As a ~4 year tenured L5, I agree. There is annual performance review system called Forte. During forte, each person is rated in each leadership principles (LPs) by their peers and manager, possibly from away-team members.

As the parent mentioned, nowadays the scope is extremely limited. Citing Ownership (ie. this/that team has the ownership...) reasons. I see LPs are currently weaponised to limit promotions/pay-raises.

I am not a low-performer or anything, in fact, I proactively find problems and fix them. I do not like to complain (which most people do) and if it takes <=10% of my weekly working time (ie. 4 hours or less) then I create a ticket and add this to my personal backlog. Then, when I go through my backlog, I prioritize these things according to their predicted complexity and impact. I take the low-complexity/big-impact things and do those in a 4-hour period.

When I fix the things, I update the ticket and send a CR (pull-request) to the owning team of the package. I even have a script to pick out a recent committer in the repository to add them as an optional reviewer, which helps quite a lot, as most of the teams do not track their CR (pull-request) queues at all. (neither proactively or even with notifications)

Nevertheless, 3 years back to back, I have been rated negatively for the following LPs - Think-Big - Ownership - Bias-for-Action

Moreover, I have not only participated in Hackathons but even organised org-wide (Director/L8) hackathons & events. Not to mention that my manager, my skip, and their manager (director) all in different regions than mine. I didn't had any TPM in my org in my region either.

It super frustrating as an engineer as certain minor occurrences weaponised against (ie. an escalation from away team that I did not respond in time during my PTO, c'mon!) meanwhile I have 10 or more valid scenarios which keep being overlooked.

Which is why the quality is dropping. Because as an engineer, I do not see any return on my investment (time & effort). There are thousands of engineers like me, I see more and more people are silent quitting (rest & vest), elevating minor things as if they were grand problems, increasing the bureaucracy as much as they can. As the layoffs already showed to all, there is no job guarantee at all!

You don’t see the problem with being a “four year L5”? That’s not to insult your skillset - just the nature of Amazon. There is a 99% probability that you are getting paid much less than new L5 hires.

Why are you still there?

Your manager and skip probably barely understand what you do, and then can't sell it to the director. You get put on the bottom of the list and then the manager trawls their email for a weak-sauce justification.

Also, depending on your org you might be on a timer for L6, which sounds impossible given the situation. So... fair warning.

Great background and experience and you seem very driven and proactive.

That someone like you doesn’t get recognised or rewarded reeks of piss poor leadership.

And then the petty reason not to give a good performance score - your manager should have stood up for you, unless they were ignored as well.

What’s the allure of working at Amazon these days?

Can definitely relate. There is no correlation to work complexity and quality in performance reviews from what I’ve seen. It’s often how much you are selling something and your director happens to be buying…

Forte isn’t used to withhold comp. It’s just a development tool. That’s why it was always held in January after end of year comp. If your manager told you otherwise, they are being passive-aggressive about your prospects.

Second, if you’re a fifth year L5, start interviewing now. L5 technically is a terminal level (is that still a thing there?) but you aren’t supposed to spend five years at that level.