Amazon Principal Engineer On Layoffs, Interviewing & Career Growth | Steve Huynh

Steve Huynh became a software engineer at Amazon with a Liberal Arts degree. He started as a Support Engineer and eventually became a Principal Engineer (top ~1% at Amazon) before starting his own career growth YouTube channel, A Life Engineered. We discuss: • Why most interview prep advice is garbage • Why most people don’t become Principal Engineers • Amazon’s performance-based layoff culture • How to avoid being laid off • Regrets & advice for his younger self Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:37) Transitioning from liberal arts to tech (06:31) Becoming a software development engineer (17:37) Breaking into the tech industry today (22:56) Future of software engineering with AI (26:06) SDE1 → SDE3 promos (33:11) Perf-based Layoffs at Amazon (46:22) His Principal promotion project (59:53) Best parts of Amazon's culture (1:05:22) His best and worst managers among 20+ (1:09:09) Career reflections Where to find Steve: • Newsletter: https://alifeengineered.substack.com/ • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ALifeEngineered • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/a-life-engineered/ • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alifeengineered/ Where to find Ryan: • Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/ • X: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/ • Threads: https://www.threads.net/@ryanlpeterman • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman To hear more, visit www.developing.dev https://www.developing.dev?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=show-notes-spotify-open-access

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We will say no to people, even if their coding and system design is good.

• 0:04Ryan Peterman?

  This guy was a principal engineer at Amazon. He conducted thousands of interviews while he was there. And last month, I went to his studio to ask him to teach me everything he knows about interviewing in big tech. He also shared a ton of unexpected stories from his promotion to principal engineer at Amazon. How many people are expected to be cut in Amazon typically?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  What I can say is

• 0:29Speaker 00

  the PIP stands for Performance Improvement Plan.

• 0:31Ryan Peterman?

  And then what about the worst manager you had?

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't want to name names or anything, but.

• 0:37Ryan Peterman?

  I know that you came from a liberal arts background. Your major going into college was actually English, right?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was creative writing and English literature.

• 0:47Ryan Peterman?

  So can you tell us a little bit about you getting into Amazon without a CS major?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think just getting in as a liberal arts major may be a bit disingenuous. Both of my parents were electrical engineers. And so I've always had a computer around the house. And, you know, I used to program that computer. I still remember my first one. It was an IBM XT 8088 with 640K of RAM, no hard disk, two five and a quarter inch floppy disk. So it's the floppy disk that's actually floppy, not the hard one that you probably don't even remember. And so, you know, I've always been in coding and since a really young age.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  In high school, I did the computer science AP tests. My sophomore year, I did the AB test, which was in Pascal way back when. Pascal is a programming language. And my junior year, it was in C++ and I did the BC test. And so I knew about the concepts of, you know, Big O, algorithms and data structures, how to write programs. You know, I still remember making like a Tetris clone when I was in high school. So, you know, the fact that I broke in without a computer science degree, if you just said the part about the English degree. Like I said, it's a bit disingenuous.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  And so I went to school, I got a liberal arts degree. I did get a minor in math and applied math, and I took some computer science courses. You know, when I got out of school, I was looking for work, and it was around 2005, 2006. I still remember the story. I went and talked to my writing professor in one of my senior year seminars at UW. And I was like, Professor Bosworth, like, what type of job should I get? I want to be a writer. And he said, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he was like, Steve, there's no job called writer. It's like, not yet. There is a job called waiter.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  And so you just have to find a way to sort of support yourself while you ply your craft, right? And so just finding some sort of way to eke by while you get some experience under your belt. I wasn't really turned on by that. And so I decided to revisit the skills that I had picked up in high school and before that.

• 3:25Ryan Peterman?

  I see. So, I mean, to me, then, it is disingenuous to say that as if you came from zero skill, but your resume came from zero is my understanding, right? Because if you look, if I was a big tech recruiter and I was looking through a stack of resumes and English major comes along, you probably would not stand out when it comes to, you know, the job market. So what is the thing that you did that got you into Amazon?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  It was through networking. So somebody that I did AP computer science with, worked at Amazon, he went to University of Washington and got a proper computer science degree and was a software developer at Amazon. And so they needed some support engineers, and it was a contract position.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  And so I basically was like, can you get me an interview at the company? And I was just, I was not worried about a coding interview because of my prior experience, but also, you know, I think with support engineers, they're writing scripts and maintaining systems. And so I got through on that interview and, you know, I was a green badge contractor for about nine months before I transitioned to full time.

• 4:43Ryan Peterman?

  What's green badge mean? Just temp?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a temp.

• 4:46Ryan Peterman?

  It's an Amazon term.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the blue badge would be full time.

• 4:50Ryan Peterman?

  I see.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  And then green badge is a contractor, yellow is like a vendor or something.

• 4:55Ryan Peterman?

  Like maybe today's environment is like a bit more intense where people want to get into big tech and, you know, Amazon's a big name at this point. But also, your resume, although it was not CS, the thing that got you in was that you knew someone and they gave you like a referral and that made a big difference. That at least got you the interview and then you had the skills because you were, you had been doing CS for a while.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the way to think about it, if, you know, when I, when I guide people trying to get a job, it takes two things. It takes, you know, some amount of opportunity and it takes some amount of study. And so you don't know when the opportunity is going to pop up. You don't know if your Uncle Daniel from church, you know, will talk to somebody that knows about a job opening. You don't know when that's going to land. It's very unevenly distributed where these opportunities come from. But I think over time, they will come and rear their, their heads or make themselves available. I think the other side of it is the preparedness, right? So up leveling yourself, gaining knowledge, gaining skills. That needs to occur. You can't just have the opportunity and then not have the skills, right?

• 6:03Speaker 00

  And so those two things need to marry. And so I think back then it was much more difficult to gain the knowledge that was necessary to get into big tech. Today, you see all of these cottage industries around interview prep, getting ready for the coding interview. None of that stuff existed when I was trying to get in. And so I think it would actually be harder back then to get your foot into the door in tech from a non-traditional background than it is today. Now, I won't say that it's necessarily easy today, but at least in my mind, I think it was more difficult for me.

• 6:37Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, I remember when we worked on that post together, you said there wasn't even the idea of like lists of leaked code questions and things, and you were just collecting interview questions to prepare.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when I was a support engineer and like, you know, they made me Blue Badge, so full-time employee, but I just, I wanted to be an SDE so bad. And so all I did-

• 6:59Ryan Peterman?

  An SDE for the audiences.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Software Development Engineer, yeah. And so I wanted to be a software developer so bad, I just cornered everybody. I just became a collector of questions. I was like, what do you ask during interviews? And I was like, don't tell me the answer, I'm gonna go and figure it out. And so, you know, just did it the old-fashioned way, just firing up an IDE and, you know, you don't have all these battery of test cases that get run, like, you know, with leaked code and stuff now. And so, you know, generating your own test cases, you know, that's, that's a way to sort of up-level yourself. So I feel like I did it in a, just in a time where, you know, we weren't so resource-rich.

• 7:39Ryan Peterman?

