Five Traits Executives Look For When Promoting Engineers

Executives care about business outcomes, so the best engineers are judged on impact, not just technical brilliance. Ethan Evans, a former Amazon VP, explains that promotion hinges on five concrete traits. First, ship complete products by gluing existing systems together and focusing on customer value rather than elegant code. Second, make the organization faster by building tools, automating tasks, and taking initiative without waiting for direction. Third, take on the "dirty work"-on-call duties, bug fixes, and operational tasks-to set a heroic example for teammates. Fourth, grow and lead others through mentorship, standards, and knowledge sharing, which signals maturity to leaders. Fifth, anticipate problems before they surface, building observability and warning leaders to prevent outages.

The piece is full of vivid Amazon anecdotes: engineers who ignored managerial attention stayed mid-level, while those who proactively solved on-call spikes during a Christmas Kindle launch earned promotion. It shows how simple glue code can generate billions in revenue and why executives value productivity over perfection. The article also stresses that great engineers balance personal productivity with organization-wide speed, embodying a bias for action that translates into measurable business value.

For technical leaders, the takeaway is clear: to accelerate a career, shift focus from pure coding to delivering end-to-end value, owning operations, mentoring peers, and foreseeing system risks. By embodying these five traits, engineers become indispensable to executives and position themselves for senior promotions.