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 got to be an Amazon VP because a series of managers fought to promote me and pay me more. This was no accident. I used "The Magic Loop" which I invented with my first manager.
Here is that story and how you can do it yourself today.
In my first job out of college, my new manager had no idea how the company’s tech worked. The way I handled this had an impact on my entire career, all the way through what I do now as an Executive Coach.
Her not knowing our tech is how I discovered “The Breakthrough Loop”.
It also led to two promotions in 2.5 years and a 90% increase in my salary over that period.
I have written about “The Breakthrough Loop” before, but under the name “The Magic Loop”. I am switching to “Breakthrough” because it isn’t magic at all.
I learned firsthand as an Amazon VP that hard things are much scarier in our minds than they are in reality. And, the fear of failing is always much greater than the likelihood of actually failing.
I spent years avoiding tasks that:
- Seemed hard
- Used skills I thought of as my weaknesses
- Required activities I dislike
- Require speaking to people I don’t know (I'm an introvert in this way)
If you do this, here are 2 tactics you can use:
1. Find any possible way to get started.
Bargain with yourself, promise yourself you will try for 5 short minutes, give yourself a reward if you start, or tackle just "a part" of the problem.
I was asked to describe my typical day as an Amazon Director and VP. My answer was short: “meetings.” That was accurate, but here I will go into more detail. This is a day in the life of an Amazon VP.
I will cover normal days, big decisions, and crisis management.
◾Normal Days
On “normal” days, my answer of “meetings” was pretty accurate.
As a team leader of several hundred people and several businesses with hundreds of millions in revenue, my calendar was always full and often double or triple-booked. Once I was a director, I had the luxury of an executive assistant who would try to keep my days organized.
At Amazon, my team of 800 had more than 75 managers. I saw many thrive and others fail. A Harvard study identified the 4 main risk factors of manager failure, so I am going to share how managers can fix them and avoid failure.
I will share what individual contributors can do to help themselves (by helping their managers identify these risk factors).
The 4 main risk factors:
1. Lack of self-awareness 2. Lack of two-way empathy 3. Unproductive relationships with employees 4. Absence of goal alignment
Harvard says that when employers address these 4 factors, the risk of manager failure drops from 48% to just 5%.
I got to Amazon VP after 2 promotions by managing up well. My managers fought for my promotions.
You get "fight for you" manager support by building a partnership and meeting 3 criteria that get your manager to put their reputation and energy into helping you:
1) Good work performance 2) People they trust 3) They "like" you
Good performance means you do excellent work and are reliable. This is work that makes their jobs easier.
Note, however, that good work alone is not enough. You need the other two factors, which is why the smartest person or the hardest worker is not always the one to move up.
One of Jeff Bezos' most famous principles is "It's always Day 1." Since his first letter to shareholders in 1997, it has been a call to arms for Amazon to maintain its entrepreneurial spirit and speed of a startup while growing scale and resources.
We can take away valuable insights for ourselves from this idea.
First, let's define what Day 1 means using Jeff's words:
“It’s a very simple and age-old idea about renewal and rebirth. Every day is Day 1. Every day you are deciding what you’re going to do...
...You are not trapped by what you were or who you were, or any self-consistency. Day 1 thinking is we start fresh every day and we make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about how we will operate, what the principles are.”