I started reading. People who graduated in 2025 and 2026 in computer science, IT, and computer engineering. They can’t find a job. Some got laid off right after joining. Some had their offers taken back by the employer.

I got emotional. It is crazy how the market is treating freshers right now.

I could have scrolled on. My plate was already full. But I’m on the inside of a market they can’t get into, and that made it hard to look away.

I know a small part of that feeling. I wrote about my own job hunt in The No-Feedback Rejection Stings.

Then I noticed something in myself. A spark. I have some experience now. I have learned some things. And I did not wait for a calm week. There is never a calm week.

I did not sit down and plan how to help. Planning would have felt responsible. It would also have been a way to wait. A question costs one minute. So I posted one: how can I help?

I offered one thing myself. Free one-on-one calls on weekends. I’m not a recruiter. I’m someone with experience who is willing to talk.

At least ten people asked for one.

Now I want to put it all in one place, a platform where anyone can book a slot and get advice. I’m sorting that out.

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Work did not slow down

At the same time, my work got faster.

For two weeks I’ve been the on-call. The load is very high.

Every minute is a decision. Should I respond to this ping? Should I open that email? There are more than 100 a day. Yesterday I read none. I stayed on the one thing I was focused on.

Earlier this month, I wrote that I came back to this kind of pace to learn what to do first. I wrote it in You do not decide to become a workaholic. Now the lesson is here.

You can’t answer everything, so you decide what deserves an answer. It is uncomfortable. It is also the skill I asked for.

Every minute felt like the most important and most urgent thing I could be doing. I think that is the best way to do what the world needs from you.

One minute. One thing. All in.

Skipping my inbox yesterday was a bet. I’d rather choose what to miss than miss everything by accident.

At home, my wife got busy too

All week, my wife had seven clients a day. For a beginner at nail salon, that is a big deal.

She does the marketing. She talks to all kinds of people. She figures out what each one needs. Seven clients a day means ten+ conversations a day. That is a lot of chances to get better.

Some people did not like the service. That is sad to hear. I once heard that

You will feel more embarrassment than you think. She is getting that practice frequently now.

My part is the tech side. I promised her that until the end of this year, in I got my dream job. Now Mondays feel heavy. This week I set up her Google Business profile.

Then there is the rest of life

Life did not pause for any of this.

A big courier company lost my parcel. They made us wait almost a month. “We are tracking it. We are tracking it.” They are still not giving the reimbursement we expected.

There is also a hospital bill that should not exist. Insurance should have covered it. It did not. That one is on my list.

And I still wake up around 6:30 a.m. to play tennis. In the evening, I’m with my family.

I don’t want to remove any of it. Myself, my family, and my work still get most of my time. My wife’s business and the freshers sit on top of that.

It is a lot. I know.

What I’m taking from this

Don’t plan how to help. Just ask.

It won’t work for everyone. I can try my best. Out of ten people, if it helps some of them, that is my success criteria.

Ten calls will not fix the job market. I know that. I’m not trying to fix the market. I’m trying to be useful to a few people.

I used to think a full plate meant saying no to the next thing. This week showed me a better question. Not “do I have room?” but “what goes first?”

That is the part I need to learn. Prioritize. Act faster. Get good at it.

I’m not cutting anything. I’m learning what goes first.

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Now I learn something new every three months or six months.

Same company.
Same job.

The only thing that changed is me. I figured out how the machine works.

Nobody warns you about this part of the dream.

Yesterday I read ’s Saturday essay, Just one more year. It was written for solopreneurs/entrepreneur, people who run businesses. I work for one of the biggest companies on earth. It still read like he had been watching me.

He says that over five years he has received thousands of emails that say some version of: “I’m making great money, but I hate what I do.” The people who write them, he says, seem almost embarrassed to admit they’re bored or miserable in a situation other people might kill for.

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I read that line twice.

The dream had an expiry date I didn’t see

In college, I fantasized about Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. How did they grow so fast? I wanted inside, to learn their processes, their tools, their secrets.

Like every CS student, I also dreamed of my own startup. I put that dream in a drawer. I wrote about the college version of me in Big Tech Dreams vs. Reality.

