A large part of an engineer’s success is often tied to how they navigate their relationship with their manager, according to former Amazon engineering director Dave Anderson.
“I would actually say, as a manager, even, like 50% of that performance, frequently, is your relationship with your manager and your team. How will you fit in with the team, with your peers, with your manager?” he said on a recent episode of “The Pragmatic Engineer” podcast.
Underestimating your supervisor’s influence can be particularly important at a company like Amazon, he added. As can be the case at other companies, a manager’s decisions can definitively sway the futures of their direct report, from determining how much they’re compensated to how far up the career ladder they can climb.
The influence a manager can have over an engineer’s trajectory isn’t something to be shrugged off, Anderson said.
“I think the mistake that people will sometimes make is like, ‘My manager doesn’t influence my job that much because I can work independently or, you know, I don’t need to figure this out with my manager because I can, you know, work with my peers, or I have this great engineer on my team I can work with,'” Anderson said.
But if your manager doesn’t like you, he added, you’re “never ever” going to be able to snag a promotion.
It’s also important to remember that managers are often asked to point out a number of team members “who are not doing great,” Anderson said. If you are, when compared to other members of your team, the “least effective,” he added, you could be on the chopping block — no matter how competent you are.
“If you look around the room and you’re thinking, ‘Yep, I’m the worst one here’ — that’s not a great situation to ever be in. It’s just never safe,” Anderson said. “And at Amazon, it’s definitely not safe. Some other companies where they just might do layoffs once every four years, you might be safe for quite a while. But Amazon has this sort of regular cycle.”
In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said Anderson’s experiences are his alone.
“These claims reflect the opinion of one individual who worked at Amazon years ago. They’re not based in fact, and aren’t indicative of what it was like to work here then or what it’s like today,” Callahan said. “We’re proud to be one of the most sought-after employers in the world and to have ranked in the top three in LinkedIn’s Top Companies for eight years running.”
Anderson said that if an engineer’s relationship with their manager isn’t good, there can be an escape hatch of sorts: moving teams before being managed out.
“So many times I’ve had someone who was either doing amazing on one team, they moved to the next team, and they’re like actually not doing well at all, or someone who was not doing well escapes to another team before they get fired — and they do well,” he said.
If you start to hear rumblings from further up the chain of command, Anderson thinks it could be in your best interest to make a change, and swiftly.
“This is like my sneaky recommendation for anyone is like — if you start to hear performance feedback whatsoever from your management chain, if you have any opportunity at all, get off your team fast as possible,” he said.
In a follow-up email, Anderson told Business Insider that, in a “great number of situations,” he’d seen success prove itself to be at least partially dependent on team fit.
“I’ve seen poor performers turn into great performers, and great performers turn into poor performers — and the only factor was them switching teams,” he told BI. “In particular, switching teams to a place where they didn’t know their manager. I don’t think people fundamentally changed — so the only reasonable conclusion is that team fit (in particular, their relationship with their manager) is the deciding factor.”
Anderson doesn’t suggest completely disavowing any negative feedback you receive, and bailing out into a different section of the company on a whim. It depends, he said, on the relationship you’ve formed with your supervisor and whether or not you have faith in their advice.
“Now, if you trust your manager, they might be actually just giving you honest feedback, which you’d like to be able to receive,” he said. “But for the most part, if you’ve been working for someone for three years and suddenly they start giving you performance feedback, that’s a really bad sign.”
“If you run for the hills fast enough, it’s possible you’ll get away before they flag you in the system as non-transferable,” Anderson added.
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