  So I imagine that probably lowered the average performance of a, of an interviewe, and maybe because you had some extraordinary process of like collecting questions that you might have been like, you know, very outstanding when it comes to everyone, because ultimately, interview prep is a little bit competitive. You need to be better than the other people to get in.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Yes and no. I think of the distribution of demand for software developers is skewed. I just, especially today, I don't think there's a ton of demand for junior folks. I think there's a extraordinary amount of demand for senior and above. The reality is that seniors come from mid-level and juniors. And so I think the pipeline is a bit busted right now. I don't necessarily think of a ton of competition at the upper end. I do think that there is a lot at the lower end. But the competition doesn't exist at the interview stage. I think the competition exists at the pre-qualification and selection phase.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  And so if you're able to catch the attention of a recruiter, say you know somebody that works at the company, or you're able to go really deep in a particular area and stand out, maybe you built an app, has some amount of customers, that's where the competition is. You need to stand out on the selection side. By the time you get to the interview, it's just a matter of clearing the bar there. And so the dimension of competition is not at the coding level, I don't think.

• 9:16Ryan Peterman?

  Why do you think that most interview prep advice is garbage?

• 9:21Speaker 00

  I think that most interview prep is non-optimal. And so, you know, there's a hyper-focus on the coding interview. There's a hyper-focus now on system design. But I think really, people forget, so they turn it into a test. And in some sense, it is, if you can't code, then they don't want you. If you can't design a system and you're a senior, like, you know, it's not going to work out. Like, if we put you in a role, you're going to be that 5% that leave, right? We don't want to do that.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  And so, the big overarching framework is, the people on the other side of the table are trying to figure out whether they want to work with you, whether you're going to be a good fit for the culture. But people think about it in terms of a test. And so, it's much more like a date than it is like the SAT.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Right? And but the but the prep industry, the interview prep industry, it's much easier to think about it and present it as a test. Right? And so I wish people would just embed this, you know, some things like, hey, behavioral interviews have an outsized impact on whether they're going to hire you and what level you're going to come in at. So instead of, say, spending 80% of your time on coding, or maybe, let's say, 60% on coding and then 35% on system design, and like, the 5% is like the donate to charity pie slice.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Like, maybe it's much more like 40%, 40%, 20%. Right? Because that behavioral side, I think, is really where the match is made.

• 11:17Ryan Peterman?

  Where and where behavioral is the 20%?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  I was a bar raiser trainer and I trained thousands of people at Amazon on how to conduct interviews, assess talent, and then level people. Before, the training was, you know, now it's a set of videos, but it used to be live training. So I trained many people on this. And what I used to say, and I'll say it right now, is the coding, so the functional parts of the interview, the coding interview, the system design interview, those things are the ante. Right? So they're the small blind and big blind. So I'll use a poker analogy. They're the small blind and big blind of getting into a company. And the behavioral part of the interview,

• 12:03Speaker 00

  that's the poker part of poker. Right? It's like, do you have a good hand? You know, trying to beat the other hand of the other person. And so if you thought about the coding part and the system design part as necessary but not sufficient,

• 12:21Speaker 00

  Like, that's the thing that I wish people understood. Right? We will say no to people that have poor behavioral answers. Poor, not in the sense that they don't have the experience it needs. It's just we can recognize from far away that it's not going to be a good fit for the company. We'll say no to those people, even if their coding and system design is good.

• 12:43Ryan Peterman?

  You're saying at Amazon, it's like the functional parts, like coding, system. That's like pass no pass.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:49Ryan Peterman?

  But once you pass it, you're leveling and the, I guess, the color behind how good you are is the behavioral.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:58Ryan Peterman?

  I see. Okay. So then, what should people do to kind of prevent from being downleveled because their behavioral is bad?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  I think that they should spend some time on what I call packaging. So if you can package your experience and sort of communicate that packaging to your interviewer, I think that's just optimal for both sides. Right? So you are packaging your experience. You're communicating to them what you're all about, how you operate, what things you've done in the past. And you can make that a good story. You can not, it doesn't have to be entertaining, but it can be efficient and you can, you know, if you are able to effectively articulate yourself and communicate it to your interviewer. I think now we're talking about empathy.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Now we're talking about things like, this is the fundamental question for interviews is like, do I want to work with this person? That's the question that this whole song and dance for the interview process is trying to figure out. Do I want to work with this person or not? And I think spending some time on the behavioral side is about trying to help the interviewer answer that question. So you are just, you're really trying to act like yourself and not, you know, it's not necessarily, you want to put your best foot forward.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  You don't want to lie, obviously. You don't want to misrepresent yourself. But I really think that, you know, just being able to talk about who you are, what you're about, and your experience, like, that's the important part. That's the missing part. From all of this cottage, like, interview prep that's going on on the internet, that's the big thing that's missing.

• 14:49Ryan Peterman?

  Could you give me an example of packaging? Like, what, maybe you could package your, as if you were going to sell yourself back and go back to tech?

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, so just even something like, "Tell me about yourself," right? I think people, people kind of gloss over that, and they kind of run on sentence their way through it. And, you know, I think if I were to answer a question like that, it would just be like, "Hey, you know, my name's Steve Nguyen. I have, you know, I have a passion for backend distributed systems. I really love to work on customer-facing products. I'm a sports fan. You know, I used to work at Amazon Tickets and Prime Video Sports. And, you know, I really love, like, building teams and really, you know,

• 15:43Speaker 00

  taking an organization's engineering culture and up-leveling it at that level. Like, those are, those are some of my passions, I think. I didn't prep for that. That was kind of an interview off the cuff. But, you know, hopefully you got a sense of, you know, who I am and what I'm about, and the level that I operate. One thing that I like to say is that the stories you tell, they sort of betray your level. The way that you communicate with people, they betray your level, right? And so if you have stories that are SD1 stories, right, entry-level stories, but you're trying to get a senior role... That incongruity is the thing that's going to lead to the down leveling.

• 16:25Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And like, the last thing that you said there was up leveling teams. You're almost speaking to like a staff or higher rubric where, you know, it's not like you said, oh, I like to clean up the code or.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love refactoring code. It's like, I do.

• 16:43Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  But that's not, that's not how I'm going to describe myself.

• 16:46Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Right? And so I'm trying to turn this into a video of some sort, but I just, I want to do a thing where I just talk with somebody for five minutes. And I try to figure out whether they're senior or mid or staff or whatever they are.

• 17:00Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, that'd be interesting, like a blind.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:03Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, like you don't know and you just.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm overconfident. But I just, I feel like if I talk to a junior entry level person, I would know that they're a junior entry level person. They just, they just, just the way that they carry themselves, the, the things that they talk about, you know? Now, maybe on the, you know, if they're a strong senior engineer, you know, are they going to be able to pass as a principal? Yeah, there's some, there's some places where I, you know, I might struggle, but I, I think I'm really calibrated in terms of level.

• 17:37Ryan Peterman?

  So that's for the interview stage. What about before you get the interview? Right now, it's a really competitive job market. Do you have any advice for people to stand out?

• 17:46Speaker 00

  You have to be an outlier in some regard. And so being outlier may mean, oh, I have a contact that can give me a referral to a big tech company. I think that if you just, if you cold DM'd some folks on a team that had an opening, and it was, you know, you didn't like spam them, it didn't look like a, like a, like an auto DM sort of thing, or a script, you didn't sound like AI, and you were just like, hey. My name's Ryan. I noticed you work on this team. You have some openings. Like, can you tell me what it's like on your team? Like, what are the sort of things that you do on a day-to-day basis?

