Comment by JustExAWS
2 days ago
There is no pipeline though. The average tenure of a junior developer even at AWS is 3 years. Everyone knows that you make less money getting promoted to an L5 (mid) than getting hired in as one. Salary compression is real. The best play is always to jump ship after 3 years. Even if you like Amazon, “boomeranging” is still the right play.
that's interesting because that's how the consulting world works too. Start at a big firm, work for a few years, then jump to a small firm two levels above where you were. The after two years, come back to the big firm and get hired one level up from where you left. Rinse/repeat. It's the fastest promotion path in consulting.
I went from an L5 (mid) working at AWS ProServe as a consultant (full time role) to a year later (and a shitty company in between) as a “staff architect” - like you said two levels up - at a smaller cloud consulting company.
If I had any interest in ever working for BigTech again (and I would rather get an anal probe daily with a cactus), I could relatively easily get into Google’s equivalent department as a “senior” based on my connections.
Why is the hiring budget so much larger than the promotion budget?
It’s not necessarily “larger”, so much as different units. In a big company, the hiring budget is measured in headcount, but the promotion budget is measured in dollar percentage. It’s much easier to add $20k salary to get a hire done than to give that same person a $20k bump the following year.
I don't now about the dollars but it's much easier and faster to leave and come back at a higher level than it is to win an actual promotion.
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It’s a lot cheaper to replace an employee by one who leaves at market rate than to pay all of your developers at market rate. Many are going to stick around because of inertia, their lack of ability to interview well, golden handcuffs of RSUs, they don’t feel like rebuilding the social capital at another company or the naive belief in the “mission”, “passion” etc
Mgmt/hr playing a game of chicken and you don't know you're playing.
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But that's fine, that's why I say for big companies - the pipeline is the entire industry, everyone potentially in the job market, not just those currently at AWS. Companies like Amazon have a large enough work force to care that there's people coming up even if they don't work there yet (or never do, but by working elsewhere free someone else to work at AWS).
They have an interest in getting those grads turned into would-be-L5s even if they leave for a different company. If they 'boomerang back' at L7 that's great. They can't if they never got a grad job.