to do, that value is shrinking."
But what is the alternative? Most answers land on "learn new skills faster" — which is still repeating what you already know how to do, just in a different domain. The compression will catch up.
The capacity that doesn't compress is the one that operates before expertise: arriving at a genuinely unknown situation without a preset conclusion, staying open to what's actually there, finding the structure underneath it before you know what to look for. That's not a skill category most professional development tracks for — and it's exactly what determines whether a person directs AI or is directed by it.
Wrote about this specifically: https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-wit...
Whether or not your manager is capable of helping you shape your career is an open question, for sure. But 20 people, over an 18-year career, and not a single one of them bring it up in a 1:1? And, oh okay, all those managers have worked at the same company? Seems like maybe a culture problem. I've had plenty of managers in sub-FAANG enterprises bring it up unprompted.
It always surprised me when people talked about their Bosses / Managers like they were some sort of gods that were going to save them and protect them from all bad things in the world.
Similar with salary. If you want a raise, you need to ask for it. It's sad, but that's what it is. (I'm aware of some companies that do raise the salary annually, and there is also the performance benefit if you have it, but I don't think that's common).
That, and the "you need to change companies frequently (at most one each year)" are the two things I always say to people on a computer science career.
Very tragic. We need more people to guide juniors. My first job was just "do task and do more task", but my next jump clearly had people invested in training and advising me for that job and beyond. I don't know why we all collectively decided that "sink or swim" is the best way to teach new grads how to transition into enterprise software environments.
its even worse than this. managers will pretend to br your career coach for one day per year at your employee reviews. theyll give you advice and even in the moment that manager will think to themselves how they want to help you. they still won't help, the post is correct about that.
Really great advice. There are some managers out there like myself who do care about your career. It's one reason I got into management- to be different and better than other managers who never think about it.
113 comments
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).
> The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere.
But this one didn’t. 20 years at one place, at least 10 with minimal support. Maybe all those managers were bad; but maybe they realized this individual wasn’t a flight risk, and had a reasonable strategy for maximizing what they got out of them, since they knew they didn’t have to guard against departure.
> most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
Now weird at all, and maybe that's "most managers" within your career? I've seen my share of complacent managers who were fine with status quo.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
Managers will sometimes not help you because they are lazy. In a few cases culture will make them discriminate against you. However in general managers like you and want you to do well.
Any manager will let me go if their manager tells them to.
If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.
Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.
>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”
That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".
Not that I gave a shit. I was 46-50 and on my 8th job and knew what I was getting myself into from day one. I came in with a plan and had a job and multiple offers within 10 days
> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.
> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
My advice for Career Growth for engineers who like to do things is to be willing to take on problems that others might not want, things that aren’t “sexy”, if you find them interesting. Theres a lot of interesting problems and you can grow your career by following the direction that interests you rather than the company. And when it comes to promotions, its often easier and better compensated to get a new job rather than trying to convince a bunch of people that you should be promoted.
How else can we expect to get the best out of people?
There are two reasons for this. 1. Retention is good. And if you think about your direct's careers, you will retain them longer and build a better relationship because they will have more help being successful inside the company (assuming a larger org here) 2. It's actually part of the job description and something EMs are evaluated on at some companies.
#2 is probably more rare these days, but it still exists, occasionally. Until it doesn't.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the author's hypothesis in this emergent AI world - I think companies will completely forget to think about this soon - but over the last 10 years it's definitely been an important part of my career as a manager to help my employees succeed in their careers. It's very rewarding.
> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything?
Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.
That's not the case anymore. Your manager won't mentor you not because they don't want to, but because they're also struggling to find footing and progression in a corporate world where nobody gives a shit about the folks beneath them, nor do they have any vested interest in long-term organizational health. It's not personal, it's just the system our predecessors put into practice so they could have an easier time keeping money and power for themselves.
If we want to care about the careers of others again, we have to build institutions where mentorship and training happen, as well as where good ideas are recognized and rewarded. That's something even the most "meritorious" of SV companies completely lack atm, and they're viewed as the companies to emulate by the rest of the investor class and industry. Until and unless other companies reject those fads in favor of strategies that grow and improve their orgs from within again, we're all kind of on our own.
My manager and my skip manager tried to persuade me out of the idea, saying they "want to make sure this is the correct decision".
I politely acknowledged their concerns and declined. (It's not like they were offering anything for me to stay.) I really wanted to say, "If it's a bad decision, it's my decision. You guys couldn't care less about my career growth, otherwise you'd have promoted me or given me bigger scope. You just care about shipping products and staff retention."
Although I once worked at a data center, I was on the facility side of things, but was always around the white shirt workers. All of us were happy to be gainfully employed and raising families, paying taxes, pursuing hobbies,etc.
I heard a radio article yesterday which said AI was very concerning for the future of data/tech workers, which was worrying to me. To paraphrase: it claimed that tens of thousands of tech workers are entering data in many different fields and in the process are doing what humans are doing as mentioned above. It claimed that the fear was that AI will replace these workers and instead of all those worker paying taxes/providing for families, perhaps ten or fifteen companies will be using AI to replace them and, as we all know, will pay a fraction of the taxes. (I don't mean to imply that paying taxes and employing people are equal, just that taxes are an important part of any economy.)
I don't have any expertise in business or economics, but it seems to me if AI isn't regulated somehow, not only will this threaten workers, it will further widen the gap between the haves and the have nots.
This guy is apparently a jerk, who apparently thrived in a jerk atmosphere. Don't listen to him.
That, and the "you need to change companies frequently (at most one each year)" are the two things I always say to people on a computer science career.