This was apparently a relatively recent change. Until about a year ago, apparently managers wrote this document. Previous feedback that the promotion process seemed random, obscure, and allowed favoritism resulted in this change being made, where employees are involved in writing their promotion document.

However, the intention isn't to focus more on documenting your promotion than doing the right things.

At least in our office, senior management is aware of the problems that have been introduced, and trying to find solutions.

> Not by writing self-promotional documents.

If you think the most important thing for promotion is writing your promotion document, you have either been misled by your manager, or you have fallen into a trap.

> Unfortunately, it is not by "exceeding", but documenting that you have exceeded, and knowing how to document it right, sometimes not really exceeding at all.

In my experience, this is not true.

I have sat in promotion reviews where the manager was told to write the employee's promotion doc for them, because it wasn't worth it to frustrate an good employee who doesn't find time to write his own promotion document.

I am sorry that you had a bad experience at Amazon, but your experience doesn't match mine or any of the colleagues at our office that I know well enough to gauge their job satisfaction etc. However, a lot of your sentiments have been reported to arise in junior employees (who seem to focus too much on reaching promotion instead of on developing themselves).

Your case may have been different because you seem to have had a bad hiring experience, where you should have been hired as an SDEII, not an SDEI. But, your manager should have sorted this out for you (by doing the work to fast-track your promotion without letting you do all the document-writing). Either you had a bad manager, or you didn't discuss this with your manager adequately.

I think it is unfair for you to judge the whole company based on what seems to be one bad manager.