• 18:29Speaker 00

  And then also, you know, I'm a university student. I'm about to graduate in three months. Like, how can I position myself optimally in order to get this job? I ran a poll on my Discord, and 90% of people said that if somebody did that, and they were genuine about it, that they would interact with them and that they would actually extend a referral if they asked, right? And so that's an easy way to be an outlier in networking. You know, I think about a lot, you know, there's this networking stuff where it's just like, "Hey, you know, strengthen your networking. Go up and talk to people."

• 19:09Speaker 00

  There's this, and it's American-style, too, so it's like, everybody thinks it's fake and surface-level, but that's not what I'm talking about, right? Like, you should do those things, but like, really, like, networking is about making some sort of connection, right? And so if you're able to connect with people, they're in a spot to help you, if you can provide value to them, right? I think that's one way to be an outlier. I think if you're new and you're willing to pick up skills, "Hey, what's the skill that I should pick up so that I'm much more attractive to Big Tech or to getting a job?"

• 19:50Speaker 00

  I think that most people should go deep instead of going broad. You know, they'll be like, "Oh, I'm gonna, you know, I'm doing a React tutorial, then I'm gonna learn Rust, and then there's a machine learning Python thing with PyTorch." And they go breadth, and there's no cohesion there. It's like, you know, mobile app development and machine learning. Yeah, you can make them sort of, you know, connect to each other, but in some sense, it's contrived, and there's just so much to learn. And so I give the general guidance. It's just like, okay, well, what's the thing that interests you in a framework or a language that you are, like, you already know?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Like, how deep can you go in a particular, you know, in a thing that you already have some familiarity with?

• 20:40Ryan Peterman?

  2025, is there a top programming language that you'd recommend for someone to go deep in?

• 20:47Speaker 00

  The cheeky answer is English is the top programming language in 2025.

• 20:52Ryan Peterman?

  What do you mean by that?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  We had talked about it a little bit before, but the ability to communicate yourself, the ability to package your experience and tell a good story. I think that's the thing that's the high leverage activity.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  In terms of languages, dude, I've been, I've been programming, you know, I've done assembly in BASIC and Pascal and C and C plus, like, I learned C in 1990, right? Like, languages are, they come and they go. Like, I consider myself a pearl expert. Like, that, that's no longer useful, right? And so, like, the language itself, I think, in a sense, is immaterial. I think this is where I think, you know, your, your personal curiosity, like, it's totally fine to pick up something that, you know, you have an affinity towards. I think it's also totally fine to be like, hey, look at all of these jobs in Java.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  I don't think Java is going away, or at least JVM-based languages. And so, I think it's totally okay to be like, well, I'm gonna become an expert in Java. That's not very sexy right now, but that's a totally fine reason. So however you get there, my advice is just, just go deep, right? People will be like, okay, cool, well, I'm gonna do a Java tutorial. And then, I think an example of going deep is just being like, oh, what's going on in this virtual machine? What are virtual machines, right?

• 22:22Speaker 00

  What does it, what does it mean to tune a garbage collector? We can get into a debate about whether you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot with, you know, trying to tweak your Java garbage collection. But if you are willing to pop the hood on that, and then sort of like, take a look at what's going on in there, that's the sort of thing that nobody can stop you, right? Like, you can just, you can just try to go deep. Steve said to go deep, so I'm going as deep as I can till you get to the ones and the zeros that are flowing through on that bus, right? Like, that is the thing that is rare.

• 22:56Ryan Peterman?

  Last thing on this topic of, you know, breaking in. Recently, Zuck, he had this quote, he said on an interview that, you know, the capabilities of AI in this year will be able to produce mid-level engineer code already.

• 23:16Ryan Peterman?

  Do you think that junior engineers are screwed then because of that?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  I think it's super interesting. Maybe you should tell me. You're the one that works at Meta, right? But I'll say this, folks at the CEO level, you know, they're very high performing. Their job is to look into the future. But they tend to make predictions that are, they're not exaggerated, but they tend to make things like the timeline for which things happen. They tend to undershoot that. And then they tend to overshoot inability. But the idea is that the vision exists and you work towards it. The fact that he says he equivocates, or at least he's hedging. He's saying mid-level engineers later this year. If that was actually already there, he would have said senior staff level engineers or

• 24:06Speaker 00

  10x engineers by tomorrow.

• 24:09Ryan Peterman?

  Right.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  The fact that he's pushing that out makes me think that the actual implement, like the rollout of a mid-level AI bot within Meta is a little, it's a little further away because his job is to move the goalposts just a little further than where we're at. And so I have a little bit of doubt there. Now, if you want to talk about, you know, AI taking over some tasks, yes, absolutely, they should. You know, I think when I was coming up as a mid and senior, oh, code generation. Look at these annotations. We can put Lombok in our code. You don't have to write getters and setters. There were, there was, you know, I have a lot of familiarity with Java. Java is a very verbose language.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Oh, look, the IDE can help me refactor some code. The IDE can write some boilerplate for me. Yes, absolutely, we should be leveraging tools to make us more efficient. But at this point, I think of AI help as an amplifier. If you just go through the different levels, if you're a non-coder, I think that you can go from zero to one very easily. Right? So we're getting to the point with products like Replit where a non-coder could conceivably become a product manager and build like a mobile app. Right? Soup to nuts from beginning to end. But I have my doubts that if the app doesn't work exactly the way that it's intended,

• 25:37Speaker 00

  or they're like, hey, scale this thing to meta scale. Like, I don't think an AI is going to be able to do that. So I think very comfortably we'll be able to go from zero to one. But I don't think that it will go from like one to many. I think a 1X engineer is going to definitely turn into a 10X engineer today with the help of AI. But do I see a 0 to 10X engineer jump like later this year? I don't see it.

• 26:05Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, so then I guess moving into you being at Amazon. You went into Amazon, you converted to an SD, and then you climbed all the way to principal at Amazon, which I know that last jump is also very notoriously difficult. So you went from SD1 to SD2, SD3, and then principal. Could you walk me through the high level? Maybe just tell me, you know, what was the main thing that made the difference at each level? And, you know, just like a very concise high level.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, I was able to get, you know, from support engineer, SD1, 2, and 3, around three, three and a half years, something like that. You know, at SD1, I think it's, the real focus is on some amount of independence. So just understanding where you fit inside of the software development lifecycle, getting to the point where you can take tasks and see them all the way through. So you've gained a little bit of trust there, and you don't have to be handheld. I think that's the critical piece for junior level or SD1. I think I just want to add a caveat there, which is, that doesn't mean you know everything, and that doesn't mean that you don't ask questions.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  It's just that you're much more comfortable asking a question if you're stuck. You're much more comfortable surfacing an issue. There are some folks that have this idea that at SD1 or at any level that you are completely self-contained. So self-contained is not the same thing as being independent.

• 27:43Ryan Peterman?

