Amazon

Engineers are actually evaluated on two dimensions: performance and potential. Performance is backward-looking: what did you achieve in the past few months? Potential is forward-looking: how will you perform in the future, given your ambition and growth rate?

Managers decide a rating for each engineer on these two dimensions, which results in a final "performance summary" (described in the calibration section):

Evaluation at Amazon is coupled to their 16 leadership principles (LPs):

• Customer Obsession
• Ownership
• Invent and Simplify
• Are Right, A Lot
• Learn and Be Curious
• Hire and Develop the Best
• Insist on the Highest Standards
• Think Big
• Bias for Action
• Frugality
• Earn Trust
• Dive Deep
• Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
• Deliver Results
• Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
• Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

The input is free-form, but you should anchor your self-assessment against the Amazon LPs.

Your manager's feedback is very important because they will stack rank you. All of the feedback is collated under your director level.

Amazon is big on collaboration, so you can request feedback from a huge amount of peers. There is effectively no limit to the amount of peers you can get feedback from - You can go as high as 15-30 peers.

When someone requests peer feedback from you, you write about the following 2 categories:

1. Superpowers
2. Areas of improvement

On top of the above 2 fields, you can also choose up to 3 options each for:

1. Amazon LPs your peer championed well
2. Amazon LPs your peer could have represented better

This means that you can tie up to 6 total LPs to your peer feedback. These selections are made across checkboxes.

You will be able to see your peer feedback with names removed. However, this can be reverse engineered based on the author's writing style. Write peer feedback with the expectation that the peer will know the feedback is coming from you.

Amazon is different than most other companies because there are 2 different ratings:

• The rating you see and get (Exceeds, Meets, Needs Improvement)
• The real behind-the-scenes rating, which is generated by your manager and other engineering leadership

The real rating is generated through a separate process called OLR (Organization And Leadership Review).

Here are the real ratings:

Rating	Maps To	Description
TT - Top Tier	Exceeds	This means that you are a rockstar for your level, massively exceeding expectations. You generally need to be here to get promoted. Only 1-2% of engineers get this rating.
HV3 - High Value 3	Exceeds	This means that you're doing extremely well.
HV2 - High Value 2	Meets	This means that you're doing quite well, exceeding expectations.
HV1 - High Value 1	Meets	This is the average rating. 35-40% of engineers are placed within this bucket.
LE - Least Effective	Needs Improvement	This means that you're doing poorly, not meeting expectations at your level. 10% of engineers get this rating every cycle.

Rating	Salary Increase (%)
Exceeds	2-4%
Meets	1-2%
Needs Improvement	0-1%

If you want a significant compensation increase, you need to get a promotion. A promotion often increases your base salary by at least 30%.

Amazon's offers equity to employees over a 4 year period, but the vesting schedule is biased toward the end of the 4 year grant. Generally you'll get a signing bonus over years 1 and 2 to "make up" the initial TC difference.

Before, you could "boomerang", leaving Amazon for another company and then quickly come back to Amazon with a better package. However, policy recently changed so that boomerangs would get the same package they had before.

There is a target for 10% of engineers to receive the NI rating each cycle.

If you're a low performer, the process is as follows:

1. Focus - This is also called a "Development Plan" or a "Development List". 10-15% of each organization is put into "Focus" each cycle. You are given a well-defined project that's usually around a month to execute.
2. Pivot - If you don't succeed in "Focus", you are given the opportunity to exit the company and take a severance package or be put on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).
3. PIP - You're given an aggressive project to complete that's also well-defined. If you don't succeed, you are fired. Most Amazonians on PIP do not survive.

You need to write a summary of your work for your promotion packet. The summary needs to include information about the following 5 core scopes of work:

• Scope and influence
• Ambiguity
• Technical complexity
• Execution
• Impact

There is another section where you need to talk about how your work corresponds to Amazon's LPs; however, this section isn't as important as the others.

Documentation requirements

The documentation requirements at Amazon are pretty onerous:

• SDE 1 -> SDE 2 promotion takes 5+ pages of documentation.
• SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotion takes 15+ pages of documentation (!!!).

You generally need a TT (Top Tier) or HV3 (High Value 3) rating to get promoted.

• SDE 1 -> SDE 2 promotions are generally held back because they're lacking in technical complexity.
• SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotions are generally held back because of lack of scope, influence, and impact.