I've been an L4 SDE at Amazon for 1.5 year and am still waiting for a promotion; my manager told me it should come "sometime in 2024".

My manager told me I have excellent technical skills; and I know those skills are far better than what is expected from an L4 engineer. My team joined a new org last year and we had to work these last months on legacy services that we refactored and modernized. Thanks to my refactorings my team already saved multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The reason why I still haven't received a promotion is (from my manager) that I need to improve my communication with business stakeholders -- which is true to some extent (I could have kept the stakeholders more informed about the progress of some of my projects) but completely wrong from another aspect: I wrote many documents and made a lot of efforts to explain my manager and my PMs how things work and what could be improved -- but it seems they don't really read them; most of the time they ask me the same questions that I already answered in those documents.