Amazon

Amazon is a great company. The leadership principles, the need to write documents which makes anyone think further and insist on quality work, and the offices, are great.

They have different titles doing the same work. For example, a DevOps engineer also works in OE risks and ticketing, a support engineer works on the same too, a sys development engineer works on ticketing and OE risks too, and a software development engineer works on the same.

On paper, they differentiate with the automation done or LLDs, HLDs authored, but most of the times this is not so clear. This causes disparity and a sense of being lost. While the engineers who join with passion are exposed to this differentiation without clarity, they stop working well and focus on role conversions. This is the case for many levels.

A company as huge as Amazon hardly takes suggestions from people who come from other great organizations to change this, mainly because the top leaders have been at Amazon for a long time. They refuse to change and treat people from other companies as 'mediocre' without any knowledge, etc.

OE risks here mean SAS, Shepherd, and PE risks.

The company fails to remember that more than work and money, people should feel valued. A support engineer feels less valued than a software dev engineer, even though the work profile is similar. Even leaders treat them thus.

I am not sure if this will change anytime soon, but continuing on such things will ensure the company continues to breed mediocre talent, as the highlighted talented people will leave due to not being valued.

Be transparent.

Have proper role guidelines and promote folks who are doing the same type of job, even though they may belong to a different job family.

Value counsel from people you have hired. Some other organizations have better policies, so learning and growing should be the mantra.

Please forsake false prestige.