How I Transformed Amazon's Internal Transfer Process
Anecdotes, ranting, and some personal philosophy.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member!
One of the strangest memorable experiences from my time at Amazon was when I managed to get a major policy at Amazon changed. In short, I made it significantly easier for employees to move around the company by drastically modifying the internal transfer process.
I’ve mentioned portions of the process, what some (rude & mean) VPs said about the changes, and how it influenced my eventual promotion to Director.
I decided it would be fun and interesting to share my entire experience from beginning to end.
Amazon internal transfers before this story begins.
To begin with, I need to set the stage. When I joined Amazon, there were a few official policies in place for internal transfers.
After being hired or after transferring, an employee cannot change teams for 12-months.
Managers were required to approve internal transfers, which meant they’d say no for various reasons, such as being too busy, or understaffed.
Managers could require an employee to stay on their team for 45 workdays (9 weeks) before transferring.
Of course these weren’t arbitrary rules. They were put in place for what I think we should assume are honest intentions. What were the purposes of those policies?
Amazon believes in performance consequences.
Good performance leads to promotions. Bad performance leads to bad things. There is/was a fear that employees could hop from team to team, avoiding the consequences of their poor performance.
Ramping up employees on a team has a cost.
When employees join a team, they have a negative impact on the team for a period of time. If someone were to always stay on a team for 3 months, they’d be a net negative for the company.
Amazon runs on ownership.
Managers are responsible for the performance of their teams. When you have responsibility, that is usually paired with authority to meet your commitments. Therefore, they granted managers various powers to block transfers because that’s a way for managers to have agency.
So what happened?
Those policies had valid reasons to exist. Without considering the negative consequences, you might agree with them. Except they did have unintended negative consequences. And those consequences were pretty bad. Particularly if you care about humans.