Horrible idea unless your super passionate -not just from a skills perspective but also from a culture perspective (more stressed/on call etc)Also you will most likely be downlevelled to an L4
I disagree with these people above. If you had programming chops and you update them, you could totally do this. Pays way more. It’s likely hard to stay an L6, but I bet you could keep an L5 (likely paying more than your current job), especially if you were going into some place that requires skills proximate to the work you’ve been doing.
> If you had programming chops and you update them, you could totally do this. Read the original post again. He/she already said that their last programming experience was Cobol on mainframes and that was years ago. No way Amazon will give them L5 with only that experience even with some studying.
Did I miss something? They gave no timeline. A lot of people who worked on older systems got a level of what was happening under the hood in terms of cpu/cache/memory/disk/network that is still helpful, and dealt with lower level things that can make figuring out leetcode problems much easier. I’m not saying he shouldn’t study. But that lots of real world (but somewhat off kilter) experience can be valuable. Amazon absolutely has a system for testing people moving cross function to make sure they meet the bar - I think he shouldn’t be afraid of studying and giving it a go.
You’ll most likely be downleveled to L4 because you don’t have much experience with modern software development.