It has been 5 years since I wrote a post for this personal blog. Why? I started working at Amazon in 2019 and all my energy & creativity were focused on the job.
There is so much to read and write internally, so much that the prospect of reading and writing outside of work did not seem appetizing.
What changed? Why am I writing this post? The answer is that I find there to be a strong feedback loop between reading and writing. The more that I read, the more I want to write, and vice versa. I have read a lot of Amazon documents over the last half decade, and wrote a couple too. Recently I have started reading more external content, specifically in an attempt to cast a wider net and glean insight into how to continue to grow as a leader. Notably this includes recently finishing the book Staff Engineer by Will Larson.
In my 5 years at Amazon I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to grow from a new hire, fresh from university with a CS & Math undergraduate degree, to a Senior Software Development Engineer. I attribute my growth primarily to luck: due to the fact that I had the right leaders, projects, and peers, all at the right time, who challenged me with harder, more ambiguous, more impactful projects, that in hindsight has led to my current career trajectory. Of course I played an active role too: continually seeking out feedback, identifying and working with mentors, and holding the quality of my own work to high standards. However I cannot honestly assert that the majority of factors which led me to where I am today I had any control over.
I like to keep memorable quotes in my backpocket, for easy access when the time is right. If you have ever worked with me, you’ll be lucky to escape a meeting without me quoting something I read or was once told. What comes to mind right now is the phrase “what got you here; won’t get you there”. Going from new hire to senior in under five years can be attributed to a couple things. One thing is my penchant to go deep into problems and establish myself as a subject matter expert. Another is the rigorous standard I hold myself and others to in reviews of all kinds, notably code reviews & design reviews. Yet another could be my intrinsic enjoyment of incident management, so much that I actually enjoy going oncall, pages and all. These aspects of how I have operated for five years have contributed to my professional development, and the resonsibility that it brings. However I am acutely aware that I cannot rest on my natural instincts if I wish to continue to grow my impact.
While I currently have mentors internally who I hope will help me identify and bridge the gaps in my skill set, at each level the number of individuals within the company shrinks. This is why I have started to cast my gaze externally to learn from the broader community of engineers once again, instead of doubling down on how to operate within one company. As with any tech behemoth, Amazon has its internal quirks, and thus I thought it best to keep my sights fully focused internally to ramp up on the specific internal quirks, both in the software development lifecycle, and the yearly planning processes and other mechanisms which have crystalized over 3 decades. In hindsight was this the right choice? Would I recommend someone else to follow the same process? No idea. I tend to follow my natural tendencies and then in hindsight write some narrative to justify my actions. To be frank the decision keep my focus inside the company instead of continuing to read the broader engineering community was not a fully intentional choice that I made. I have limited energy and focus each day, and naturally I try to direct this focus to activities which feel like it serves me best. Only in retrospect, writing this, have I come up with the realization of where I have been consistently directing my focus over the past five years. Of course I can’t bring myself to just shrug it as something I happened to do, I feel compelled to attach a narrative to it, despite not consciously following said narrative as I was making those choices. This seems like a common human experience, and I recall reading something to back up this claim, but at this moment in time I am too lazy to go find a citation. If you, the reader, feel so compelled, please drop me a note so I can update this for the benefit of future readers.
All of this is a circutitous route to explain why I am writing this, and plan to write more often. It is because I am reading more content from outside the walled garden that is Amazon’s internal ecosystem. Why am I reading more? Because I feel like what got me to senior in five years won’t get me to Principal Engineer. Career spoiler alert: I would like to one day be a Principal Engineer. Will this happen in the next five years? Honestly probably not, but we will have to wait and see how things shake out and how lucky or unlucky I become.
Note: as I edit this post I ponder the question of what is my goal of putting these words on the internet. Why not be normal and just write it in a private journal? What benefit do I get from having strangers read my thoughts? Am I trying to turn this into a side hustle? Is my ego so inflated that I believe a stranger would benefit from reading this? I don’t want this to become a side hustle, or make any money from this. I don’t think these meandering ramblings will bring much benefit to a reader. I do think that the prospect of having this accessible to strangers gives me a reason to hold the bar higher on the quality of the written word, and coherency of thought. Instead of dumping a raw train of thought, I go back and edit! Editing makes it better! Would I edit if this was a private journal that would probably never be read even by me? I don’t think so.