Evans: Amazon engineer rose from SDE II to Director in eight years
Ethan Evans · Taking control of your career | Ethan Evans (Amazon) · Jan 14, 2024 · at 14:08
Ethan Evans, former VP at Amazon, provides an example of how applying his career advancement framework enabled rapid promotion across technical and managerial tiers.
0:00 / 0:42exact quote · 42.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“One of my best people I ever worked with joined my team at Amazon as what we would call an SDE two, which in Amazon is a level five employee. He grew with me kind of following this process to a senior engineer. Then he switched to management and ran a small team. Then he became a senior manager and he relocated with my organization. He opened a new office in another city. Was eventually promoted to director running his own office of a couple hundred people. And this was over the course of about eight years. He went from a mid-level engineer to a, an executive with a team of 800 people.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ethan Evans
Evans: Remote work will triumph over in-person offices in the long term
“I have so much more faith in the opportunity to improve the remote experience. And so I think long-term it's going to triumph.”
Evans: Exploitative managers who refuse to reciprocate help are rare
“There are of course exceptions where you have very exploitative managers who are like, oh, it's great. You're working harder. Keep doing that. And they won't do anything for you. But those are rare.”
Evans: Appearance and enthusiasm are the top factors in job interviews
“There's a lot of evidence that suggests that the number one and two factors in any interview are appearance and enthusiasm.”
Evans: The Fire Phone failure will permanently burden Jeff Bezos's reputation
“Jeff's, I mean, Jeff and fire phone, which, you know, it's like his, that'll be an albatross around his neck. You know, Jeff and fire phone will be a phrase of anybody who knows Amazon for the rest of his life.”
Evans: Beta testing and risk of leaks beat high-risk surprise launches
“The problem I came to say is the biggest thing I learned with surprise launches is that you're surprised by what doesn't work. And so I shifted the approach to let's do a lot of beta testing. We always Even if others don't agree quite and say, you're right. We…”