Big tech jobs are not what they were. Amazon made my career and "my life", but things have changed. Here is the good, the bad and the ugly of today’s big tech job options:
(1) The Good
- Great Comp.
People may want more, but tech worker pay dwarfs everyone except Wall Street traders.
- Incredible platforms for scale and impact.
What you work on will be seen and used by millions, possibly billions. A lousy feature from Google or Meta will get 100x the traffic that a startup would sell it's imaginary kidney to have.
- Slow but consistent growth over time.
Put in the years and you can get the levels and the pay.
(2) The Bad
- Slow but consistent growth over time.
The days of adding tens of thousands of employees are gone. Amazon grew 100x in my 15 years there, and the stock went up 9082% (I checked).
Revenue has grown 67x since I started. Another 67x would make Amazon's revenue larger than the US Gross Domestic Product. It simply cannot happen again.
- Rocket-ride careers are largely over.
The exception is if you happen to get in early to a hot new division, but your odds of this are no better than finding the next unicorn startup.
- Increasing bureaucracy.
Every person I coach across Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. tells me of policies, politics, and waiting lists around progression.
(3) The Ugly
- Most of big tech is either still laying off or not hiring. The pre-pandemic hiring sprees are still being washed out in the name of efficiency.
- For most of these companies (not all), there is increasing return to office pressure.
- Big tech still has worse-than-average diversity stats.
Who can benefit from big tech jobs today:
(A) People well along in their careers looking for stability and a fat paycheck. You can put the career on cruise control, add a blue chip line to your resume, and pay off the mortgage/college tuition with the comp.
(B) New graduates. Spend a couple of years getting that blue chip resume line and exposure to the tools, scale, and thinking. They may no longer be fast and agile, but they are massive and powerful. They are like battleships. They can't turn fast, but they are nearly unstoppable.
(C) People like me (at the end) - Those looking for a line of sight to "retirement" or a second career of their choosing.
Who should leave or look elsewhere:
(D) Those who can afford higher risk / lower short-term compensation that comes with the potential to grow faster.
(E) Anyone who cannot stand being part of a large, slow system.
(F) People who have already gotten any "scale" and "top performer" credentials they wanted from a big tech job. Now that you have the "credential", you can "graduate" to something with less overhead and more potential.
Readers- Thoughts about the state of big tech careers?
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I made it to Amazon VP because my managers fought for my promotions. They fought for my promotions because I met the 3 criteria that a manager needs to risk their reputation on you:
1) Good work performance
2) They trusted me
3) They "liked" me
The two pieces of “good work performance” are quality and reliability. Basically, your work should make their work easier. This is the groundwork on which the other two parts are built.
Trust means your manager can count on you in several key ways:
a) You will deliver/get the work done
b) You will make good decisions when they are not around
c) You will not surprise them with disasters or bad news
Doing your job won’t get you promoted; managing up will. There are 6 key parts of managing up to executives:
1. "Be bright, be quick, be gone."
Executives are busy. Come to your conversations prepared with well-thought-out ideas, and then express them quickly and clearly. Then move on.
2. Avoid bad surprises.
Managing up before a crisis is way easier than doing it after the crisis begins. Stay on top of worrying signals and keep the executives informed before things blow up.
Straight Truth: Each promotion in a career gets harder. Your peers get stronger and the number of positions decrease. Here is how to win:
For both Individual Contributors (ICs) and managers, there is a pyramid. Many roles at the bottom, few at the top, only one CEO.
This pyramid means that our competition gets stiffer at each level as our less talented, motivated, or driven peers drop behind us.
While this is obvious for personnel managers (you need only 1/10th as many leaders of groups of 100 as you need first level managers of groups of 10), it is also true for ICs. A project may need only one "Architect" and "Distinguished Engineer" isn't very distinguished if there are dozens of them.
My first demo at Amazon failed in front of Jeff Bezos at the company all hands meeting. I have had to recover from visible disasters while on stage at several key moments in my career. Your career will stall out if you are not comfortable speaking in front of others.
You don’t have to be loud or extroverted, but you do have to express yourself clearly and confidently.
Here is why and how you can do this.
1) Why
To move up in your career, you need to create impact. To create impact, you must be able to influence your peers. One of the ways that you will need to do this is through speaking, both in small settings and to large groups in meetings.
As your role increases, you will need to speak to larger groups with more influential people with whom you have less of a relationship. You will be responsible for communicating to them in a way that advocates for your ideas, your team, and yourself.
If you can’t convincingly get your message across, you will not create impact and you will not get promoted.
“Executive presence” helped me reach VP at Amazon. The biggest challenge when it comes to improving your executive presence is simply defining it.
Here is how I define it: Executive presence is the ability to command a room, hold attention, and present yourself as someone who should be trusted and followed.
It is a composite of many skills.
In order to break executive presence into specific areas for improvement, I will borrow from the author Sylvia Ann Hewlett. She breaks it down into three categories:
→ 60% gravitas
→ 30% communication
→ 10% appearance
Gravitas, according to Hewlett, is the collection of things that make you worthy of attention and respect. The two main traits for this are your confidence and decisiveness.
I screwed over one of my top engineers when I was a Senior Manager at Amazon. He felt betrayed, found another job, and resigned. This is a dark spot on my career, so learn from my mistake. Here’s the story:
I joined Amazon in April 2005. This engineer was a new graduate assigned to my team, which was a new team for a new project.
Everyone on this new team was smart and talented, but this engineer was a top performer. Our project had a tight deadline, and he came to me and offered me a deal: he would do whatever was needed to ship the project if I made sure he was promoted as a result.
Side note: This is a great piece of negotiation, and I encourage you to strike similar deals with your managers when you can.
This engineer trusted me to follow through on the deal, but there was a problem. I had just come to Amazon from the startup world, where there was no formal promotion process. When we wanted to promote someone, we just gave them a new title and a raise.