Then I got in. The first week was awesome. Two months in, I still woke up on Mondays fully charged. Amazon had built its own software for everything, and every internal tool was a door to a room I had never seen.

Then year two. A promotion. Then another year. And so on.

Somewhere in there, Monday started to feel heavier.

Amazon didn’t do anything wrong. Once you know how the machine works, the machine stops teaching you. AI has brought new tools, and they are genuinely new, but the nature of the work is the same. The learning curve that used to point straight up went flat.

That is what a dream job becomes after five years. Just another Tuesday.

I felt the first crack last year and wrote Why We Lose Our Spark? Back then, I told myself to lean into the work. That was right for that season. I’m not sure it’s right forever.

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Why we kick the ball down the road

Justin describes the trap, and I recognize every piece of it.

You worked for years to get here. Walking away feels like betraying your younger self. You’d be leaving money on the table, and the title, and the expectations of your family, friends, and boss.

So you say: one more year. I’ll change something next year.

For many people, as Justin writes, “one more year” turns into five, ten, twenty. They just get even better at work they no longer love.

I’ve watched this loop before, with visas instead of jobs. Indians in the US saying “we’ll move back in 2028” until a decade disappears. It is different cage but same lock.

My answer to Justin’s question

Justin asks:

Would you rather make the same money you make today running the business you have now, or half of what you make building something you’re genuinely excited about?

My honest answer is awkward. I already chose less than half. When I moved from the US back to India, I accepted making less than half of what I earned there.

So money isn’t what’s holding me back. It’s something harder to admit. I’ve lost some trust in my ability to build something of my own.

Years inside a giant system will do that. You get very good at your piece. You forget you can build the whole thing.

So it doesn’t mean you quit tomorrow. Instead make smaller moves. Experiment in your spare time.

So last night, I made a decision. I’m doubling down on what I love, in the hours that are mine.

The business in our home

Three months ago, my wife started Chikooo Nails & Mehendi Studio from our home. It is already profitable.

Our rhythm is simple. I give directions. She executes. Some of my directions have been wrong. Some worked beautifully. Either way, she is a great executor, better than myself.

Until the end of this year, she gets my spare time. Anything she needs on the tech side, I’m her person. With AI, one engineer can now do what used to take a small agency.

Our plan has two steps:

1. Make the pipeline bigger. Offer more kinds of services so more kinds of clients find her. I think we’ve done this.

2. Make the pipeline full. That’s the next two months: bringing the right clients through the door, and bringing them back.

It’s small. It won’t replace my salary. That’s not the point.

The point is that I’m learning every hour again. Pricing. Marketing. Networking.

What makes a stranger trust a small studio run from someone’s home. And every time a new client books, we’re both proud. Not performance-review proud. Built-it-ourselves proud.

What I’m taking from this

You don’t have to burn down your career to get your spark back. You only have to stop waiting for next year.

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Annie Dillard put it in one line in The Writing Life:

“One more year” isn’t a plan. It’s a decision you make again every Monday.

This Monday, I’m deciding differently.

If you’re in the same place, with a good job and quiet Mondays, tell me in the comments: what are you building on the side? And if you’ve already made this move, I’d love your advice.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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If a face tightened, I found a softer ending. If a room might notice I was missing, I went. If I’d said what I thought and the silence lasted a second too long, I offered another version before anyone asked.

I was always making adjustments for reactions that hadn’t fully arrived.

That person is fast. He knows how to take over before I’ve had a chance to choose.

For a long time, I mistook that speed for instinct, that instinct for identity.

To evolve myself, I’m now trying to let a sentence stand. Let an absence be an absence. Let silence pass without turning it into a problem I have to solve.

I don’t feel like the person I’m trying to become. And I’m not waiting until I do.

Their disappointment is not a task

The first thing I want is to be fearless.

If I upset someone, or miss what they expected, that can stand. It is not a job I have to finish before I leave the room.

I met this fear in a specific meeting. A senior engineer was telling my skip why he was leaving the team, and he was good at it. I stopped hearing him and started writing my own speech, so I would not say the wrong thing and burn the bridge.

I wrote about that meeting in Learning from the Best: Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety. The fear was not going blank. The fear was the relationship after the words.

