Comment by strivingtobe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strivingtobe | Hacker News Reader

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As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.

However...

>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join

I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.

Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.

The problem isn't that you shouldn't care about your company, but that caring about your company is going to be far less important in your day to day.

And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped apart, or you are one manager change away from being very sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with minimal in-team changes.

So you can try to care about your manager as little as you want, but the changes will happen to you eventually. Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit companies, because no love for your company is going to help.

If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10 years is probably not leaving, because they know that nobody else would hire them at that level.

Everything is ephemeral though. Not just your team at work that you enjoy, or a team at any workplace that you enjoy, but everything. So don't worry about crossing that bridge until you come to it. There's no good situation that is a sure thing to continue indefinitely, so enjoy them while they're there and then be prepared to make moves if they end.

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