Comment by eigen-vector
4 years ago
Not sure how long you've been at or spent at Amazon, but the promotion process doesn't prioritize building new things at all. It's true that people think complexity = build new things, but promotion criteria specifically encourage people to stick to simple things and build on top of what exists rather than invent something new for promotion's sake.
When selling your work to a promo committee, building a new shiny thing lowers the communication hurdle.
Personal anecdote, at Amazon, my wife led a very challenging refactor of legacy code and didn’t get promoted, I built a shiny thing barely anyone is using yet, and got promoted.
> Personal anecdote, at Amazon, my wife led a very challenging refactor of legacy code and didn’t get promoted, I built a shiny thing barely anyone is using yet, and got promoted.
How much of that is the effect of shiny vs. dull, and how much is male vs. female (apologies if my assuming you are male was mistaken, but it seemed the way to bet)?
That's an odd bet to make. At Google promo committees were desperate to promote women. There were entire schemes set up to encourage them to apply more, to give them special help men didn't get etc and that was years ago. Probably it's worse (less fair) now.
It wasn't just process, either. I saw severely unfair decisions go the other way. A woman in my team who everyone hated because she was dishonest, staggeringly unproductive and had a habit of upsetting other teams, sailed through promotion several times into management. On the other hand team members who created entirely new products from scratch or were the backbone of their team got bounced. The patronage of another (female) boss higher up in the management chain seemed the most likely culprit, along with a pervasive "everyone's gotta help women get ahead" attitude.
There were multiple factors, hard to know what percentage gender contributed, but I do think it played a role.
I'd argue this depends on what org and team and the culture surrounding. It can be vastly different in various nooks of the company.
Laughably false.