In the last few weeks I have seen several AWS L7 promo announcements from individuals. Has it become easier to get promoted or is it still almost impossible to do so? Wondering also what us driving people to self-promote themselves as Amazon does not like folks wearing badges when walking out if their offices…
Promotions were hard before 2021. Easy during 21-22 when job market was hot. Hard again after 2023 since layoff season.
Depends on which org and team you are on. The bar varies from team to team and even org to org.
It was never easy to get promoted to L7 internally at Amazon. I doubt it will ever be.
It all depends on your manager, in Kuiper last year the amount of L6 and L7 promos was surreal, seriously check the phonetool, there are leans with more L6s than L4,5 combined
I am from Kuiper and we hired extremely senior people and downlevelled them in the initial years. Imagine Naveen K came in as an L7 (L8 now) and he literally runs the entire business. Several people who were VPs/ SVPs with 500+ ppl orgs outside were wrongly hired as L6. That has been corrected. That said the talent bar (internal or external) i have seen here at Kuiper in the business org is >>>>>> anywhere else in Amazon. I have been a TT at retail, ads and aws in my 12 years at Amazon.
In Luxembourg everybody is wearing badges outside office everywhere.
Promos can be seen as amore subtle way to RIF.
L7 is the new sde 3, probably maps to e3 at meta now ;)
Bullshit
And it maps to customer level at eBay 🤡