  One of the common words I hear for that first promo is like doing things independently without guidance. Some people interpret that as I'm not going to ask for help and I got to do it all myself, which is obviously not right. But you need to know how to unblock yourself. So it makes sense.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  And it's also insidious in the sense that it's not just not right so that it will hold you back for longer. It actually turns into a performance issue if you're hiding the fact that you're not able to perform or you don't know anything. If you're hiding progress because you're unsure about yourself and you sort of beat yourself up that you should know this thing. And suppose you have a task and it should take two weeks and then you're like, hey, everything's on track, everything's on track. And then the Thursday before, you're like, I've been blocked this whole time. That's a performance issue, right? And so there's a difference between, oh, it's just going to take you longer to get there

• 28:42Speaker 00

  to something that's actually detrimental to get to the next level. I think for SD2, the word that pops into my head the most is ownership. And so you are an active participant in the software development lifecycle. You're much more of a steward of, say, your team's codebase. And I just sort of think about it like, hey, you're littering. Don't litter here. And then maybe picking up some of the trash. That trash being tech debt, not actual trash in the code. Being able to get, now you're able to leverage this independence

• 29:23Speaker 00

  and to start to make a contribution to the team's codebase that's a little bit larger. So basically, every step up with SDE is kind of an argument that you deserve more scope. And so the scope of an SD2 or mid-level engineer is

• 29:45Speaker 00

  You know, at the team level, right? You understand your team's code base. You know, you understand its weaknesses, its strengths. You can start to, you know, make suggestions about where it's going to be. At Amazon, we have an old operational culture. And so, you know, you're on call. You know how things break. You might have some ideas about how to fix some of these things. And so, you know, it's a very, you know, meat and potatoes sort of role. And, you know.

• 30:14Ryan Peterman?

  This is what you need to go from two to three.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm just talking about two.

• 30:19Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, this is table stakes.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's expectations for, at least this is my conception of it.

• 30:24Ryan Peterman?

  Right, right.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  And there's an eternal debate at Amazon about whether the ST2 or mid-level role is a terminal position or not. Can you retire as an ST2? The level granularity at Amazon is such that I think ST2 is a very wide band. So I think at the upper levels of ST2, a lot of those folks are senior engineers at other companies, even within big tech, not just, you know, oh, they're a senior engineer at a smaller company or a startup. I think you're pretty strong as an ST2 at Amazon, just because the granularity for levels at Amazon is so terrible.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  And so I tend to bias towards like, yeah, actually at ST2, you're, that could be a terminal level, right? Now, I don't advise that people think of it as a terminal level, but it's just a reflection of, you know, how much scope I think an ST2 at Amazon can actually deliver against.

• 31:26Ryan Peterman?

  So there isn't an up and out policy? Like, if you were a manager at Amazon and you had someone that says, hey, I want to just stay at, you know, ST2, is that okay? Or would they get fired in Amazon's culture eventually?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  So, and it might have changed. You know, it's been, it's been close to a year since I've been gone. So I say "we" a lot, as though I still work there and still trying to train myself. I don't work at Amazon.

• 31:52Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  So it's definitely up and out at STU1.

• 31:58Ryan Peterman?

  Yep.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  And so if you've been at STU1 for more than two years, you know, it's it's kind of like, uh, this is

• 32:05Ryan Peterman?

  Is there a formal, formal, like, you know, 24 months and then they start managing out? Or it's a feel thing?

• 32:13Speaker 00

  I believe it's a, it's a strong, it's a progressively stronger guidance, the longer that you've been there. But it's not a 20, 36 months and then you're out sort of thing.

• 32:23Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  I think for STU2, it's a much more interesting conversation. I think that will depend on the, where the upper management, you know, or that particular individual, where they land on whether STU2 is a terminal level or not.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  And so if you happen to get a manager that's basically like, no, you've been there for 10 years, you should be a three.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  If you happen to get that person, then I think it might be, might be bad news for you.

• 32:55Ryan Peterman?

  And you know, with the recent news about Meta, a lot of people are likening, or they're worried that Meta would turn into Amazon because Amaz- Amazon's famous for a culture of intense performance and cutting people who aren't making it.

• 33:12Ryan Peterman?

  From, yeah, from your time at Amazon, I'm kind of curious, maybe you can give us the, the juicy details? Like, how many people are expected to be cut in Amazon typically? Like, because you were there for so many years. Is it, you know, some percentage per year or is it up to the manager's discretion? How does that work?

• 33:30Speaker 00

  What I can say, so I won't give an exact number. What I can say is that guidance, you know, suppose it was five or 6% you know, for the organization. That number used to be a recommendation. It wouldn't, it would be kind of a soft one. Hey, we need to manage out X% of folks over the course of a year. I think in the past couple of years, that has turned into a much more It's turned from guidance to much more of a mandate. I think coupled with the fact that up until recently, they weren't doing backfills for folks. There was this sort of like, hey, keep on running because this thing's chasing you right from the back. I don't think that was necessarily healthy.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  And if I were to be quite honest, I consider myself a high performer. And so if you're a high performer, you don't have to think about that stuff. And as much as I'd like to be empathetic about it, and I've been around some of these decisions and meetings and stuff like that.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  If you're down, it's hard for me to speak about what it's actually like to feel like your job may be at stake. And so I think a lot of what I would tell you is just kind of cold and numbers based. There are real people here. If you, getting fired from a job is, that's a very, that's a highly emotional, psychological thing. So I just want to make sure that I bring that up. Maybe I'll say this, and this is sort of how I guided other folks and other managers when they're asking me, hey, how do I think about this? The way to think about it is 5%, suppose that was the number.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  So that's one in 20 people.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  And so just take a population of 20 people, and I think there's a distribution there. And the people on the left-hand side of that distribution, in regular years where there are backfills. I think that they're not having a good time with Amazon's culture. They're not thriving, almost by definition. We're just going to say, hey, everything on the left-hand side is, people aren't having a great time. And so I think it's almost a relief that there's a way to sort of like leave a situation like that. What's the alternative? They stay. And somebody that's not having a great time in Amazon's culture, which it doesn't have a great reputation.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Part of me is like, oh, that's kind of nice that, you know, it's kind of a blessing in disguise, right, that we would move them out. Now, without backfills, that's where I start to get a little uncomfortable because in basically any other year that they would be at Amazon, they would be totally fine. And I think even people, you know, that are sort of left shifted, but in that main part of the distribution, I think they're great. So that's where I start to go like, this is not, this is not something that I really agree with.

• 36:47Ryan Peterman?

  You're saying because it starts to cannibalize people who are, they're doing good, but now we're forced to

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yet not.

• 36:56Ryan Peterman?

  ...sacring people that were good.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  So suppose you had a 6% amount of folks that were let go, and that was a hard thing. And so you did all of the very tough work to identify those folks and have them move out. And now you need to do 6% of those folks that remain. And then you need to do 6% of those folks that remain. And so it's not 18%, you know, I don't, I can't do that math. But now we're starting to talk about people that are very close to the midpoint. They're operating at a high level. And in any other year, they'd be totally fine. But now they're not.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I have colleagues that were let go recently, and this kind of blows my mind that they would be, they would be let go. And so I think the most amount of impact will come from folks that, say, middle management, where, okay, well, there's four middle managers within the sub org right here. The bottom 6%, like 6% doesn't make sense when you're talking about four people or eight people. Right. And so I was very surprised by some of the people that were let go recently.

• 38:11Ryan Peterman?

  So you said when in the past, I guess as a principal engineer, once you get higher up, you were privy to some of the conversations where people are being discussed if they're getting managed out. What happens in those conversations? How does a high-level IC like you participate?

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, you start getting pulled in when you're a senior engineer and you definitely get pulled in when you're L7 or above. Those meetings are terrible, right? They're like three days long and you're locked up in a room and you're just sitting there talking about people and people, you start to lose the humanity. You just start to think of them in terms of, you know, the measurables, right, and the feedback from other folks. I won't go into the specific process, but what I will say is it's not a linear algorithm. I think in a perfect world, you would just go through everybody in the org and then you would have equal amount of time to talk about them and their strengths and their

• 39:14Speaker 00

  weaknesses. Typically, you just talk about the edges. And that's not a reflection of, you know, the people that are making the decisions and whether that's poor or not. It's just, it's the math. There are just too many people. And so the conversation tends to go to either side. And yeah, it's, it's just, it's not my favorite time of year.