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I have run a smaller version of that meeting for years. I kept people comfortable. I called it being easy to work with.

A relationship that only lasts if I stay slightly false is not one I am keeping. I am paying for it with the sentence I meant.

I am not looking for a fight, and I am not proud of hurting someone.

But I am done treating their disappointment as an emergency. They can be unhappy with me.

The team can live with that, or it cannot.
The friendship can live with that, or it cannot.
The relationship can live with that, or it cannot.

I will not settle it by affecting myself.

Don’t be present everywhere

The second thing I want is to be unavailable.

When I am easy to get, people get casual about getting me.

Raj Shamani said the professional version of this to Robert Greene on Figuring Out. Early in his career he went to every networking event, every conference, anywhere he might be seen. He thought being everywhere would help. It did the opposite.

Being seen in very few places helped more. He called it the law of absence.

Greene had already written the rule, as Law 16 of The 48 Laws of Power.

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Too much circulation makes the price go down. The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. On the show he said what the absence is for.

If you are at every event, people take you for granted.
If you are not, they wonder what you have that is better than being there. When you do walk in, the hour means something.

Greene’s own limit on the law is simple. Absence only raises your price once people already know you. Leave before that and you are not rare. You are forgotten. Shamani had been in the rooms. Then he stopped attending all of them.

Robert Cialdini wrote the mechanism in plain language in Influence:

People want what they can’t have. That saying is older than the book, and it is easy to fake. Scarcity with nothing behind it is hiding.

So I am keeping the practice small. I choose the rooms. I choose the meetings. When someone asks why I wasn’t there, I don’t build a polite story around it.

It was not worth my time.

I mean the hour. I don’t mean the person.

I described this no once already, in Are Successful People Just Better at This One Thing? The people who get further are not pleasing everyone. They guard the hours that move the real work.

I wrote it as a lesson for people-pleasers, myself included. A calendar invite is where I find out if I meant it.

I hold what I already said

The third thing I want is confidence.

This is the one I have started, so I trust it more than the other two.

I say the thing. Then I stay with it.

I used to revise on contact. Not the next morning, after a better argument. In the same room, because a face changed.

That is not thinking. Thinking can take a night. It does not take the temperature of the table.

Last week I caught a different copy of the same habit. A teammate stayed late, so my evening started to look unfinished. I wrote about those hours in You do not decide to become a workaholic. The laptop was one imitation. This is the older one. I was also imitating whoever needed me to agree.

I trust what I just said, and I hold it. If I was wrong, I will say so when I know. I will not say so because the room got cold. My values don’t move in the same breath.

I edit the sentence when the facts change. Not when the mood does.

What I am keeping

1. Disappointment is allowed. I don’t owe a repair before I have left the room.

2. I pick the rooms. If the hour didn’t make the cut, I say so. I don’t add a story.

3. I hold the sentence. I change it when the facts change. Not when the mood does.

You don’t become this person by writing the three lines. You become them the next time someone is let down, and you don’t rush to fix their face.

My old version is quick. He will offer the softer ending, the extra meeting, the reversal. You can hear him.

But I don’t like to continue act like him to evolve.

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I lived in the U.S. for seven years, and worked here for about five of them, before I moved back to India. The move is settled. The team is new.

What I love about this company is that a new team is a new business. Each org has tenets, and a thing it refuses to drop.

In AWS, latency is that thing. A slow answer is a wrong answer. On different team, cost is that thing. A customer will wait a moment. A customer will not keep paying a bill that climbs.

I wrote about living inside that tradeoff in What trade wars taught me about decision-making. You pick the failure the customer will not forgive. That pick is the speed.

We are fast because we can afford to be wrong

We release features in days. On my previous team, the same kind of change took weeks. Breaking a thing here is affordable. That is the difference. There, if one feature went down, every minute turned into millions of dollars loss. When a minute costs that much, slow is the careful choice.

I had named this split once already. In I stopped writing code. I started babysitting for AI, the speed showed up where nobody was depending on the system yet. This team can afford a bad afternoon. The last one could not.

We are fast because we can afford to be wrong.

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The pace is terrific.

Then I noticed the other thing I was learning.

You do not decide to become a workaholic

If a teammate opened a laptop after the day was over, I opened mine. If they took a Saturday, my Saturday started to look unfinished.

