What The Best Engineers Do—and What Actually Got Them Promoted, from an Amazon VP

Guest post by Amazon VP, Ethan Evans

Today, you’ll learn from former Amazon VP Ethan Evans, who will give you an inside look at the factors he considered when deciding whom to promote, and which engineers stood out.

If you aren’t familiar with Ethan, he’s a prolific writer and content creator. I’ve also written about his Maven course, which I took and recommend if you’d like to build your executive presence and accelerate your career.

I’ll pass it off to Ethan! 👏

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As a Vice President at Amazon, I reviewed and approved scores of promotions to Sr. Engineer and dozens to the Principal or Staff level. The best engineers weren’t just great coders or even great technologists; they made the whole organization better. This is what I looked for in them and what got them promoted.

But first, an example of what will not get you promoted.

If You Don’t Care, Neither Will They

I once had an engineer tell me that he did not care what his manager thought of him. He cared that his peers respected him, and his value system was focused almost exclusively on technical excellence. Close to 30 years later, that engineer is still a mid-level coder, in a role I see others achieve in five years or less.

He didn’t care about gaining his manager’s attention, and his career stagnated as a result.

The reason that this person never moved up, despite being a competent coder, is that executives are paid to create business outcomes, which means making the company more profitable. There are a few main ways to do this, including creating new products the company can sell, lowering operating costs, or building a moat against competitors so the company can charge more for its products.

Executives thus do not judge engineers only by technical excellence. They judge their impact on new products, their influence on operating costs, and their contributions to competitive moats. Technical excellence matters in all of this, but so do several other things that determine how much business impact an engineer delivers.

In this article, I will break down these additional skills into five main traits that set the best apart from the rest.

What Will Get You Promoted

Here is a more in-depth explanation of the traits listed in the chart above.

Trait 1: Great engineers fully ship products, not just clever demos.

A technical proof of concept or hackathon project can be a great first step for a product–it can show that something is possible and worthwhile. But great engineers don’t stop there. Great engineers understand that the end value of an idea or product is only realized when a customer can use and pay for the result.

An “ugly truth” is that many very valuable products do not require that much technical innovation. At Amazon, for example, the eCommerce systems bring in hundreds of billions of dollars. While there are areas of technical complexity in these systems, such as handling billions of purchase transactions securely, there is also a ton of glue code. Many of the projects I built had little algorithmic complexity, but they opened the doors for customers to spend lots of money on things like movies or Twitch streams. Their value wasn’t in their complexity or genius design; it was in their ability to generate revenue.

The most valuable engineers to an organization are those who can glue together existing pieces in clever, fast ways, so that the road to value is as short and simple as possible. The most valuable design is one that creates the most business impact while requiring the least new code. An “elegant”, custom solution is only the best option when it is completely necessary. Otherwise, glue existing stuff together to create value.

The idea that gluing together working components makes for better business can be painful for many engineers, especially those like the engineer in the story above, who want to earn respect for their technical abilities.

For many engineers, the “interesting part” of their work is figuring out the problem. Once they have proven that a solution can work, the messy process of building it out, testing it, deploying it, and educating all the users is less exciting. However, the most valuable engineers to a leader are those that are so excited to help an end customer that they drive all the necessary steps to fully launch the project.

Then, to show their value, these same engineers can explain why their work and ideas matter to customers. They do not need a translator in the room who can reframe their technical jargon into simple language that demonstrates customer impact.

Companies do employ others to do some of this communication work. These can be product managers, marketers, technical writers, and others who help engineers get the point across to customers and executives. But the best engineers are good at this themselves.

Your action: Drive to completion and final shipment. Do not stop at demo, at testing, or even at launch. The best engineers follow through for a few weeks of stable operation. This establishes you as a “complete package” in the eye of a leader. Someone who does the whole job to completion.

