my hiatus from one life and my break from another
I’m sitting in this closed, interior office. The table inside is meant for twelve, but right now, it’s just me and a bunch of mangled cables and chargers. There are no real windows - to the outside world, at least. I can see the hallway through the glass pane adjacent to the other meeting rooms. All the other walls are covered in whiteboards stained with yesterday’s diagrams - erased, rewritten - circles and question marks. I was early. I was nervous. I still didn’t understand exactly how I had gotten here. But I had made it. I passed the interview (at last), and today was a big day.
We were reviewing our team’s new system design with the organization’s principal engineer. Every stand-up for weeks was about this meeting. There were a lot of stakeholders, as I came to know the term. But I had nothing to do with it. I was new. Stand-ups were a word salad of acronyms and tech slang. Scope creep. Highpri. Repro. Sync with the smee. MBR. ORR. OP2. Dedupe. Code drift. I am currently working on my task. Learning this language added to my excitement, though. It didn’t matter if I understood it. A part of me figured I wouldn’t be able to keep up here long enough anyway.
Then in comes my manager - “Hey Dane”, “Hey!” - my teammates, the PM with a meal from downstairs. Now, people from another team. I don’t know them. Ok, more people. I thought this was a room for twelve, no? Who is that? Oh, behind them is our director. And that must be the principal engineer? Ok. Here we go. Hm, we’re out of chairs. I should volunteer mine. Wait, nope. They’re already joking about it. Someone is bringing in some more. So far, so good.
What felt weird at the time but became normal over the years was how the meeting was structured. We went around the table introducing ourselves, our names, and what we did. All the while, my team’s lead engineer was handing around copies of the system design: the 6-pager. Then the principal said, “Time-check in 20-25 minutes?“. A bunch of “mhmms” and “okays” in response and we officially start. I look around and everyone starts reading this document together. Wait, we’re all seriously just going to sit here and read together for 25 minutes? My eyes go from corner to corner. When in Rome. I grabbed my pencil and started taking my own notes. Oh, I see; this is actually six pages long.
I don’t remember if I spoke at all during that review. Although, I vividly remember leaving and thinking, “That principal engineer knows more about this system now than I do. And it only took them, like, an hour. How is that even, what?” That gave me something to aspire to. L4.
Eight years later, I left Amazon. This was about three months ago. I didn’t leave for a better opportunity or anything. I just left. Call it a sabbatical.
I like to think I would have understood that 6-pager better if I could go back to that meeting now. Honestly, I believe I would have.
Towards the end, I knew the acronyms. I knew the tools. I knew the Orgs. I had production features on Search. I had production features on the Detail Page. I even broke a few things along the way. That’s another acronym: COE (Correction of Error). I had a hundred-plus interviews under my belt. I onboarded great people. L5. I wrote promotion docs. I got a few through. I got ticketed. I got paged. I cut tickets. I cut more tickets. +1. You really have to push sometimes to get things through. Nag. Expect the best.
I ran meetings. Great doc. I wrote docs. What isn’t clear to me is this. I missed deadlines. Hard. I made deadlines. There’s more to do. Sprint’s due. Trending green. We’re yellow. They’ll order pizza for us this weekend. Reorg. Handoff. Was it in the spec? That’s the miss. COE. Raise the bar. Wait, I used to play guitar. L6. Blocked days. Deliver. Escalate. Pipelines. Wow, my system designs actually work. Earn trust. Build relationships. Plan the project. Think big. Be realistic. Calendar time. SDE days. Plan. Point. What does a point mean on this team? Wait, what was the point again? I looked around one day to realize that busy had become routine.
Meanwhile, I flatly ignored the outside world. Behold my GitHub history. You can pretty clearly see when I left my other life in 2015 and when I rejoined it.
I had gotten good at busy. I had gotten good at Amazon. I made plenty of mistakes while there; I never quite felt good enough but I was - impostor syndrome. And I did become a better engineer.
I had also gotten good at change. Honestly, Amazon is a maelstrom of change. That isn’t a bad thing. It keeps things fresh; Day 1. But I was past due for a different kind of change.
You’re only given so much energy in the end. I spent a good chunk of mine, permanently, on something else and for someone else. And I just can’t shake this feeling that whatever remains is best spent on myself.
It’s been three months now. I haven’t considered going back. It feels like a closed chapter. A necessary one and one I worked hard for. But a closed one.
I still see my former teammates from time to time. People keep asking what I’m doing. I’m revisiting myself. I picked up woodworking, of all things, and made a few acoustic panels. I cook more. I’m learning music theory and practicing more. I hang out with my dog. I made a donut in Blender. I walked around a low-poly world in Unreal. I got back into code. I even trained a local diffusion model of myself (very fun). And I’m giving a talk soon, trying to be more public.
Keeping busy isn’t really an issue at the moment. I even made a Gantt chart with goals, milestones, and deliverables. After all, I am a better engineer now. We’ll see which ones stick and which ones trend red.