A holiday became a day I was choosing to fall behind. Nobody assigned this. I would have been embarrassed to admit I was copying it.

You do not decide to become a workaholic. You sit next to one.

Three things keep the copy going.

The first is mimicry. If the people you respect are tired and still typing, rest starts to look like you are not serious.

The second is the review. A lot of companies, mine included, score you against other people. I wrote about how that feels in Surviving and thriving in Amazon’s performance review.
Once the question is whether you are better than the person beside you, their open laptop is information. You are not chasing a finish line. You are chasing them.

The third is the one I do not want to lose. Sometimes they are simply faster, and you want to see how. That instinct is good. The skill is worth taking. The hours sneak in with it.

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I went and checked whether this was only my month, or a thing people had already measured.

The hours did.

In 2025, Paweł Atroszko, Edyta Charzyńska, and their colleagues asked 33,222 employees in 85 cultures about the work addiction they saw around them.

In most of the 85 cultures, when employees saw more work addiction in colleagues, they also reported more of it in themselves, and more stress. Job satisfaction fell. Colleagues tracked with you more tightly than the boss did.

The signature on the review matters less than the laptop that is still open.

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Chaos is the norm, because survival is the need

So I asked why a team gets like this.

Because the team is trying to survive.

Some groups do not have the customers yet. Some have them and can lose them. Miss the expectation, and the team is finished. So they ship a lot of features, a lot of services, a lot of fixes for problems that might matter.

They also delete a lot. A thing that was urgent in the spring is a candidate for removal by summer. Building and deleting are the same motion. We do not yet know what keeps us alive, so we touch more things than a calm team would.

Chaos is the norm, because survival is the need.

A Hail Mary is a late throw

I have seen the next stage, when survival stops being a pace and becomes the actual question. People stop choosing. They throw.

In American football, a Hail Mary is the long pass you throw when the clock is nearly gone. The plays you practiced are over. You throw it far and hope. The name is a prayer. Most of them are not caught. We remember the ones that were, so desperation gets remembered as courage.

In December 2014, Jeff Bezos described the company version of that pass. At the Business Insider Ignition conference, he said companies that stop experimenting “eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence.” He does not believe in betting the company. “That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.”

What I kept from that speech is the timing. The bold part was the smaller bet, made while you still had a season. By the time you are throwing as far as you can, you are already late.

A Hail Mary is what you throw after the ordinary bets are gone.

I have watched something like it in more than one place. One of those places was a past experience in team. The plans got larger because the normal plans had not worked, and a larger plan felt, in the room, like seriousness.

I came back for two skills

When I left my first AWS team, I wanted the pace back. That team was fast in this same way. People prioritized from every direction, all day.

I wrote a goal for myself on the way out. I wanted to come back to a pace like that and learn two things: how to pitch, and what to do first.

This team is that return.

What I am learning here is simple. Say the point clearly. Then pick the one thing worth building. A lot of ideas show up in a week. We ship the one with the most impact, then the next. On a slower team, an unclear priority can sit for a month. Here the week ends, so you have to choose.

In There are only two ways work gets done, I split work into two kinds. One kind gets done because of pressure. The date is close, so people stay. The other kind gives you energy and sends you home.

This team is the first kind. It ships. It also pulls the evening in with it.

I already wrote about those evenings at home. In I was on the floor with my son. I was still working, the laptop was shut and I was still thinking about the job. The thinking starts next to the person who has not logged off.

I can keep the skill. I do not have to keep their hours.

If you join a team like this, learn what they say no to. Then, on a Thursday night, ask a plain question. Am I still working because the work needs it, or because they are?

If you have been on a team like this, reply and tell me what you kept and what you stopped. I am still deciding which hours are the job, and which hours I copied.

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What I am keeping

1. Speed is a price, not a personality. We ship in days because being wrong is affordable. On the last team, a minute down was millions, so we took weeks. Both were rational.

2. Workaholics come from the side. Colleagues’ work addiction tracks with yours more than the boss’s does. A review that compares you to them will call the copying discipline.

3. I came back for the pitch and the priority. Those stay. The weekend does not. A Hail Mary is not vision. It is what a team throws when the smaller bets never got made.

