It’s up to him to advocate for himself and speak in terms of business value and knowing how to get a promo doc through.

I was 46-49 when I was in BigTech and way too old to care about the bullshit. But I helped a couple of interns I mentored there to get return offers as L4s and helped a couple of other L4s get to L5 and one L5 to get to L6.

But it’s almost always better to job hop than worry about an internal promotion. When you change jobs, you control the narrative. Incoming folks at Amazon almost always get better offers than people coming in.

One of the interns I mentored who came back as an L4 recently got promoted after three years and their comp package was the same as mine when I was hired there back in 2020 and is 20% less than new hires at her position.

AWS had an “anonymous” comp sharing internal Slack channel #pay-equity where you submitted your message to a Slack workflow that anonymized it before posting it. Of course the workflow admin knew about it.