India
Yesterday
264
Heard congress distributing wealth
Tech Industry
Yesterday
3082
Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
Tech Industry
2d
41267
Worried that our top performer is an attrition risk. How do managers handle this?
Tech Industry
Yesterday
341
TikTok Sell or Ban - What am I Missing?
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1045
I haven’t done shit today!
What to expect with L5 TPM role at Amazon? 1. Is it a scrum master kind of role where you facilitate daily scrum, share status with leadership and coordinate with other teams? 2. Does TPM participate in technical discussion and have a say in those discussions? 3. What's the career trajectory and what's the possible timeframe to expect a promo to L6? 4. Was I low balled with a L5 offer with 8 YOE ( 5 yrs as SDE+ 3 yrs as Dev Lead) ? YOE: 8 Current TC: 170k
TPM don't do much in terms of design instead they need to understand tech designs in order to facilitate work. Common TPM day to day technical task: your project can't deploy to production because some tests are failing. Your team's engineer suspects another team has a bug that is the causing the failures. Go talk to that other team, work with their engineers to find out what the root cause is, and get them to fix in a way that solves the issue your team is having. To do this you will need to understand how your team's software works and come to understand enough about the other teams system to know what the bug is and what the fix is. TPM may even execute some of the production tests to reproduce the issue for the other team, in order to speed up the fix, before handing over the complete testing to a QAE. In other words TPM aren't just project managers, they get their hands dirty, but they aren't doing design work rather they are understanding designs so they can coordinate technical work between different teams.
Thanks so much! So TPM is not just scrum master or project manager who just facilitates the meetings and stay dumb at technical discussions. I like to stay technical and learn new tech. Your response gives me a hope that I'm taking a right decision 🙂
In some teams they are treated that way. Don't stay on a team like that.
Looking at TPM as a path to SDE is a disaster. Also L5 TPM is generally hard and frustrating. You are up for it only if you are a strong at influencing people, triaging random emails and meetings, doing reports, ruthless in escalating your dependent teams, etc Folks who move from engineering to L5 TPM do it early in their career - around 4-5 yoe. Primarily they move for 2 reasons: 1. They don't see themselves growing as engineers 2. They love to interact, co-ordinate and get things done. I would suggest switch internally to a team with a modern tech stack then do SDE interviews after 6-12 months
Thanks for the suggestions! I was assuming L5 is not a Senior role so the opportunity to learn would be more than accountability and risk of failure if I don't fit in the role. I have been doing all these in my current role too but Amazon is a HUGE and fast paced.
Did you take the L5 TPm at Amazon ?
1. Yes 2. Yes - less likely. 3. 2-4 yrs to next level. 4. I would stay at SDE. TPM is not highly seen as SDE.
Thanks! I would love to stay SDE but unfortunately I don't have much experience on modern tech. We are using mainframe but I have done side projects in C/C++ and eager to learn more. How easy would it be to join them as TPM, practice leetcode and move back to SDE?
I haven’t heard of anyone moving from TPM to SDE in Amazon. It would be difficult - probably your only hope would be to pick up some automation on the side and make friends with some SDMs, and then express interest and gauge their response.