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My son is one year old.

When I am with him, I get on the floor. I talk to him. I laugh with him. I make the noises he is learning to make. I try to be one year old again with him.

The laptop is closed. I am not typing. But I am still thinking about work.

A thread from the afternoon. A decision that can wait until tomorrow. Count those minutes and I am working past the hours the job asks for.

Even when I am not working, I am still at work.

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I tried to stop

I know what I want that hour for.

My son.
My wife.
My parents.

The room I am actually in.

I tried, on purpose, to stop. It got worse. Work, then work again.

I have named this wrong before. In I hated sports I called anxiety boredom for years. This time I called it discipline. That is not the name.

In 1987, a white-bear study by Daniel Wegner showed the trap. People told not to think of a bear thought of it more.

“Do not think about work” is still thinking about work.

So I asked a better question. #2 Why does my mind pick the job every time the room goes quiet?

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Nothing else was important enough

This is what I found.

I keep thinking about work in my free time because I do not have anything else important enough to think about.

Work has a next step. My free time has been whatever is left. The quiet hour fills with the one thing I have treated as serious. For a long time, that has been the job.

I had never chosen anything else, so work kept the evening.

I keep thinking about work because nothing else is important enough to think about.

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I am keeping the writing. I am not starting the company.

I have wanted to write for a long time. Now I do it in public.

In Amazon title didn’t change. Project scope did. I said the page is where I find out what I think. That is still why.

More than a hundred of you subscribe. I want that to become a thousand. Not because I want a bigger number on a screen.

Because more people means more replies, more comments, and more collaboration. And that is how I get to help people directly, not only in my own head.

In college I wanted my own company. There was no product. Only the want. I am not starting it.

Building is cheap now. Someone can tell an agent to make the app, and it can be up in minutes, hours, or days.

Then a copy shows up. They fight for the same users. The one with the funding covers the market.

In March 2025, Y Combinator said about a quarter of its winter batch had codebases roughly 95 percent written by AI.

I am still optimistic about the tools. I wrote why I am optimistic about AI, and a task that used to take me two days can come back in an afternoon.

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Open source is the same race. The expensive company has to cut the price and the people, and some shut down.

OpenSearch, OpenTofu, and Valkey are already that fight. Producing the thing got fast, as I wrote in Amazon’s software engineer job quietly changed. Deciding what should exist did not.

I do not want a decade whose prize is a lower price.

The hour that gives the energy back

#3 What is important enough that my mind would hold it instead of the job? I do not have the full answer. I have a clue.

When a friend calls about what is stuck, and I can help, I hang up more alive than I was before I picked up.

I have seen that at work. In There are only two ways work gets done, the good teams send you home with more energy than you brought.

Pressure ships the date. Helping gives the hour back.

After the call, I feel more alive than I did before it started.

In 2022, Yuzvendra Chahal said Rahul Dravid tells him, when the over is hard, “Yuzi just back your strengths, we trust you.”

Helping is that strength. I am doubling down on it.

One place is this page. If you are stuck, reply. That email is the call.

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The other is a path I have already published. It has not moved. SDE II, then SDE III, then Software Development Manager. I said why in To grow, I had to forget how I used to work.

That job is people and the product together. The code still matters. Someone else’s growth is the part I want more of.

Final: Step back, or the job keeps the evening

The world wants everything faster. Every few days something shocking shows up, then another.

The clock got shorter because leaders believed the tools made us faster. Some of that speed is real. The pressure is bigger.

With my son, the step is simple. Floor. Talk. Laugh. Make the noises.

If my mind is at the office, I missed him, even while looking at him. He is one. This year does not run again.

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Then I looked up and noticed the day had changed shape.

A new chat. The ticket. The context I would have kept in my head two years ago: which service owns the truth, which failure mode nobody wrote down, the sentence the customer actually said. I paste it in. I wait. Something comes back that used to be my afternoon.

I have been asking around. Teammates here. Friends at other big tech companies, and at companies that are not in tech at all. The description is almost word for word.

Open a session. Explain the task. Read what returns.

We already have a name for the person who watches, redirects, and escalates when the situation outgrows the rules. We call that person a babysitter.

