You won't get fired for no reason, but you do get compared with your colleagues.

But you also won't get promoted just because of seniority, most of what people say about being hard to get promoted is true. However, there are only 3 SDE levels if you don't count Principal, so SDE II has a very large range of pay rates, and you don't need to get promoted to get a higher pay. Higher levels are all about being a better leader and influencing more people. There are people who spend 10 years as SDE II and are happy with it, because they don't care about leading others, they just care about doing their job, and this is fine.

Thank you for your response. I haven't actually heard any complaints about promotion. Most of the noise I've heard has to do with firing, namely that less-tenured managers feel pressure to get rid of a higher percentage of their team members than managers that have a lot of years and political capital built-up in the company.

However I suppose that it stands to reason that perhaps that phenomena is due to the fact that greener managers may have greener engineers working under them who are perhaps more prone to mistakes or may not be a good fit.

Not true, if you are in the lower %20 you will get fired. That's the pressure to "get rid". Of course they will let you "resign" instead of get fired, and if you refuse they will give you a financial incentive to resign. This keeps the "stats" better, and probably where boredoso gets his nonsense.

But here's the real kicker that makes the company so stupid- if you're on the lower half of the rank, you're blocked from moving to another team.

Even though the HR policy is that your manager can't block you from an internal transfer, that's not reality. Which means when you're wrongly assigned to a team with a bad manager or a bad fit, you better bounce quick, or you're stuck there until you leave the company.

Can you imagine what they (Amazon) are trying to achieve with the "can't transfer if you're in the bottom 50%" policy? I can understand your frustration but at its core there has to be some sort of quasi-reasonable objective for the policy.

I'd assume it's literally because their management philosophy holds that half of all employees are not good enough to deserve being rewarded with a transfer. Or perhaps they're trying to protect managers running poorer-performing teams from getting hit with so many outgoing transfer requests.

So if you make a mistake at Amazon your job is on the line? Wouldn't that incentive developers to be extremely risk adverse and play politics? Is it a "mistake" to get assigned to a project that is doomed? And what about the whole learning from your mistakes or the idea of mentoring?

Yes, although it has to be a little more complicated than 1 mistake => in trouble, I think this is essentially the complaint of a lot of stack ranking dissenters.