Morning! I moved from a Sr Director of IT role at a pretty well known Fortune 600 media company to SDM at AWS about 5 months ago. I don’t really love the AWS culture, I’m already being pushed to PIP someone who is improving rapidly but not yet meeting the bar. I’ve successfully pushed back on that, but I’m realizing the AWS culture isn’t for me, or at least not the org I’m in. Getting good connections scores but this also feels like I took a step back in my career going from managing Sr managers and Sr ICs to managing all ICs. I also am more interested in working in technology where I have more experience. I have a masters and 19 YOE, mostly in CRM, customer experience, API development, enterprise applications, and leading production support, technical support, and implementation teams. Lots of experience with ServiceNow, Oracle, Pega, Salesforce and contact center technology at scale. Anyone out there looking for a motivated IT leader? TC: 495k
Transition from IT to SWE management is often not successful.
I had pretty large scope in my previously role. Included about 60 devs across 5 teams
Sorry but if you are technically unaware of what your team works on then you will not get the respect of the folks who you manage and they will bad mouth you to skip level. Also will be hard to evaluate the success of team members without being hands on yourself. You will have hard time surviving at any deep technical companies. This why most such companies either make you code or have coding reviews as a part of interview process. Does AMZN not have a coding round for first line managers?
Amazon/AWS is PIP or be PIP’ped for SDM. Your Org has a mandatory quota for URA / PIP exits so skip levels wanna see those PIP numbers. This is, one of the maaany reasons, why tenured Amazon/AWS SDM are not beloved on the external interview circuit. Skedaddle before your resume takes too much reputational hit or before you yourself get in Focus.
How do you know that you are being pushed to PIP. Are you just being too self critical?
L7 specifically asked why I hadn’t put the engineer on PIP yet and wasn’t happy I hadn’t