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That is a large part of the job now.

A few weeks ago I wrote that Amazon’s software engineer job quietly changed. AI did not take the chair. It took the part of the work we had spent years getting good at, and left us with the part the model cannot settle: what should exist, and whether the thing in front of us is actually that. I underweighted the bill.

Deciding what should exist, in practice, means reading what a model already wrote and finding the sentence that should not be true.

From the outside, this looks easy. Anyone who is not the one responsible can watch a feature appear before lunch and conclude the developer job got simple.

The generating part did. A task that used to take one person two weeks can come back the same day. The review did not get simple with it. Someone still has to stand behind the words.

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Speed is real when nobody is using it yet

On a greenfield project at startups, with no customers and no midnight page, teams are taking the friction out of review. The model writes the change. Another model reviews it. A person approves, or nobody does. Ideas get a week instead of a quarter. I understand the bet. If the cost of being wrong is a deleted branch, you should try more ideas.

The numbers from inside one company match what I have been seeing.

Researchers followed 802 developers and 196,212 pull requests at a mid-sized, AI-forward company from January 2024 through April 2026.

Leadership had asked engineers to double the number of merged changes.

By April 2026, output per person was 2.09 times the old baseline. Company-wide, the volume of changes grew about 3.1 times. The pool of people acting as reviewers grew only 1.5 times. The load on each reviewer roughly doubled.

The organization absorbed that gap by reading less carefully. Pull requests with at least one human review fell from 89 percent to 68 percent.

Automated review climbed from about 19 percent to about 84 percent. The reviews that still contained a human comment fell from about 39 percent of changes to about 21 percent. More of what remained was a nod. Merge rates and revert rates stayed flat, and the authors are careful about what that means. Those are short-horizon signals. They do not show you the defect that arrives in month three, or the design that becomes expensive to stand next to.

One more detail matters. The speedup concentrated in newer code. In legacy repositories, it was barely there.

That is the split. On an empty field, with no user to injure, removing the human reader is a strategy. On a system people already depend on, the same move is how a corner case leaves the building inside a paragraph that sounded finished.

A quiet review has the same shape. It shows you found nothing. It does not show that nothing was there.

Clearer writing is a better hiding place

On September 22, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5. I tried it. It is better. It puts the point earlier. It spends fewer words getting there. Early testers said its code comments came back short and useful, where older models had written little essays in the margins. Anthropic’s own note is that clearer writing makes the work easier to follow and easier to check.

I believe the first half. I am less comforted by the second.

The model can still talk for a long time. A day’s sessions are a stack of documents, diffs, and designs, each one locally coherent. The corner case is rarely labeled. It sits inside a sentence that is grammatically fine and slightly untrue.

Retry, where the system must not retry. User, where the caller is an admin. A timeout copied from a service that can afford to wait, pasted into one that cannot.

Hallucinations are the obvious failure, and everyone has a story about one. The failure I trust less is the smooth one. Nothing looks invented. The page reads like a careful colleague. Your shoulders drop. That is when the miss happens.

We used to meet that poverty as a search problem: too many tabs, too many docs, too many alerts. The new version is a verification problem. The information is fluent, on-topic, and already formatted like a decision.

Attention is the only tool left that can refuse it.

There is no daily word allowance. There is a rate, and then there is a leak.

I went looking for a study that would tell me how many words a person can truly read in a day. There isn’t a clean one. What exists is more useful.

In 2019, Marc Brysbaert pooled 190 studies and 18,573 readers. The average adult, reading English nonfiction silently, manages about 238 words a minute. Most people land somewhere between 175 and 300. Two uninterrupted hours at that pace is close to 28,000 words.

That number sounds generous until you remember what kind of reading it measures. It is comprehension of prose. It is not inspection. A workday is also not two clear hours. After the meetings, the two hours I spend on a design are often the whole budget.

And inspection leaks.

When Raymond Panko reviewed the proofreading experiments, readers who were trying to find mistakes caught about 81 percent of errors that were not real words, and only about 66 percent of errors that were real words in the wrong place.

On harder material, even nonsense-word detection fell to roughly half. In a 2024 study, Adrian Staub and colleagues hid nine small wording errors inside ordinary articles and asked people to read for understanding, clicking anything that looked wrong. The typical reader caught one.