• 39:38Ryan Peterman?

  No, definitely. It sounds, especially if they cut out some low performers and then the next iteration is like people where you objectively look at them and go, oh, they're, they're solid, but we need to fork over some more people.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Now, if you want to talk about meta, I think meta is on a hiring spree, if I'm not mistaken. I think, you know, if your fearless leader is saying, hey, low performers are leaving, and it's say at a 5% number, I think that's the number that's been floated around. I just have a sense that those folks are probably not having a good time at meta right now. Right. Does that everybody? No. But I would say that the vast majority of folks there, if you're talking about 1 in 20 people, 20 random people at Meta, there's probably somebody that's struggling, especially when you start multiplying that out across a large population. So because the inflow is much larger than the outflow, I wouldn't be too worried.

• 40:36Ryan Peterman?

  Sounds like across Big Tech, there's this increased intensity. And historically, Amazon has been the one that's always had this level of increased intensity, or at least this process of like, let's manage out the low performers quickly and let's just factor that into our processes. Given that you've been in a lot of those performance conversations, do you have any advice for the people who are on the border? Where, you know, if this is how we're going to be operating in the future, people who are kind of just meeting expectations, what is the things that protects you in those conversations that they could do for this coming year to be safe?

• 41:20Speaker 00

  I think it's just that. If you meet expectations, if you solidly meet expectations, if everybody across the organization met expectations, I don't think you have a 5% stack ranking, like removing folks from the system. Right? And so, you know, I don't think that people that are... And I bristle a bit at the low performer label. I just, again, I think of it as like, the culture is not working out. There is a mismatch between me and the ambient environment at any particular company. I don't think it's a low performer. You know how hard it is to get an offer at Meta?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Like, you are not a low performer.

• 42:07Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Right? You have to be driven. There is a song and dance that you need to perform under pressure in front of somebody. Like, you go and take a lead code hard and you have to go look at some... You have to code it in front of some SDE that's like got a bad expression on their face. Like, you are more than qualified. You're smart as hell. And now you're working at a company and...

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Maybe you thought it was something different than what it actually was. What I would say is, I don't think these low performers, these so-called low performers, they should try to become high performers. Right? I think by focusing on trying to be a high performer, or focusing on trying to get to the next level, there's usually a reason why you're considered, you're labeled that way. And so try to figure out what is that dimension that you're being judged and measured against that's, that's holding you back from meeting expectations? Because I think you need to crawl before you walk, before you run. What is that thing that they're judging you on? And then I think you should be real with your manager. And you should say, hey, I just wanted to check in on my meeting expectations.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  And if I'm not, then like, let's, let's do a preemptive plan, right? So PIP stands for Performance Improvement Plan. Can you do a pre-PIP? Can you, can you proactively put together a plan to get you to a spot where you're going to be safe? That's what I would, that's what I would recommend. Just be proactive about growth to get back to the median.

• 43:41Ryan Peterman?

  Asking your manager for a proactive PIP is-

• 43:43Speaker 00

  I would maybe not use those words.

• 43:46Ryan Peterman?

  That's hilarious. Okay, so it sounds like, I mean, obviously, meet expectations, work with your manager.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Well, I don't think it's obvious. I don't, I actually, if you, if you took a survey of software developers and you asked them, have you used these words with your manager? Suppose you're my manager.

• 44:05Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Hey, Ryan, you know, I just started here at Meta. I just wanted to get a sense of what my, your expectations of me, what are those? Right? Have they, have you explicitly asked about expectations with your manager? I think like 25% of, of people have actually done that. I think most people are trying to guess at what those expectations are. And so I think that would be my first bit of advice is just like, straight up ask what expectations are, and then ask if you're meeting them or not.

• 44:38Ryan Peterman?

  Right.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  That would go so far.

• 44:40Ryan Peterman?

  Definitely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think most people, I don't know if it's being shy or what, but I feel like most ICs don't directly talk to their manager and say, "I want this," or, "How do I meet expectations? How do I get promoted?" Kind of just do the work and do it well and hope that things go well.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Well, obviously, there's going to be an answer.

• 45:04Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  And so it's like, "Hey, Ryan. Ryan, what's your expectation of me and am I meeting it?" It's like, "No, Steve, you are not meeting expectations," and it's starting to become a problem. Even that is a better situation than not knowing.

• 45:18Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Right? And so there's a mutual friend of ours, Rahul Pandey from Tero.

• 45:24Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  I stole this saying from him, and I don't know if he stole it from somebody else that worked at Meta, but it's basically like, "Bad news that's delivered early is just news."

• 45:39Ryan Peterman?

  Right?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  "Bad news that's delivered late is terrible news."

• 45:44Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  So if you are asking about expectations and it's early in your career, it's early in cycle, you know, and they're like, "Hey, this is a problem," well, now you've surfaced the issue and you have a fighting chance of actually addressing it. If you are like, "Hey, what's up with my expectations?" "Oh, it's really bad." And it's December, right, so the month preceding performance review.

• 46:11Ryan Peterman?

  It's over.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  You're not in a good spot.

• 46:12Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Right? And so I just encourage people to deliver, or try to find as much bad news as early as possible.

• 46:22Ryan Peterman?

  For your principal promo, I think a lot of it comes down to having the opportunity and then delivering. But it's interesting to dig into how you got the opportunity to even deliver on Principal Scope. So I'm kind of curious, can you tell the story about how you got that?

• 46:40Speaker 00

  So I was reorged back into Prime Video. And so the previous team to that was a team that I cared deeply about. It was called Amazon Tickets. We sold tickets like Ticketmaster, built a bunch of really awesome tech, filed a ton of patents. I love music. I love going to live shows. And so I was like, oh, this is great. They spun that business down and they reorg that whole team into Prime Video. And basically, the 30 or 40 devs that were in that organization, they kind of just scattered into the wind, right?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  And I was, I had a bad taste in my mouth. And so I was, and I didn't want to talk to any of their teams. So I was basically like, okay, well, what do I have here? What they had was a team that was focused on delivering live sports on the Prime Video platform. And I'm a big sports fan as well. And so I was like, okay, well, this is interesting. And then I looked around and I was like, oh, there's a bunch of principal engineers here. Okay, so cool. I can, I can learn about what's going on there. And there was this really big need that was there, just the catalog work.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  And, you know, I just made a decision about whether I wanted to pick it up or not, right? And I decided to. It was just, in reality, much larger than any other project that I had ever done. I wouldn't say it landed on my lap. It was a combination of staying and then sort of saying, okay, well, if I stay, I need to do this.

• 48:25Ryan Peterman?

  I see. So it's some scope that principal engineers were aware of, needed to be done, was particularly difficult. It was, it was just sitting there for someone to take it on.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:37Ryan Peterman?

  You took the initiative, say, all right, I'm going to take it and stay on this team. And then you delivered on it.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, you know, the way that the principals were organized back then, it's changed now, but essentially, the principals were assigned to different areas, say, like playback, or clients, or catalog, or wherever they were. And the work that needs to be done was In the gaps between those orgs. So it had to be an end to end solution. And so even though the thrust, the main thrust of the work was in these sort of centralized services. And so that's why, you know, nobody, none of the other principals had done it because they were kind of, they were doing all of this other stuff that was necessary for us to deliver.