Trait 2: Great engineers make the organization faster

Great engineers are highly productive. Everyone has heard of the “10x engineer,” who produces ten times the results of their peers. While I am not sure I ever worked with someone who was truly ten times more efficient, I definitely worked with engineers who shipped much more than others. Sometimes the other engineers were just slower. Other times they spent too much time seeking technical elegance rather than just a working solution. No matter the reason, executives who are trying to meet goals and make money value personal productivity.

“Slow” versus “Fast” engineers:

• Long hours but no focus → master Deep Work (see Cal Newport’s book)

• Argue endlessly over minutia (coding standards, commenting styles) → focus on value

  • Baiting others into low-value arguments slows others. Argue only what matters

• Monuments to “elegance” rather than simple and working → shipment over perfection

• Sit in silence when stuck or confused → figuring it out yourself is a virtue only to a point

However, in addition to great personal productivity, great engineers also make the whole organization faster. They can figure out what to build without a perfect specification from a product manager, and they create and share tools that help the team without being asked. Most importantly, they overcome roadblocks on their own rather than stopping and waiting for direction.

At Amazon, this was called “Bias for Action.” More simply, you can just call it being proactive. Great engineers are highly proactive. Rather than waiting to be told what to do, always look for what you can do.

One engineer I worked with had a habit of getting frustrated with a system or problem, and then coming back with a rebuilt solution at the end of the weekend. I wasn’t asking him to work the weekend; from his own frustration, he would naturally build whatever was needed. This behavior combines clearly seeing what needs to be done with just doing it.

Ask yourself, what is the last thing you built, not because you were asked to, but because the project needed a better solution to a problem, and you felt like you needed to create it?

An engineer like this is someone I want to promote, both to reward them and to elevate the example they set for others.

Trait 3: Do your share of the dirty work

Few people love being on call. Most engineers prefer writing new code to fixing bugs and closing tickets. The same goes for server migrations, deployment monitoring, and a host of other tasks.

Engineers may not be managers, but at higher levels, they are leaders. They are setting an example for the team. Because of this, the senior engineer who jumps on a fair share of the necessary operational load is someone I will promote far faster than the engineer who avoids this to “focus on new features.” All this “boring” work needs to be done, and if the most senior people try to avoid it, the message to everyone else is they should avoid it too.

I had a great experience with one of my engineers volunteering to do this dirty work while I was working on the Amazon Kindle.

That year, many Kindle tablets got purchased and were given as Christmas presents, which meant that we got a huge spike of devices coming online on Christmas morning. This spike was predicted to be 100 times the average load on any other day, which makes it look just like a denial of service attack that is scheduled for the exact time when most of us want to be with our own families, not monitoring systems and sitting in a war room call.

At the time, an engineer on my team was Jewish, so Christmas was just another day to him. But he recognized how much it mattered to his teammates. So he volunteered for the oncall, knowing that it had to be done and that it would make so many of his teammates happier. He could have had the day off and waited for the bad luck to fall on someone else, but instead he volunteered.

The lesson here is to look for opportunities to be a hero to your teammates.

Do your share of the necessary operations; set an example of stepping up rather than complaining or trying to hide.

Trait 4: Grow and lead others

Teams have constant turnover. People transfer or leave. Others have less experience. Be a mentor and teacher who willingly shares and helps others.

This has many benefits:

• The new or junior people appreciate it

• It builds your influence with your teammates

• It allows you to set the direction for how things get done

The first time I needed to get a Senior Engineer promoted to Principal, I constructed a system where he ran the design reviews for my entire organization. He set the standards for how we documented and shared designs, then trained each team as we met with them. This clear ability to lift and grow whole organization led to immediate approval of his promotion. I then put another Senior Engineer into the same job, leading to his promotion as well. If you do not have a manager who thinks about how to support your growth, suggest options to them yourself. Many managers are open to supporting you if you bring them a decent idea. Patience is waiting for something you reasonably know or believe is coming. If there is no plan to get there, then “patience” is just a combination of blind hope and inaction.

