Secret Weapon

Amazon managers have a secret weapon against engineers. It's called the improvement or development list. It took 3 years of working here to learn about this, but it's an all-powerful tool given to managers to promote their friends and fire anyone else they want for no reason. The improvement list is invisible to employees. Only managers can see it and they can add anything to it without any proof. They often do that to force you to stay in a team, even though the transfer policy was supposed to have changed a year and a half ago and managers aren't supposed to be able to block transfers. If you try to transfer, this will be communicated to your manager and in almost all cases, the manager will try to block you. One of the best engineers on our team recently went as far as lining up an outside offer so that he would have a job ready if his manager falsely claimed poor performance immediately when he requested his transfer. It didn't matter that he had been the best engineer for 3+ years and had been promoted repeated. At Amazon, you have to please managers in ALL situations or you will certainly be cheated out of your job.