• 49:21Ryan Peterman?

  Okay, so that that makes a lot of sense too, because I imagine also if you delivered on that. So each principal to each, I guess, central vertical and you delivering some glue work. If you did that job really well, not only is the scope huge, but also these principal engineers are, you know, they're going to have context on your work and speak to your packet and be champions for you. So I'm sure that was helpful too. A lot of people, they say getting to principal at Amazon is so difficult. People don't even recommend doing it. You know, there's all this job hop advice. So what is the thing that usually blocks people from going from senior to principal at Amazon?

• 50:03Speaker 00

  There's a lot of reasons. I think just to back up a little bit, I am of the impression that Amazon just skipped a level. So they should just insert a staff level, staff level. They could do that right now. Basically, they would say, okay, well, everybody does principal. We'll call you principals, shove staff in there and then just say, hey, for, you know, for the really high performing SD3s, we're just going to move you there preemptively. And that would be so great. But I think the big problem is that you're essentially jumping two levels for that particular promotion. And so the, the big thing that's holding them back

• 50:47Speaker 00

  is that you need to jump two levels, right? So there's, there's basically double the amount of criteria to get to that next level. And I think it's kind of impossible to exhibit all of the moving to criteria for principal in a year. So if you think you're ready, hey, I'm a senior engineer. I've been doing really well. I'm going to make a big push. I think it's like, it's, it's because the job is so different because now you're influencing multiple teams.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  It's very difficult to find the opportunity and then also be able to perform at a level where people would consider you for the next level, 12, 18 months. And so what ends up happening for, you know, the, the failure mode that I see the most is they think they're ready, they will make a push, they will get a rejection, and they will get some amount of feedback. And then what they'll do is they'll, you know, they'll just go back to their strengths and then they'll continue to work on their, they might like address one or two of these pieces of feedback, but it just takes so long to, to close one of these cycles.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  And so a lot of people give up. I, I know so many folks that, you know, went to Meta and they're, they're thriving, or they went to Google, absolutely thriving right now, senior staff, EA, you know, principal at Google, which is, you know, two levels past staff and, and one level above senior staff, they're doing awesome. They just couldn't make that jump, right, from ST3 to principal. And so it, it turns into this thing where I think there's this two-year sliding window of where you kind of have to pack in basically a new job. You have to basically be doing two jobs because there's a, there's an anti-pattern where

• 52:45Speaker 00

  you just stop doing all of the things that you need to do for ST3 and you just focus on the principal level stuff. And then performance review time comes around and then they're like, uh, you're actually low performance at ST3 even though you're a high performer doing principal level things.

• 53:02Ryan Peterman?

  How's that possible? Like, what are those two jobs and how are they so different?

• 53:06Speaker 00

  Well, the reason it's possible is because performance and promotion are decoupled, two different processes.

• 53:13Ryan Peterman?

  What's the performance process at Amazon?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Performance process is, you know, yearly and then, you know, every six months there's a smaller version of that. And then the promotion process is, depends on the level, so it could be quarterly or it could be every six months. So they might line up generally, but the idea is that there's not a dependency on one with the other. And so if you're trying to make a big push for a promotion and you're doing all this principal stuff and then, you know, then it's, so here's, here's a big example. Senior engineers need to code, right? That's a, that's a very important thing that they do. And principals are also expected to code, but not as large of a contribution generally.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Like, direct contribution is not rare, but it just, that needs to be balanced with their other obligations. So they might be a sponsor of a project, or they might be acting as a backstop, or they might be acting as a catalyst, or an evangelist for a particular initiative. And so, you know, those roles, they are pan-team, right? So it's, it's cross-functional teams, there might be product teams, there might be five dev teams. These dev teams may be spanning multiple organizations. You might act like a TPM. I was accused of that in one of my promotion assessments. "It's kind of hard to figure out whether Steve's an SDE or a TPM."

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Kind of took offense to that. I'm like, "Are you kidding me, dude?" And, and, you know, one of them came back, it's like, "Hey, you need to code more." I'm like, "I have checked in so many lines of code." And so, okay, well, there's some sporadic, you know, six months where I didn't code a lot, and it's like, I didn't get any credit for time served.

• 55:01Ryan Peterman?

  I see. Okay, so they looked at the code delivered in those six months when you were going for principal, they looked at it, not a lot of code, and so they said, "Okay, we're blocking you because you're not doing the senior job."

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:14Ryan Peterman?

  But principal was good because you were doing all the cross-functional.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so then it got kicked, so then it's like, "Okay, well, now I'll go code." Right? And they'll be like, "Oh, it's been, you know, it's been a long time since he's been on-call. He's not in the day-to-day operations for an individual team." It's like, I've been, you know, I was there for 18 years. I have been on-call.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Longer than prob- like time on call, longer than most people's careers at Amazon, by far. I've probably been on call like four years continuously.

• 55:48Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  And so you get feedback like that and you're just like this, like I'm battling the process now, right? And so to be quite honest, I was promoted in 2020 and I thought I was ready at 2016. So, you know, I was promoted to senior in 2012. So it took eight years to get there. I thought I was there in 2016 and-

• 56:07Ryan Peterman?

  Four years and you went for promo every year and they gave you like this TPM feedback or other?

• 56:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was, there were a number of obstacles, but you know, they changed the process three times during that four year span. I, just to be honest, I probably hadn't generated enough evidence that I was operating at that level. That's not to say that I didn't have the ability, but you need to generate this tangible evidence that goes into your packet. So I wasn't quite there yet. You need the support of your manager. And so there was a, there was a number of reasons why I wasn't able to get there. But a lot of it was just battling the process itself. I don't think I necessarily up leveled myself. I think I just became an expert in the process of getting promoted.

• 56:53Ryan Peterman?

  And so what did you learn from becoming an expert of that promo process for senior to?

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, you know, I, I think about it and like, is that a useful skill? Yeah, I think so. I think it's useful for people that are in Amazon. I learned a couple of things. So the big ones are, don't wait to start. I think a lot of people postpone themselves. And so they're like, oh, well, after this big project lands, that's when I'll get my packet together. But the project landing may not be the thing that you would be rejected for. And so I'm a big proponent of being kind of impatient and putting your packet in early and then getting that actual feedback about where the gaps are. So that's one failure pattern. I think the other is, you know,

• 57:44Speaker 00

  You do get some amount of credit for strengths in your promo packet. And so suppose your strengths are, you know, he's a great communicator, very data-driven. He does a lot of, you know, he's a strength, there's a strength with interviewing, great coder. Cool. Feedback, oh, well, he's not scaling through others, he could be a better mentor. He doesn't communicate upward very well to directors or VPs. So let's work on that. You don't really have to put so much emphasis on the strengths. Just make sure that they don't regress and turn into problems. But I think you can just focus on the delta. Because that's what the promo panel is going to do.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  When you're, you know, we try to make the promo packet sticky to a particular set of individuals. And so it's like, okay, well, Ryan, you know, reject it. You get the big red Stamper thing on a piece of paper. And, you know, six months later, it's like, oh, Ryan, he's not promoted yet? Okay, like, let's dig in. Again, with humans, just like the talent review process, you're going to look at the delta, you're going to look at the outliers, right? And so you're going to be like, okay, well, what changed? Right? And just like, let's look at the evidence that's there. And so if you're able to really focus in on the areas for growth, the places where

• 59:11Speaker 00

  there aren't as many data points, then I think you'll be pretty successful.

