Pros
Great for politically gifted engineers who know how to game the system. Not so great for the rest.
Cons
The below Linkedin post from an Amazon employee perfectly summed up GIC's make-shit-up for promotions culture: "Rewrote a perfectly good microservice just for my SDE3 promotion at Amazon. The legacy Java service was running fine for 5 years. Zero latency issues, minimal maintenance. But I needed “Scope” and “Complexity” to justify my move from L5 to L6. So, I wrote a 20-page design doc arguing that we needed to “modernize the stack” by rewriting the whole thing in Go with a complex microservices architecture. Wasted 4 quarters of engineering time and 3 other engineers’ lives. The new system is actually slower and costs 2x more in compute, but the launch email looked “strategic” enough to get my packet approved. I officially got the promo last week. Today, I accepted an internal transfer to a chill Core Infra team. The memory leak in the new service usually hits around 2 AM, and I won’t be on call. Good luck to the new grad taking over. TC $550k."