Those planted errors were tiny: a repeated the, a missing of, two short words swapped. The brain repairs them on the way through, because it is trying to understand, not to audit.

Code and design docs ask for the stricter job, and the dangerous mistakes are stricter still. They are real words. They compile. They agree with the paragraph above them. Fluency is camouflage.

This is why a document that took someone fifteen minutes can honestly cost a senior two hours. The author, often with a model, produced language. The reviewer has to turn that language back into a system, hold the system in mind, and ask what the words declined to say.

Fifteen minutes is generation. Two hours is reconstruction.

A day of review is a day you lent your mind out. The thinking you meant to do gets spent translating. That translation is real work. It is also a conversion loss. You do not get the two hours back for the problem you actually wanted to hold.

The cost is landing on seniors, because seniors were already the people asked to review the design, review the code, and say what the project is.

I wrote in To grow, I had to forget how I used to work that growth has started to feel like deleting instincts. The instinct to produce is now the one that floods someone else’s queue. The instinct that still matters is the one that can stop a page.

In article: I almost left my team, the clock had gotten shorter because leaders believed the tools made us faster. The clock did get shorter for writing. It did not get shorter for reading. That gap is why the week feels unhinged. The calendar moved. The eyes did not.

The other babysitter was already here

I used the word babysitter for the AI, and then recognized the office.

A babysitter does not raise the child. A babysitter keeps the child inside the rules until the person in charge comes back.

Watch. Redirect. If something breaks the rules, escalate.

That is the loop with the AI. It is also the loop the company has run on adults for longer than any of these tools have existed.

Here is what you may do.
Here is what you may not.
Hang the badge on your neck so the building can tell you belong to it.
If something hurts and it does not fit a ticket, take it to HR and let a process hold it.

Most days the task arrives already named, from your manager, or your manager’s manager. You can propose a thing you actually want. If it serves a purpose the company already has, it gets a season, and if it works, the company makes the money.

If it does not, it is deprioritized. I have watched the person who loved the idea leave with it. Not every time. Often enough that people learn to want smaller things.

To get work done, the split that stayed with me was internal motivation against external pressure. Autonomy and mastery on one side. Deadlines and the wish not to be seen failing on the other. Babysitting lives on the second side. The fence is drawn. Your job is to notice when something crosses it.

Put the two babysitters together and the day gets very small.

The company watches the employee. The employee watches the AI.

In both rooms you are responsible for an outcome you did not fully author, inside boundaries you did not set. Do that long enough and desire thins out.

The senior who still has taste — who can say “this should not exist,” or “this case will page us” — is spending that taste on a reading list that got longer because everyone else got faster.

What I am keeping

I have not changed my mind about the tools. When the loud story was fear, I wrote why I am optimistic about AI. A machine that does in a day what used to take a team two weeks is a gift. I use it. I am not handing the gift back.

I am changing where I think the scarce hours go.

Three things, before the queue eats them:

1. Generation speed and review speed are different currencies. A fifteen-minute document can cost a senior two hours, and those two hours are close to a full day’s budget for careful reading once the meetings are gone. Brysbaert’s 238 words a minute is the ceiling of ordinary reading, not the speed of finding a lie that looks like a sentence.

2. The errors that matter look finished. Better models make this sharper. Opus 5.5 really is clearer, and clarity helps you navigate. It also helps a wrong sentence borrow the authority of a right one. The studies are blunt about this:

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3. Taking the human out of review is a product decision. It is rational when there is no customer and the branch can die. It is how a lived-in system discovers, in production, the case a model folded into a confident paragraph. One company’s review load doubled, and the response was to automate the reading and thin what humans still commented on. Watch that pattern in your own building. The speed will show up in the dashboard before the miss shows up in the incident.

The part I do not have a clean answer for yet is the practice. What I refuse to read. What I now make the AI show me before I spend the two hours. Which pages are worth reconstruction, and which are babysitting dressed up as ownership.

If your reading queue ate your week, reply with one miss you still think about. Tell me how long the document took the other person to produce, and how long it took you to trust it.

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Not because the work got harder overnight. Because the clock got shorter.

