Never ever going back

I worked at Amazon twice, for some reason. The first time was on the original Kindle team (and came up with several key patented algorithms that made the Kindle shippable in the first place). While on Kindle I was constantly second-guessed and ridiculed for coming up with ideas that eventually turned out to be very important, and was never once thanked or recognized for my contributions. I quit and had absolutely no intention of ever going back - but several years later when I was in a vulnerable spot I was offered an interview and given an incredibly high-pressure offer that they insisted that I give verbal acceptance at the time of the offer call. In a hurry I took it.

When I came back it was on a core platform team. While our purpose was to maintain and improve one core system at Amazon, we were working on a new site technology that wasn’t officially funded and wasn’t in the charter of the team, but we wanted to prove ourselves as innovators. This project was mostly organized in the tech lead’s head and being skunkworks/“off the record” it didn’t have any useful high-level design documents or long-term project planning.  Said lead also had some rather opaque coding standards (including liberal use of gotos! in C++! seriously!) and he’d never document his code, at all, and yet it was up to me to add some functionality to this trainwreck. I did the best I could, and during my first performance review on the team even got plenty of praise for my bias for action and willingness to dive deep and so on, but after a year of that I decided I’d had enough and changed teams. A few months later was performance review season once again, and I ended up getting quite a lot of negative attention for the very same things I’d been given positives for on the previous review - soon after I learned that the project ended up being a miserable failure and they needed someone to blame for this, and since I’d left the team, I was a perfect candidate.  So I ended up with a “needs improvement” rating.

The new team was an incredible pile of stress and attrition and failing legacy services - part of why I’d been offered the transfer was because they wanted my expertise to help fix it, but I never had the capacity to do so simply because everything was so badly broken and the team was ridiculously under-staffed, which made for a vicious cycle of attrition and burnout. I ended up developing severe wrist problems as a result, and between being on-call 24/7 for months at a time and having a lot of pressure on me to write new services while being up at 5 AM pretty much every day with random servers in China failing (because of course we didn’t have an ops team, even though we were a tier-1 service!), I really needed a medical leave.

So I asked about a medical leave so I could take care of myself, and the response from HR was: if I am to take medical leave, then when I get back my “poor performance will need addressing.” Which is a coded phrase for “get in line or we’re gonna give you a PIP."

In the meantime I had requested an ergonomic evaluation - which kept on getting postponed, and yet the fact I hadn’t yet received it was also being used against me like it was my fault somehow - and I was doing everything I could to try to balance my health and ability to keep on working and was being worn out and ground down to a fine paste. This was the last straw. I submitted my two weeks’ notice, and will never, ever go back.