• 59:16Ryan Peterman?

  When you get that packet back, you're saying there's the strengths and then there's things that blocked it. And you're saying, strengths, they're good. You don't need to worry about those. Just focus on the weaknesses and closing those gaps.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  I would just say prioritize.

• 59:30Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  The weaknesses and gaps. And you just, I think about it like you're in a kitchen with a lot of pots and pans everywhere. It's like, your strengths, you can put that on the back burner.

• 59:39Ryan Peterman?

  Hmm.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Right? But, you know, this risotto, like, you're going to sit here and make sure that the risotto is good, right? It's like, you're adding broth. You just can't, you have to make sure that you got that right.

• 59:53Ryan Peterman?

  And so you said you were at Amazon for 18 years. Their, Amazon's culture is very specific. They have the leadership principles, it's its own, yeah, culture. What's your favorite parts of Amazon culture? And then we'll also talk about the worst parts, too.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  The worst parts in it. You know, I think there's some amount of Stockholm syndrome for me being there for so long. I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. You know, I still say I, we, even though it's been a while since I worked.

• 1:00:20Ryan Peterman?

  What's your favorite Kool-Aid then?

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Well, I just, the big thing is customer obsession. I think, especially when Bezos was there,

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  nobody ever gave lip service to the customer experience. That was the highest priority. From interns to VPs, you were always going to be doing the right thing if you had the customer in mind. Absolutely, 100%.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  And I just, I think that's a great north star.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I think you chase profits, or you focus on competitors, or, you know, there's a lot of other trappings that are there. You might optimize for the wrong thing, right? If you optimize for short-term next quarter profits, it's going to bite you in the long run. If you optimize for, you know, if you're just sort of chasing, that's another problem, right? And so, if you, if you actually work backward from the customer, you know, Jeff Bezos has that saying, they're like, hey, long-term profits and, and customers, those are the same thing. There's no difference there. I think that's wonderful. Another thing that I absolutely, I think is a superpower for Amazon is their writing culture. You know, I think the ability to write a six-page doc,

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  that was, that was accelerated by the fact that I have a writing degree. And so, I didn't realize that I had the precursor to a superpower. When I joined, I, I was worried about like, learning Java, right? Or, or learning how to, to deploy to prod. Man, I wish people would have a college class to figure out how to like, send an email. Or to be clear about like, the work that's in front of them. And so, what comes with a, a wonderful writing culture is a wonderful reading culture. We literally will spend the first 30 minutes of a meeting, reading the document. And then, we will have a discussion afterwards. There's no, this never works. It's like, oh, I sent you the document.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  So after you've read the document, we're all gonna get in the... No, nobody does that, right? Like, they should. It's like a best intention sort of thing, right? But the fact that you're forced to read it at the same time, and everybody's just sort of fast-forwarded to the same place, and then you can have a discussion? Like, that's actually super powerful.

• 1:02:44Ryan Peterman?

  So if someone was onboarding to Amazon, they really wanna make sure they hit the ground running and plug into the culture, would you say that's one of the most important things?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, if they are curious about how we know we're doing right by the customer? Yeah, I think that's a... If you have a curiosity about that, you will do really well. The writing culture? I think that's just the medium by which we express our ideas. That's learnable. That's something that I wouldn't necessarily focus on before you joined.

• 1:03:18Ryan Peterman?

  You said you're drinking the Kool-Aid, but there's gotta be something that you don't like about Amazon culture. What would be the number one thing?

• 1:03:28Ryan Peterman?

  I don't mind.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 1:03:31Ryan Peterman?

  I remember this was like a joke among my friends at Amazon. There's the leadership principles, right? And there's a list of, what, 11 or 12 things that... Yeah, everyone's kind of basing everything off of. And there's one there that was just like the recurring inside joke among our friend group, which was frugality. Basically, anything... Anytime something was crappy, or cheap, or whatever, we would just say, "Oh, frugality, so, you know, no free food, no..." There were some other things, too. Like, our hardware wasn't particularly good.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I think free food, that's a perk. If a company doesn't provide you food, like, that doesn't mean it's a bad company. So it's great on the upside, but I don't think it says very much on the other side. I do think, you know, frugality. We have a term called being frupid, where you are so frugal that it's kind of stupid. I had to beg, borrow, and plead for hardware, right? Like, I'm trying to get a... Trying to get a MacBook Pro with, like, some RAM so that it doesn't, like... Like, the fan doesn't overheat when I'm running, like, building my code. It's like... If you're gonna hire tens of thousands of software developers, you won't get them a computer that works.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Now, I'm not saying I need the top of the line thing. I just need a computer. I'm a software developer. Give me a computer that works. When intern season would come and then the interns would leave and then the vultures would come to try to steal the monitors. Right? And so it's just like, it just reminds me of Oliver Tuss. It's like more please. It's like you just want a little bit more gruel.

• 1:05:22Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah. One thing that I wanted to dig into, and I guess this is switching to another topic, is in your time at Amazon, you had 17 managers over 18 years. So you've seen a lot when it comes to managers. What was it that made your best manager the best manager out of 17?

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  I think I had more than 17 managers, actually.

• 1:05:47Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, really?

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it was in the 20s last time I checked. I took a screenshot of my phone tool. I think a lot about this. Sometimes people would complain about a micromanager, but there's a class of folks that kind of like a micromanager. They kind of need to be led. They kind of need things broken down for them. I do think that a lot of what makes a good manager is personal. The ones that I resonated with, they tended to be principles-based. So not just the leadership principle stuff, but like the way that they operated. They sort of reasoned through. You think of these principles as axioms. And so you fix certain things and those things have implications.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  And so the best managers, I think, they fixed customer obsession. They fixed things that I value, like sort of thinking ahead in the future. So they were

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Maybe willing to entertain some, you know, some stuff that in the short term like a hack. But it was always within the context of like, what should we do? What's the right thing to do in the future? Okay, so like, let's make a trade off for that. Instead of, you know, maybe some managers that I didn't like are folks that are maybe too delivery oriented, right? So it's just a constant death march. It's about delivery. It's about near term delivery. So folks that kind of thought it a little bit ahead in the future and were maybe not so constrained by what we had in front of us.

• 1:07:20Ryan Peterman?

  I see. And then what about the worst manager you had out of 20 something managers?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't want to name names or anything, but you know, sometimes I think about how did we get here? Right? And so like, we live in a, in a moment right now. And so I'm talking to you and so I, I can see it, you know, a year ago, he was here and a year before that, he was here. And I, I can kind of see the progression of how you get from, you know, maybe a university student at UCLA to where you are right now. Like that progression makes sense. I think some people that I worked with, they're like, how did you get here? Like, it's, it's sort of like the Silicon Valley thing. I forget the name of the guy that.

• 1:08:07Ryan Peterman?

  Big head?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. It had to have been some sort of big head scenario where, you know, he fell up, right? Luck happened and everything just sort of landed in their lap. So, you know, I think the worst managers I had would be a combination of like, not my style, right? So again, you know, micromanager, one person is a really caring and engaged manager to another person. And then just a little bit of like WTF, like, how did you get here? I thought that the whole performance and promotion process and the hiring process was supposed to filter a certain set of folks out and here we are.

• 1:08:49Ryan Peterman?

