Comments by "" (@DiabeticGameGuy) on "A Life Engineered" channel.

  1. I moved whenever I could get an advance in my career. My 20 and 30 year old self told me this was a great way to climb the corporate ladder. I would earn more money so I could have a better life. However, in my 50s I realize I lost so much time with my family. My father passed away 1 year after I graduated Harvard so he never got to see the person I would become. My mother lives on the other side of the country, and I only see her once a year for a short visit. I call her regularly, but I know I can't be there for her when/if she needs me as my life is here now. I also have few friends from the time I graduated college until I finally decided to stop job hopping. I didn't realize what I had been missing out on for all those years. I've now lived in Arizona for 11 years. I am married, and I have friends. I'll always wonder how life would have turned out if I had accepted a slower paced life of living in a small town rather than chasing the career.
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  2. Wow, I had no idea you started as a support engineer. Your growth has been incredible. Congratulations! I started a L5 TPM, then moved to L6 SDE Manager in my first review cycle. My first year I was in the "Top Tier" category, and then I just plateuad. After the great year one, I spent the rest of my time as a L6 Product Manager, L6 Ops Managrer. I did a stretch role doing L7 work for one peak, but I didn't do well enough for a perm promotion. I left shortly after feeling lke a failure. Leaving Amazon is my greatest career regret, but I just couldn't get out of my head that people were promoting all around me. For referenece, the older version of me realizes I wasn't ready. However, at the time, it really hurt, and my lack of promotions was all I could think about day and night. Can you talk about how long you spent at each level? Did you ever feel like you were failing because you weren't moving up as quickly as you wanted?
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  3. Congratulations! I'm a fan of all your videos so I'm here for the life updates as well as the career advice. I was at Amazon from 2007 to 2011, and it changed my life. I learned more from my time at Amazon than my graduate degree from Harvard. I can't fathom how much you've learned from spending nearly 20 years in such a talent rich environment. I wish you huge amounts of success on your next chapter.
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  4. Wow, I wish I had seen this while I still worked at Amazon...
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  5. This video is pure gold. Thank you.
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  6.  @skyhappy  Definitely not. If I hadn't gone to Harvard, I wouldn't have been equipped to work at Amazon nor would I have been able to keep up with the pace. I had always been a big fish in a small pond before Harvard, and it's easy to standout in small schools or at startups where I can be the smartest person in the room. One of my biggest lessons was to listen and learn from others. At my previous jobs, I could just spend more time and get the win. Both Amazon and Harvard really taught me the importance on knowing my strengths and trusting my peers to deliver.
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  7. Great advice. Thank you.
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  8. God, I remember those. My team caused one sev 1 while I was there and it still hurts. The year was 2008, and my team (Warehouse Deals) had just migrated to a new order and fulfilment pipeline. Everything was working well, BUT none of the reports were prepared for orders to flow through this channel. There was a hard coded value to ignore us in the main Amazon reports, but after the migration all our orders were double counting. This polluted all the data in the Datawarehouse for every category where Warehouse Deals had products. The revenue and COGS were off by millions!!! It was a brutal time as it was a major issue completely impacting the business, finance and DW teams, and our little team was the main root cause. All the retail VPs and Directors saw a decrease in their WBR metrics. The consequences were above my paygrade as I was just a L6 Software Engineer Manager. Our whole team was reorged to retail from ops shortly after this happened. Another incident that was only a sev 2 happened when we misran a pricing script for WarehouseDeals. This was in 2007, and our mistake made the NBC national news. This was about 5 months after I joined the company, and I was sure that I'd be fired. Thankfully, I lived through it though.
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  9. I worked at Amazon from 2007 to 2011 as a L6 manager. During my time there, I was never on a PIP, and I was top tier for two review cycles. If I were open to returning to Amazon, would I be considered for L7 positions?
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