Many engineers are naturally introverted and prefer to be left alone, and still others find that being interrupted to answer questions breaks their flow and ruins their productivity.

It is perfectly fine to work with others only one-on-one or only at certain times to preserve your focus. Do what you need to do in order to keep your own productivity, but the best engineers make time to make their teammates better. And managers notice that.

Your leaders need someone to help them develop the team. They are responsible for creating a high-performing team, but they do not always have the time or skills to directly mentor more junior engineers. If you are known as the “go-to” person who teaches the team, that will be seen as a clear sign of leadership and maturity.

Trait 5: See around corners

Great engineers think about what problems are coming in the future. They recognize them, plan for them, warn their managers about them (before they happen), and prevent them.

It is easy to allow yourself to get buried in just building what you have been asked to build, but great engineers never stop thinking about the whole system. They listen to product managers and other leaders, but they also think about the big picture. Product Managers and customers are usually focused on new features they want, but the engineer has to worry about how everything else is running and what the new features will do to the existing system.

As VP of a group, I often had 300 to 500 engineers in my organization. I could not even stay on top of a count of our total services, let alone anticipate problems with hundreds of dependent systems, worldwide server load in different availability zones, or numerous other potential issues. I highly valued the engineers who could and would do this for me.

Staying on top of systems and preventing problems is great, but I also valued engineers who prepared in advance for the inevitable outages. Building great monitoring systems to detect problems and good logging systems to debug them sets the best engineers apart from everyone else.

A system we built once failed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on a Saturday evening. A young engineer and I were able to review the logs, pinpoint his exact failure, and provide statistics on how rare his error was, all within about an hour. Jeff knew we understood his problem, and he didn’t have to worry about it. But we could only do that because that engineer anticipated what could go wrong and built in strong observability to detect it. I remember and respect that engineer’s ability to this day.

Summary

You now know what executives value and why we promote engineers beyond necessary technical expertise.

If doing everything on this list sounds like a lot, I have good news! You don’t have to do it all at once, or even do every last thing on the list equally. If you stand out in just a few of these traits, you will be viewed as exceptional and someone your managers want to support. Second, many of these tasks come and go. You will not always have a new hire in your group to orient or a system going into production that needs thorough logging. If you master the traits here, you can apply each one as needed.

As a Vice President, I was constantly on the lookout for engineers I could develop and promote. I designed a whole process to get the first engineer on my team to Principal Engineer, not only because he deserved it, but because having a Principal Engineer on my team helped me too. If you work for good managers, they recognize that having a stronger, more senior team is good for them. The key to success is understanding how we leaders define “good,” which goes far beyond only technical excellence.

📖 TL;DR

Executives promote engineers who create business impact, not just write great code.

The 5 traits that get you promoted:

• Trait 1: Ship complete products, not demos: Glue existing systems together when possible and avoid being overly clever. Focus on customer value over technical elegance

• Trait 2: Make the organization faster: Don’t wait to be told what to do. Build tools and solutions that help the whole team.

• Trait 3: Do your share of dirty work: Take on oncall, bug fixes, and operational tasks. Be a hero to your teammates.

• Trait 4: Grow and lead others: Build influence by teching and setting standards. Your manager will notice and reward it.

• Trait 5: See around corners: Anticipate problems before they happen and warn your leaders, or even better, prevent them entirely. Think about the big picture, not just your assigned features.

You don’t need to excel at all 5 at once. Stand out in just a few of these areas, and you’ll be viewed as exceptional and promotion-worthy.

👏 Thank you to Ethan

👋 Jordan here. Thanks again, Ethan, for sharing such high-quality lessons from your 30+ years of experience.

I’m a huge advocate for all of Ethan’s content, including his Maven course I took and shared a brief preview of. His lessons just stick. I highly recommend checking out his course (15% discount with my code JORDANxMAVEN) starting on January 10. It’s targeted at Senior Managers, but I took it as an engineer and got a ton of value from it.

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