  At the end of each interview, I like to go over just general reflections of people, kind of looking over the career, what are the things that you learned and various other things. One thing that I'm curious about, because you were at Amazon for 18 years and in this industry, that is extraordinary. People already called me fossil for being at Meta for greater than four or five years. So, you know, what kept you at Amazon so long?

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  I think that, you know, we had talked about the number of managers that I had reported to. I had many careers, many, many careers at Amazon, right? So I worked on the first Kindle and I worked on the precursor to Prime Video before I went back to Prime Video. And I worked on, in payments. So, you know, I think the fact that Amazon does so many different things has allowed me to work on a variety of different things, you know, and didn't feel like I've been on one team. It's not like I worked in the accounting department

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  for 25 years and they handed me a gold watch, right? And so, you know, there's a VP, I think he's still a VP in advertising, Paul Codis. He told me one day, he said, "I've never switched teams."

• 1:10:11Ryan Peterman?

  Wow.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Right? Like, Amazon just kind of, you know, refactored itself around him until he was VP of Ads, right? And so, great guy. And so, you know, I don't think it's to that extreme, but, you know, I had a wide variety of experiences there. And so, it doesn't feel like one 18-year contiguous sort of experience.

• 1:10:35Ryan Peterman?

  So it sounds like you were still challenged, learning. I think when I was at Amazon for my short stint, it was difficult for me to not have wandering eyes because there were these other hot companies, recruiters were messaging me and, you know, I was just seeing that, "Oh, maybe I can get more somewhere else." Did you ever consider leaving Amazon?

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think...

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  You know, especially early career, it makes a lot of sense to jump companies. And, you know, everybody hears the common advice is like, hey, you want to maximize your total comp, you should be job hopping. I think that works until you get to the equivalent of senior. After that, I think, you know, you're an outlier here, but I think after that, it makes sense to put roots down, right? The levels, at the highest levels, I don't think you're going to find a lot of distinguished engineers, or principal engineers, or senior staff engineers that haven't been on the team. Like, the jump, the thing that got them to that level, I think what you'll find is that,

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  you know, there was like five years, you know, at least like, at least three, but more like five or so, where they really stayed on the same team on the same problem.

• 1:11:58Ryan Peterman?

  Right.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I think if you want to min-max it, what I would say is, you know, job hop every two years till you get to mid, maybe a little bit before, and then go to, you know, and then try to put roots down if you want to become a high-level tech IC. For me, I think that because I was able to go to different teams, and, you know, because I don't have that computer science background, I think staying put made a ton of sense because I felt like I didn't, there was so much to learn, right? You know, there was so many, there was so much code that you had access to, there were all of these wikis, you know, these internal videos, and so I felt like I could still grow

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  in the ways that I wanted to by staying at Amazon.

• 1:12:47Ryan Peterman?

  I remember even when I was at Amazon, the stock was climbing like crazy. Did you have any years where you were just super overcompensated? And if so, how much were you making in that year?

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  So, here's the thing. I would, you know, I was basically divesting and then, you know, putting money into other investments. And I won't say that I missed a lot of, like, the Amazon's climb, because a lot of it was was sort of invested.

• 1:13:17Ryan Peterman?

  Right.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  I don't know, I think 2020 or something like that, I probably got like an extra 350K that I didn't deserve, you know, just from, from the market returns and, and extra RSUs that were given to me. When I left, so 2024, I, you know, if, on the, on the vesting schedule that I was on, I would have made 750K, just not a lot compared to like the upper end of the salary ranges, but quite a bit, just sort of objectively as a number to make in the US at this point in time. I decided around, I think 2018 or 2019 to,

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  to maybe like not divest my Amazon shares because it was always like, you're dumb, like you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. But every time I sold stock, just if you just look at the stock price, it was just, it was just the wrong move.

• 1:14:16Ryan Peterman?

  Right.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  And so I was like, I'm done. I'm done. I'm not going to keep every single little bit, but I'm going to keep some. And so that turned out to be okay.

• 1:14:25Ryan Peterman?

  You said extra equity. Did, does Amazon have a, for high performers, like a discretionary equity or additional equity?

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Um, not that I know of. I think compensation is largely-

• 1:14:42Ryan Peterman?

  You're talking about like refreshers then?

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's at the discretion of managers. And so, you know, one of my, one of my best managers, he was basically like, YOLO. He was like, I'm out. And so he hooked me up, you know, and, and let me go. But it's not like these insane, like million dollar things that I ever got.

• 1:15:01Ryan Peterman?

  How, how big of a difference did that?

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  That was that 350 delta.

• 1:15:04Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  It was just like-

• 1:15:06Ryan Peterman?

  That was over four years or?

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  No, it was, it was just sort of-

• 1:15:09Ryan Peterman?

  All at once? You just, here's 350K? That's pretty good.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was the equivalent of that. He was, he was basically on his way out and he, he gave it to me and then he left and then that appreciated essentially the next year, like immediately. So-

• 1:15:23Ryan Peterman?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  It wasn't, it wasn't like here's, he didn't write me a check. It was just a combination of the, of sort of getting an outsized performance bonus and, and the stock price just doing really well.

• 1:15:37Ryan Peterman?

  Okay. So over the course of your career, 18 years at Amazon, one thing that I'm curious is, what was your biggest regret?

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, certain teams, I think, just reading the writing on the wall and making a sober decision about whether to stay or whether to leave, I think there was a lot of inertia. I think your default mode is to just stay put for some amount of time, and I don't know if that's useful.

• 1:16:06Ryan Peterman?

  I guess the career regret is noticing when you're in a bad situation or a bad team and just taking the initiative to change that situation, just leave.

• 1:16:16Speaker 00

  The regret is just, did you make it a decision or not? Did you take in all of the considerations and then said, "Okay, I am going to continue to stay"? It's the deferral of a decision, and so the default becomes just staying put. That's the regret. It's just like, just turn it into an explicit decision.

• 1:16:38Ryan Peterman?

  And the last question I like to ask, and I ask everyone this question, is if you could go back to you, or you just graduated college, you're right about to enter the industry, you could tell yourself something, what would be the thing that you want to tell yourself?

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  I think, I think maybe saying something around people-pleasing, right? You know, in the culture that I was raised in, and, you know, there are these tracks that you get on, and it's like, okay, well, do well in school, and then go get a job, and then go get married, and like, you know, you have this feeling of being ahead or behind, right? So that relative comparison.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  But then also, after you do a thing, after you make some sort of achievement, you're kind of looking for, to someone else for validation, and...

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  I don't know if my younger self would have like listened, to be quite honest with you, but you know, just if I could somehow learn this lesson that like the person that you really need to please is yourself, like just being like, are you doing what you want to do? Are you doing it because that's the expectation of somebody else? Are you climbing the ladder because you want to get to the top? Or are you climbing a ladder because the ladder was put in front of you? Just examining that.

• 1:18:13Ryan Peterman?

  That makes sense. Cool. Well, thanks so much for your time, Steve. I really enjoyed the conversation.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:18:19Ryan Peterman?

  Yeah, I guess now would be the time if we, if you want to shout out anything that you're working on.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  I have my YouTube channel. It's called The Life Engineered. So go and subscribe to that. I have a weekly newsletter that gets sent out. So, you know, it takes a long time to make a YouTube video. And so, you know, if you want more from me, the newsletter is there. And then if you want to chat, just join my Discord.

• 1:18:44Ryan Peterman?

  Awesome. Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much for your time, Steve. Really appreciate it.

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely.