L6 to L7 promo requires so many stars to align

I can help you join quant finance if you're open to considering it - what's your linkedin page?

Even L5 to L6 requires so many stars to align (SDE), I'm sure more than stars would be required for L6 to L7

Today in Amazon passing from Lvl 6 to Lvl 7 become a Unicorn. Before we had clear role matrix dimensions and if you were able to prove your impact, you were able to hit a promo. Now frugality and further layoffs have extremely tighten the promo belt.

Absolutely. You can always leverage that senior title into better pay somewhere else.

Exactly what@@fa11en1ce said. Take the title and start looking elsewhere. Most of the companies these days are doing these. Promoting their engineers to get more work off of them and when it comes to pay, they make an excuse. Just research on what senior engineers do in your field of work, focus on growing in that area so you have some experience about it and then make a switch in next few months. Hoping market gets better later this year.

My old company did that as standard practice (only moves in/out of "management" entailed an immediate change)--super dumb and great way to tell your employees you don't value them, but as already mentioned: higher title looks good on the resume. Also nicely allows you to split your experience sections for a job by role so you can brag that you were promoted and have another section to list more stuff you did there if resume length was a concern. Lastly, if you can't find something else when raises do come back--you're de facto underpaid for your title and that's leverage for you and your management to push for right sizing you.

AS long as there no hit to your WLB, do it. Then leverage your title to make more $$ elsewhere. But if they tell you you'll have more work and/or stress, with no raise, politely decline. And start looking elsewhere anyway.

At AWS you generally get good feedback on rejected promos, i.e. they say, 'Do X and you'll be ready'. Sometimes you're unlucky and there's really not much chance for you to work on your weakness, but often you just have to start saying 'no' to anything that isn't going to help you reach that next level. It's weird saying 'no' when you're pushing for promo, but you have to be a bit selfish because the only person looking out for you is YOU in most cases. The company certainly isn't...

Some great books for building a strong team culture are: The 5 Dysfunctions of a team (I have a video summarizing it on my channel) - Patrick Lencioni What you do is who you are - Ben Horowitz Build - Tony Fadell Good To Great (Chapter on Level 5 Leaders) - Jim Collins

In Seattle, US

Full time SDE here, just crush your main intern project, that as well as being coachable is the main thing they look for.

The goal of an internship from the company perspective is the same as from the Intern perspective - they want you to be successful and get a return offer if possible. It is the best way to know someone is good before giving them a full-time offer. Besides the advice others have given (good advice like "crush your project" and "be coachable"), I'd add: * Be communicative. Let your mentor/manager know where you are at. If you are stuck, let them know. Ask questions. Ask if you are asking the right questions. The hardest thing to figure out is when to ask for help - If you ask too soon, you never learn and you become a time sink. If you wait too long, you spin your wheels and waste time. Your mentor should give you feedback about when to ask for help. * Be a team player. Try to think of yourself as a normal team member. Sure, you are junior, but at most placecs (Amazon is no exception), interns are treated almost exactly the same as SDE1s (i.e. new grad FT hires) * It is possible for your project to go badly and still get a return offer - some projects just have unavoidable problems. A good mentor will make sure the projects are well suited to an intern, by being independent, severable (not dependent on specialized knowledge or for things to happen outside your control), and non-critical enough that it's not the end of the world if you screw it up. At the end of the day, the question your mentor is asking to decide if they think you should get a return offer or not is, "knowing what I know now, would I hire this person for a FT role?" Your internship is basically a 3-month interview. Who am I? I was a SWE at Amazon 2006-2009 during which I mentored an intern, and I have since worked at several other places and I am now a SWE Manager at Indeed.

I would say leave it... that's not your battle. Most of the times managers and higher management is aware of what is going on, but they ignore it since the work is getting done. They consider employees opinions or them standing up for themselves as another hurdle they need to handle and hence they force their power on the employees. I am in same situation where I wanted to leave my previous company because I had dealt with a toxic manager in past in that company which left me with emotional scars. While interviewing I had asked all relevant questions to ensure I don't get into similar team or with similar manager. I was lied to and my manager turned in my current company out to be worst than the one from my previous company. He would yell at everyone if things wouldn't go as per his plans or if people couldn't meet deadlines due to change in scope or worst devalue you saying something in lines of that are not a good engineer. I tried standing up for myself couple of times and he labeled me unprofessional, abrasive, domineering and blocked my promotion for 2 years. I learnt that people who had left in past has complained about him multiple times to HR and higher management, but nothing changed. I got stuck in the company due to bad market and it affected my self-confidence and I am even scared to find jobs thinking I might meet same members/team members at other places. I too have team members who come and talk to me about how bad the manager is, but will never speak in front of him and sometimes when I tried speaking up some of them even backstabbed me to make themselves look better.

​@@acecala3576which country are you in? And during interviewing who lied to you?

Exactly my thinking. Additional stress only means you pay the govt more tax affecting your longevity in life.

Well the reason most people climb the ladder is primarily for money. If you have decent amount of net worth and value other things other than money, sure.

A loss for us too, content will never be the same

And not only scotches as far as I can see