What's the gap between L5 to L6 at Amazon? What's the difference in expectations and how hard is it to get a promo?
I saw BIE 5 get to 6 by only doing quicksight dashboards and executing the adhoc request one after the other. They say the difference is the impact you have, but You know how political it is. So per say, not much gap. To make it easier to get promoted, got to a team that doesn’t have a BIE and build everything from scratch: db, reports... getting in a team full of BIEs is risky as people are gonna queue for promotion and you gonna fight constantly to get exposure.
I am a recent hire in a team with almost double digit BIEs. This worries me now. Any tips on how to be in a good position for promotion ?
Disclaimer, I haven’t been in this situation myself, so I will not be too prescriptive. If possible, ask people in your team who got promoted recently how they did it. Also try to become really good at one specific thing, try to build on projects and relationships, don’t fall into the trap of being a worker behind the load balancer that is your boss, try to sustain relationships with stakeholder and make them understand you are the preferred contact for topics x and y. As soon as you get something that diverges too much from it (and that doesn’t interest you of course), push back as much as possible. Try to get confirmation from people outside your team before your boss (if that’s not gonna put you in trouble with him), for example if you have a new idea for a customer go for it, present it to the customer and once you got things moving talk about it to your boss, he will be less likely to give the project to someone else or to tell you to stop it. Also of course speak with your boss about promo the soonest and define very concrete goals. Keep pristine relationship with seniors of your team as they will likely give you feedback in your doc (in case you are <l6). Last but not least, if you see red flag move fast, too many people get stuck in the « I may have my promo next quarter so I’m not gonna move » and fail to get it for years sometimes.
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