Why I’m leaving Amazon
- and why I hope you’ll join me
I’ve always felt constraints are what make problems interesting. Poorly bound problems tend to just be challenges of will or money; with enough of either you can expect results. Constraints, however, challenge leaders and engineers, force thorough analysis and require tough decision making. In the end though, constraints can also add value and yield a more impressive and satisfying result. Today I’m doing that with my career — adding a constraint, challenging myself and leaving Amazon.
With the privilege of being white, male and middle-class with access to good schools and a supportive family acknowledged, being successful in my 20s felt relatively easy. I showed up, did what was asked, and worked as hard as I needed to. This left plenty of time after work — so much so that I built a race car in my spare time. My career of the decade past could be defined by one goal: make money. And I did that. I paid off nearly $70k in student debt and saved enough to take a year long sabbatical from where I write this. Without a doubt the career of my 30s could be very similar. I carved out a comfortable senior engineering position with years of ‘above average’ and ‘top-tier’ rankings under my belt at a company LinkedIn consistently ranks one of the best places to work. I even managed to avoid being laid-off in the well-publicized, moral-crushing round of job cuts; but hold the trophy, please.
I’m at the point in my typical American life where wedding invitations are being replaced by baby announcements. You can’t live in this social environment without considering your own choices about children — especially with labels like “geriatric pregnancy” just a few years away. Yet as I’ve used my sabbatical to examine the problems our planet currently faces, I’m forced to consider what that future with children actually looks like. Not just sleepless nights, piles of disposable diapers, and a life-altering emotional connection which are all but assured, but also 15 to 20 years later when they start to reflect on the world around them. I can only hope that I would have ingrained in them a level of self-reflection that will one-day warrant them to ask me: What did I do when alarm bells were sounding for the planet? What did I know, and when? What decisions did I make thereafter? Or, in other words: Who are you and what do you stand for?
If we do have kids, I know it won’t be enough for me to tell them that although we received warning after warning, I decided to work on cool drones and complex robotic systems ultimately aimed at reducing costs for a trillion dollar company. It won’t be enough to say that I buried my head in engineering work within white, precast concrete warehouses ignoring the physical world outside. It won’t be enough to say I worked on engineering challenges in the name of capitalism and personal wealth. Instead, I want to tell them that, as an engineer, I tried to understand the problems we faced; that I read and thought and discussed and probed and ultimately decided to do something. That I made a conscious decision not to soldier on; hoping someone else had our ecosystem covered.
With the constant ringing of these thoughts, I can’t push into my 30s with the same singular career mindset. Instead I want to answer the generation of tomorrow with action today. Answering them by adjusting my career goal: earn an income working on something that helps make our world more sustainable. Instead of being satisfied with glamourized robots in two minute promotional videos courtesy of mega corporations, I’d rather work at the intersection of engineering and sustainability. A smaller part of the venn diagram of available jobs, to be sure, but also not at all small. According to LinkedIn’s Global Green Skills Report ’22, the number of Renewables & Environment jobs in the U.S. has increased by 237% in the last 5 years and the report notes that job demand continues to outpace labor supply. With the rapid degradation of topsoil, dwindling freshwater supplies, and a significant energy and transportation decarbonization challenge just to name a few — there is plenty of work to do in sustainable engineering. In fact, there are entire job sites dedicated to work in these areas: Work on Climate, Terra.do, etc.
It’s a popular belief among the climate change community that the 2020s have to be the decade that we decarbonize to avoid some of the most disastrous effects of climate change — and we’re already a few years in. Decarbonizing this decade means that we have to be the workforce that solves it. The workforce of right now. The workforce of you and I. I’ll go from 29 to 39 in the 2020s — my prime working life and maybe yours too. I’m no longer too young to say “I just need some experience” or “I need to pay off student debt” and I’m not old enough to say “I didn’t know” or “I can’t change my career at this point”. This problem is our problem.
Idealistic? Yes. I’ve been given that luxury and I’m paying it back with this career adjustment. There is no doubt I could work on sustainable initiatives within Amazon — there are many people who are doing exactly that at this moment. But in the end, I can’t continue to support the consumerism culture that Amazon supports. Personally, I have always felt strange buying second-hand, repairing or skipping purchases altogether to avoid consuming only to go to work in a massive fulfillment center and seeing the mountains of defective products, returns and damaged goods headed one way or another to a landfill. Today I’m reckoning this personal and professional dichotomy and saying goodbye to Amazon. I’ve learned a lot the last 10 years and I can’t wait to repurpose what I’ve learned to help a sustainable company build and scale. Then, maybe one day, I’ll be able to answer the next generation(s) with a satisfactory answer. I worked on something that gave back to the planet rather than took from it.
I worked on something for them.
