How easy is it to transfer between teams? Some companies make this easy, others make it almost harder to apply internally then externally.

I've been on 4 different teams at Amazon (now migrating to a 5th). It depends entirely on the team and as well as your current level. Some do loops just like with external candidates. Others barely require more than a conversation with someone on the team -- though this one is a huge red flag. Teams looking for warm bodies are seldom good teams.

Most of the time its somewhere in between. You'll speak with the manager, speak with the team, you each review each other's artifacts, and if everyone's happy, you swap over. The balance of power is pretty nice. I've dropped out of the process many, many times after starting talking with management. Or even just learning more about what the team itself does (I couldn't live with myself if I worked on pre-roll ads, for example. So I noped out of that one).

I've seen a lot of red flags in my career where managers put people on PIPs -- when in reality it's not a PIP but a personality conflict.

And from what I understand at Amazon, it's kind of the same thing, but PIPs have been aggressively weaponized.

Christ, I wish PIPs were that easy where I work. Some days it feels like the public sector trying to get rid of employees that coast for months at a time before we can work our way through the process to can them.

Pips take months too, they're really not ideal

Isn’t that what a PIP is? A Personality Improvement Plan?

I seems to be used as an advance notice of termination?

The manager isn't required to improve their personality.

I believe you also need approvals from your current manager(s) to switch teams?

Nope no approval required

Interesting, I was told the opposite by my managers...

Unless you’re in Focus or Pivot, you’re a free agent. When Amazon is performance managing you in any sense it isn’t up to your existing manager if you can move, it would be an L10 (VP) exception on the receiving side to allow you to move, even if the hiring manager thinks you’re great.

that can't be right (but i have no idea). In the new group, nobody has any desire to at least do a reference check with the previous group? That would be the first thing as a hiring manager i would try to check for, say "this person is a d-bag that the entire group hated, and we were about to pip him/her anyway"? That would be kind of an equivalent of an approval, even if there is no formal approval.

Yes they do this. I don't know if the other guy just hasn't seen it himself or what

I mean, yes, having your manager say "I will destroy your career if you think about leaving" would be a kind of approval needed, but short of that level of viciousness it sounds like no?

Not familiar with Amazon culture so I don't know if that'd be considered acceptable behavior. I hope not!

have you considered that the manager may rightly have bad things to say? or that is just never warranted.

> have you considered that the manager may rightly have bad things to say? or that is just never warranted.

The manager should put those bad things _in writing_ during performance reviews instead of trying to prevent their employees from leaving by dunking on them after they are informed about the fact.

How can you tell ahead of time if the team you're switching to has it any better?

Find out what they drink for "Team alcohol evenings."

Whiskey team? Ok, probably somewhat stressful but doable. Wine team? Plush and cushy, with a line of people who want to be on that team out the door. Vodka team? Oh hell no. Etc.

... I'm kidding. Sort of. But not entirely.

You better watch out for the team who all drink Tennent’s Super Lager.

More like team alcohol mornings amirite

The team who all have their standup down the canal with a half bottle.

RedBull & Ketamine?

You’re probably thinking of a crypto exchange as the money exits the “backdoor”.

Not at Amazon, but offering a data point for Team Patron not being a good time.

Tech survey results, ops load via CTI tickets, CR/LOC stats, accolades, COEs, promotion rate, turnover/attrition....

There are so many data sources that are all queryable via API. There are a couple basic greasemonkey scripts already floating around but as an SDE it really isn't that hard to write something yourself... It does take a bit of experience to get a good heuristic on weighting the different data points but you can do way better than blindly guessing.

I will say as someone who HAS intelligently looked through this data for most teams at Amazon, there is an absolutely MASSIVE difference between the top 10% of teams and the median, and an even larger difference between than and the bottom 10%, which by all metrics appear to truly be hell on earth.

> Tech survey results, ops load via CTI tickets, CR/LOC stats, accolades, COEs, promotion rate, turnover/attrition...

Tech survey results??

Amazon runs an annual survey with typically quite high participation rates, it is very detailed, and the results are often illuminating (and like many things at Amazon, widely accessible to all people).

Yeah, but you can't see stuff outside your group, I imagine? I mean, dis-aggregated, to drill down to team level.

OP was making it sound like you could get the results for a specific team you'd want to transfer to.

What OP was suggesting is exactly what you get. You can see results at the level of any manager and zoom out recursively.

Is there any way to get in touch with you and ask a few questions?

talk to people who work on those teams?

They all look shining from the outside, problems start when you join the new team and realize the pile of st you will be dealing with.

Btw this happens in most companies, tons of tech debt. And those who created that st are off onto new projects recreating the exact same mess all over again.

It is a cycle that never ends.

Only chance is to join early and be in for the long run.

... your censorial asterisks italicized part of your post ...

If you're good at cleaning up "pile of shit" code, you will always have work!

It's s lot of fun with the right attitude.

I've made a great career of being a code janitor and doing what others don't want, while having a good attitude. In the last few years, I just rewrite everything I possibly can in Rust and I've yet to regret it.

> I just rewrite everything I possibly can in Rust and I've yet to regret it.

And hopefully no one else regrets it...

By then you're onto the next thing and it's their problem, right?

Thus is the circle of (engineering) life.

Just kidding. Please write maintainable code.

"Please write maintainable code"

Not in the requirements, sorry.

He's using RUST. Haven't you seen all the blogicles that explain how it's impossible to write bad code in rust??

> Please write maintainable code

Most people don't know how to do this, because it's actually hard, and I don't think it's being taught much in programmer education.

I certainly had to learn "on the job", and probably spent 10 years before I got good at it.

I learned the most by fixing bugs. After a while, I started seeing the patterns of why this bug had occurred, and started writing code do avoid the traps.

> a code janitor

I prefer the term troubleshooter specialising in legacy code, but "code janitor" definitely has felt more appropriate at times.

Legacy rescue

Work? Almost certainly. Career? Not very likely.

The problem is sometimes your organization does not reward these efforts at all.

Before I left Amazon I tried transferring to multiple teams after speaking with hiring managers. They all (IIRC 4 separate ones) wanted either a full on-site loop or at minimum two coding interviews).

I was an L5 with about 5-6 years of experience, 1.5 at that point at Amazon.

Hiring managers have a lot of latitude at Amazon, so there isn't a consistent standard. I don't want to share too much PII but I was in a similar situation. I was able to transfer teams after an informal chat with a few engineers on the team (discussing past projects, the new team's product vision, etc.). There was no whiteboarding involved.

So the internal hiring managers are there for no reason at all?

The hiring managers are themselves managers of the team e.g. for a team of devs, a software development manager. In parent comment's case, the manager likely asked for opinions from the team after the chats before giving the final approval.

Yup, that's exactly what happened.

IME, the best managers are the ones who trust and enable their teams to make the right decisions. It would be a red flag if the manager was just giving out offers without allowing the team to provide their input.