> Almost any manager of managers has been at Amazon a long time, in that same job for a long time. There is no upward mobility at the company, unless you have been in some org 5+ years.
This is not specific to Amazon, it's endemic to the whole industry (and probably outside of the tech industry, for all I know): Very senior leaders and engineers are sometimes where they are because they've clung to their role for a long time, and they don't leave or die at a rate sufficient to frequently bubble up new senior talent through internal promotion. These people may also deserve their position because they are brilliant, too... or they may not. I've worked in a place with technical leaders where nobody knew what they did--their job was apparently "Being Employee Number 3" and nothing more.
I was at an organization that went from doing mostly smart things to doing mostly stupid things.
One of the smart things they managed to do was recognize that they were top-heavy with senior+ talent who were fixed in their thinking & behavior and aggressively began recruiting new graduates and reaching out to CS/Engineering/Science seniors. They also added some pretty impressive mentoring programs to bring the new people up to speed quickly.
Then they switched to doing stupid shit that mostly undermined all that and the newer people started leaving. But it was pretty good for a couple of years.
Ok so let's say for the sake of argument it's a Smart Thing to focus on hiring a bunch of 22 year old fresh graduates. Is that necessarily going to change anything at the leadership level? The GP is talking about managers of managers, I don't know where you've worked in the past but in my experience Directors and VPs are not taking a lot of advice or insight from the entry level new hires.
Not directly, no. The point in this case was understanding that the engineering culture had stagnated and needed to be refreshed. The people ordering the change in hiring clearly understood that it would take a long time for any newly introduced behaviors to percolate through the company. But without explicitly addressing the situation, things would just have gotten worse over time.
The reality was that in a fairly short time, focusing hiring on new grads actually had the intended effect of improving the way we did things. However, the company started becoming more unpleasant to work for soon after that. And a lot of those new hires, now with a couple years' experience, left. As did I, so I can't say how permanent the changes were.
> I've worked in a place with technical leaders where nobody knew what they did--their job was apparently "Being Employee Number 3" and nothing more.
Why does there need to be anything more? They probably know how the systems work and are ready to step in if necessary.
Also, they busted their ass before other people were at the company, enabling the company to grow and create the jobs that all the other people are now in.
To me it's not anywhere near as egregious as the founder who worked for a couple of years, then outsourced all leadership to a CEO for hire, and now does nothing, but still maintains 50%+ ownership of a company.
This is not specific to Amazon, it's endemic to the whole industry (and probably outside of the tech industry, for all I know): Very senior leaders and engineers are sometimes where they are because they've clung to their role for a long time, and they don't leave or die at a rate sufficient to frequently bubble up new senior talent through internal promotion. These people may also deserve their position because they are brilliant, too... or they may not. I've worked in a place with technical leaders where nobody knew what they did--their job was apparently "Being Employee Number 3" and nothing more.