I am very sad to say it here that AWS L8 leadership quality has hit a new low. I am specially referring to recently promoted L8s who have limited intuition about business and zero intuition on how tech works. They just don’t know how to identify the right talent in their team. On top of it they are happily burning the bridges with other L7s and L6s (referring to managers and PEs) in team because of their mountain size ego and zero tech leadership capabilities. All this cause lot of churn and heart burns in leadership which percolates down to even SDE-Is. SDEs are struggling to find a project that they can work on without any churn in prioritization of work items (thanks to immature L8s again). Top talent (even tenured ones) has started to find AWS irrelevant and annoying to be honest. Not to mention the great compensation and technical challenges other companies are offering in market. All this is adding to natural attrition in AWS that is being witnessed. AWS really need to get rid of incompetent L8s (specially product managers turned GM) to end the bleeding, hire L8s who have enough coding and SDM experience to have empathy for developers and engineering leaders in team #aws #awsattrition
Amazon L8s have a lot more than 5-6 years experience already, right? Levels.fyi says that Amazon L8s have 24 YOE on average. 5-6 YOE would be an extremely low bar.
I am referring to coding experience..also nowadays bar has gone low when promoting folks to L8 nowadays
How can an L8 SWE have 24 YOE but less than 5-6 years of coding experience?
I don’t know…also they don’t have 24 years of experience necessarily..I will edit my post to remove “5-6 years” number and replace it with “enough” as thinking more this is a more appropriate term here.
Tech PMs transition to SDM roles at Amazon and they eventually become engg directors. Does this happen anywhere else? 🙄
Wow, that is weird and a bad idea.
That's what I realized, there's virtually no accountability from L8 and ups, they will just let the blame fall through down to the engineers. Amazon reputation deserves to rot.
It’s almost everywhere..people are leaving because of lack of appreciation of what they do, blurry career growth, low improvement in compensation, team politics and lot of favoritism