this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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They’re actually significantly below their current hiring target at the executive level and people are leaving left and right.
When I was last there a while ago people were leaving but they were hoping for a lot more of an exodus. Particularly in the L6/7 level.
Has that changed?
Higher is more senior right? Counting up from L1?
If so, that's an insane amount of ego, to want less of that talent. Wow.
But I bet the drugs they do are amazing, though.
It’s a bit misleading for engineering.
Every Engineer starts at L4. That’s the junior position.
L5 is the mid-senior level. Most SDEs in Amazon are L5 and that’s considered a terminal position. For management this is the “junior” (for lack of a better term) tier
L6 is Senior but it’s closer to staff engineers at other companies. You tend to do more cross team work. This is also where a glut of managers are at
L7 is Principal engineer and senior manager. Only about 2% of engineers get here. Managers at this lever oversee multiple teams.
L8+ is fancy external hires and directors.
The problem is that Amazon expects a lot of people to churn out before you hit the L6/7 levels. They dangle a carrot of super high pay for those tiers but don’t actually expect to pay it long term. There’s quite a few that have stayed longer than expected. And it’s hard to get out because they know how to game the system to demonstrate “impact”. Now that isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of good managers and engineers at this tier either. There are really good people at this tier. It’s just Amazon doesn’t want that many at this tier for long.
Also if the idea of having an expected churn and dangling pay that no one can hit sounds dystopian and awful it is. Amazon sucks.