Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started

That was exactly his point though. He hoped that he would get promoted by doing an awesome job, by going beyond what was merely expected as "done".

I know where he's coming from. I've had one job in my career that was exactly like that (and I miss it dearly). I never really worked on promotions while on that job. I was very passionate about the stuff we were doing and made sure we were always building the right product for our customers, made sure our code was excellent, made sure we fixed bugs quickly, etc. And I didn't do those things by going around politicking. I just came in every day, sat at my desk, wrote code, had technical discussions with other folks, did code reviews, etc.

I got two promotions while on that job. They always came as a surprise and came with a brief talk with management about how much they appreciated my contributions and my technical skills.

These days I just dread all the career stuff. Thankfully I'm in a position at my current company where I can just "park" for the rest of my time there if I want to. The last thing I want to do when going to work is politicking and forking alliances and whatnot. I want my technical work to speak for itself. If that's not enough, I don't care. I make more than enough to make a good living.

I've been living in the US for several years now, but I'm originally from Brazil. I started my career there.

In Brazil, my experience was always that people initially trust newcomers, and only lose their trust if they fuck up. I always felt trusted when joining a new team, and thankfully I never fucked up. But I saw people fuck up, and other people lost their trust on them very quickly.

In the US (and I think Canada, both countries seem to have similar work cultures), it seems to be the opposite. When you join a new team, you have to prove yourself worth of their respect. You have to do some initial labor to show that you deserve your place in the team. That's been the case in every team I've joined so far.

I don't know what it's like in Israel, but I wonder if the author of the post had a similar experience to mine.

To me the biggest red flag was the fact that the role/team wasn’t discussed until AFTER the interview was over. Maybe that’s common with hiring events — I work at Microsoft but I’ll be the first to admit I’m very OOTL when it comes to recruitment efforts outside of my team/org. In any event, I know for me, I would need to know what I was going to do and who my manager would be before accepting a job. In fact, I turned down a job that paid extremely well, in part because I had no concrete idea of what I would be doing - and this was after I’d met with the hiring manager and I had a title for the role. Still, the whole thing was really ambiguous and that made me uncomfortable, despite the strength of the offer. That might not be the same for everyone, but it is for me.

But the broader problem I think was that the author just didn’t gel with how things worked at that office. And that’s totally OK. It’s better to leave early than to stick around, especially if you know that early.

The only area I think the author was overly naive was on the promotion front. Obviously there will always be exceptions and edge cases, but it’s generally a bad idea to take a lower-level job with the hopes that you’ll be able to get quickly promoted. Even the most aggressive promotion schedule at a place like Amazon would take more than five months to go from SDE1 to SDE2.

I feel the same way about taking jobs as I do about buying new, unproven gadgets. It’s bettet to take the job based on what it is on paper when you accept it and not what it might evolve into over time. Now, if the job isn’t what was promised and you were actively misled about what you would be doing versus what you actually do (and I’ve had that happen and I’ve also seen that happen to others), that’s a sign you should leave that job as soon as possible. But I don’t think that was the scenario here. I think the author took whatever job he could get because he assumed he’d be able to quickly turn the job into what he wanted it to be. It usually doesn’t work that way.

But that’s ok! We’ve all made the wrong decision about a job or a relationship or whatever. I think it’s great the author was able to realize Amazon wasn’t the right place for him sooner rather than later.

But I don’t think that necessarily says anything about Amazon — just about the experience and fit with the author.