The day I had nightmares working at Amazon
And how an extremely easy fix saved it!
It was back in 2015. The regular annual performance review with my manager. It had been 3 years, and I have not been promoted so far.
Each year I would ask my manager when will I get promoted? And each year, he will tell me how I was doing a fantastic job, but there was just this one thing that I needed to improve upon before being able to get promoted.
I was pissed. I was working insane hours, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m., almost every single day. I had delivered so many mega scale projects, one of which led to $300 million in savings for Amazon.
Somehow that was not enough, and one minor issue in my behavior was sufficient to not promote me.
My feedback to my manager
I told my Manager, I am certain that each year even Jeff Bezos (the Founder and then CEO of Amazon) must be finding problems in the work his SVPs are doing. So finding these tiny problems hasn’t stopped him to make them his SVPs!
I told him, find a project that is too big, which if delivered, can get me promoted, no questions asked!
He thought about it for a few minutes, and told me to talk to another senior colleague from the team about a project that otherwise he was supposed to do. And if…
