When it comes to getting ahead in the office, a retired Amazon vice president has some words of wisdom: Closed mouths don’t get fed.
“There is some truth to the old saying, ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease,'” Ethan Evans told “The Peterman Pod” in an episode released on Tuesday. “This is another harsh truth people don’t like.”
Evans said two employees could have roughly the same performance, but the one who doesn’t vocalize their needs or intentions could get lost in the shuffle of company reorgs.
“It’s not that I mean to screw you. I’m focused on saving this other person, and I know you’ll put up with it,” he said. “You can end up behind just because you’re such a nice guy.”
That doesn’t mean people should be jerks, Evans said. Rather, employees need to advocate for themselves and their careers because “pushy people get more.”
Amazon has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs so far this year. It cut 16,000 employees in January as it sought to become the “world’s largest startup,” according to an internal memo. It also made cuts to its robotic division earlier this month.
“What’s inevitable is I have some people who have been more vocal about what they want in their career than others,” Evans said. “Perhaps I’m arranging the reorg just because I know what some people want and I don’t know what others want, so I assume they’ll be fine. That’s the most benign version.”
In a follow-up statement, Evans told Business Insider that people shouldn’t rely on the “work hard and hope to be noticed” career strategy.
“It begins with simply making your career desires known. Then the next step is reasonably sharing your work, so that it gets noticed. That does not need to mean bragging. It can mean sharing a weekly status report with your boss and key stakeholders simply so that they are aware of your work,” Evans said. “The difference is, though, rather than ‘hoping to be noticed’ you are doing something about it.”
Evans has previously shared career tips with Business Insider, including how to upgrade a résumé and lessons he learned from working under CEO Jeff Bezos. He retired from Amazon in 2020.
