It’s up to him to advocate for himself and speak in terms of business value and knowing how to get a promo doc through.

I was 46-49 when I was in BigTech and way too old to care about the bullshit. But I helped a couple of interns I mentored there to get return offers as L4s and helped a couple of other L4s get to L5 and one L5 to get to L6.

But it’s almost always better to job hop than worry about an internal promotion. When you change jobs, you control the narrative. Incoming folks at Amazon almost always get better offers than people coming in.

One of the interns I mentored who came back as an L4 recently got promoted after three years and their comp package was the same as mine when I was hired there back in 2020 and is 20% less than new hires at her position.

AWS had an “anonymous” comp sharing internal Slack channel #pay-equity where you submitted your message to a Slack workflow that anonymized it before posting it. Of course the workflow admin knew about it.

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woooooo 5 days ago | parent [-]

Meh, sure it's up to him but if his management chain isn't interested, then it's basically impossible.

Best to recognize the reality and plan accordingly

Signed, a guy who saw this happen to talented L5s like you.

	▲	scarface_74 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The difference is at 46 when going in and on my 8th job, I had a plan and executed it. My plan was always to stay four years for the initial offer, build a network of potential clients (I worked in AWS ProServe), use the comp to pay off debt and stack money (I sold my AMZN stock the moment it vested) and move on. While I was there I became the second highest contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” and published my own projects to the official AWS open source repository. I also used the pivot from “enterprise dev” to “cloud consultant specializing in cloud native solutions” to stay permanently remote as I moved to my next company and relocate to state tax free Florida after COVID lifted. I knew going in I didn’t have the stomach to put up with Amazon’s bullshit or BigTech in general. When GCP was recruiting for similar positions, I neither wanted to work for another large tech company and definitely didn’t want to be in an office. On the other hand, I tell all younger people to do whatever it takes to get into a large public tech company and make as much money and get as many RSUs as they can.