You might be thinking, wait, only seven months? Yes, only seven months. Cue finger waggling. I know I deserve it. Amazon was (and still is) well-known for lots of people leaving the company. A wise person told me one should say only good things about their former employers, no matter how rotten their experience was. And Amazon is still a good company to work for — just not good for me at that time. Fortunately, I have the luxury of being honest.
I started my job with a completely blank slate, right out of university. I joined Amazon in July 2012, when the company was still very much growing and South Lake Union was a construction site all the time. I didn’t know what team I would be assigned to and what I would be doing, other than it had something to do with retail. I had no say in that matter; they just put people wherever they needed them. I knew nothing about the working culture at Amazon or in general (in hindsight, it would have paid to learn about all this beforehand) and I knew even less about the people who were going to be my coworkers.
Off to the races
Before I knew it, I was there in Seattle, at Amazon headquarters. My job title was Software Development Engineer (or SDE). It was official — welcome to my new life! I was to be in a building called Ruby, which was connected to a building called Dawson by a sky bridge (where I often went to be alone). There was the standard orientation process for new hires. Signing forms, meeting the team, settling into my workspace, which was a sort of cubicle, but without the dividers. I would later learn that this practice was known as “open office.” In the area we had five engineers including myself, plus the manager. Some of them had adjusted their desks to standing desks.
It didn’t take me long to become practiced at all the motions of being an engineer in a professional setting, what with the source control, build systems, and whatnot. What was more difficult was grasping the project itself — what our team worked on, what put food on our tables. Amazon was (at the time) mainly an online retailer, everyone knew that. But what our team worked on specifically was a cog in a machine, which was part of a bigger machine, and so on, which fell under the umbrella of retail.
Flying blind and flying solo
Talking to the other engineers didn’t tell me much about the purpose of my work. I had to talk to our team’s program manager (PM) about it. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to do that — I only caught bits of her conversations while passing by. She was the coolest person in my immediate work circle and I regret that I didn’t interact with her much. So, I went about my daily routine throughout these seven months, knowing how to go through the motions yet not knowing why.
Everyone is ostensibly encouraged to ask questions. In practice… it wasn’t that simple. Asking questions is a different matter from actually getting something out of them. I had plenty of blame to shoulder for that; not only was I introverted and socially awkward, but my university education contributed nothing in preparing me for a real workplace. Long story short, I did not get along very well, which resulted in my gradually drifting away from the other engineers and the manager, both socially and work-wise. Although it wasn’t entirely my fault, I made a lot of rookie mistakes — which I’m still trying to unpack little by little.
The new guys
During my stay at Amazon, two people joined our team. People even newer than me? How was that even possible? I was surprised to find that I got along with them quite well. And over time, some of the other engineers in our team started warming up to me — I guess the new hires were helping, somehow.
One of the guys, Pradeep Garimella, was seated next to me, and as a result he ended up asking me a lot of questions. I ended up hanging out with him outside of work, learning about all the good Indian food around Seattle & Bellevue (this was much more significant to me than I had realized at the time). It turns out people tend to like you when you genuinely want to help them without any expectation of being helped back. And because I was a fresh university grad with no social graces, I couldn’t possibly have had ulterior motives.
In closing
But my time at Amazon was almost up. I was already in talks with another employer — across the Puget Sound, over at Microsoft — and I had all but lost my motivation to keep working. I had contributed to our team’s efforts, built a little tool which some other folks at Amazon found useful, and even sort-of mentored another engineer. But in the end I didn’t feel useful or fulfilled. (I also met some dude there, Lev Alexandrovich Neiman, while doing something completely random — that’s another different story.)
One day, I was having a lunch with the other engineers in our team I got along well enough with. They all knew, but I confirmed their suspicions. They wished me well in my future exploits. At least one of them expressed discontent with their situation at work. The actual resignation process was uneventful, and there were no hard feelings. And so ended my little stint at Amazon.
Some time after I left, I learned that one by one, the folks I had lunch with that day all either left the team or left the company. Similar things would later happen at both Microsoft and Google. I may not be the Pied Piper, but it sure is funny.