One day. One week. “Can we ship it by Friday?” — as if the size of the problem stopped mattering the moment someone said AI.

I asked friends at other companies the same question. Different logos. Same story. Delivery yesterday. Scope doesn’t care. Complexity doesn’t care. The calendar only cares that AI is in the sentence.

In Amazon’s software engineer job quietly changed, I wrote that AI didn’t replace developers — it replaced the part of the job we spent years getting good at. The quieter sequel is this:

When leaders believe tools made us faster, they don’t just change how we work. They change how patient they’re allowed to be.

An Upwork study found that while 96% of C-suite leaders expect AI to boost productivity, 77% of employees say AI increased their workload. Nearly half don’t know how to hit the gains their company expects.

So the pressure isn’t only in my head. It’s in the air.

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And air is hard to explain to an SDM, a TPM, or a PM — especially to one stakeholder who walks into every room convinced they’re already carrying the whole project alone.

That’s where I get triggered. Not because I don’t want to deliver. Because I can feel the gap between what they think the work is and what it actually is — and I don’t always have the language yet to close it.

It is like I never trained for it. Engineers are trained to work with computers but working with human is whole another game.

Almost four months into this team, I thought the classic escape hatch:

Changing teams is never a clean swap

A team change is not a reset button. It’s a trade.

In To grow, I had to forget how I used to work, I wrote:

No decision is right or wrong. It is always the trade-offs.

So I listed what I’d actually give away.

What this team gives me

1. Mornings that still belong to me. My first meeting usually starts after noon. I can log in later — which means tennis every morning. I didn’t want to give that hour back lightly.

2. A day that still ends in India. For this project/team, I don’t need to sync with US or Europe. I can log off like someone with an evening. That boundary was hard-won after moving back.

3. People who get it. Especially the SDEs/Collegues. They feel the same pressure. They don’t pretend timelines are magic. In a season like this, that shared reality is rare.

If I left, I told myself three painful things might leave too:

1. high-demand people
2. high-paced environment
3. constant re-prioritization

Then a quieter thought showed up.

What if those three things don’t leave at all?

The honeymoon problem

Workplace research calls this the honeymoon–hangover effect. Satisfaction often spikes right after a move — then drifts back down as the new place shows its own friction. The grass looks greener because you’re standing in week one of spring.

A new team might remove this stakeholder. It might also remove the late login, the India-friendly calendar, and the teammates who already understand. Or the work itself gets boring. I’ve lived that before.

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In Same Company (Amazon), Different Worlds, I said culture is the operating system and the company is just the application. Every team is a different OS. You don’t upgrade by installing a new one. You swap one set of bugs for another.

As Seneca put it:

Not because every team is identical. Because you travel with you — and so does the era. Right now, the era is AI-shaped impatience. Changing desks doesn’t change the decade.

So the better question became: What do I gain if I stay?

What staying buys me

1. Better communication

It’s never only hard work that makes someone successful. Communication is the force multiplier.

I get triggered when I can’t explain something. That usually means I don’t have enough depth yet in that service or failure mode. Every week here is new work I’ve never done. Of course the explanations feel shaky. Staying forces me to translate complexity for non-technical people before I feel 100% expert. That skill compounds everywhere.

2. Learning to push back

From a senior engineer, I kept this almost word for word:

Give a date with some buffer even date is unreasonable to them — and let the things roll on.

Not because you’re lazy. Because SDMs and TPMs often don’t feel the hidden dependencies the way engineers do.

A date without buffer isn’t commitment. It’s a future apology.

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3. Practice where it hurts

If I change teams every time communication gets hard, I don’t become better. I become a tourist of discomfort.

What I’m carrying forward

I’m not saying never change teams. I’ve changed before (a lot), and I will again — I wrote about that in How to Succeed When Teams and Workplaces Change.

I’m saying: don’t confuse a hard season with a wrong team.

Ask first:

• Is this pain unique to this team — or common to the industry moment?

• What three good things would I lose that I might not get back?

• What skill is this friction trying to build in me?

For me, the answers were clear enough.

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The pressure is real. The awkward stakeholder conversations are real. But so are mornings on a tennis court, evenings that still belong to India, teammates who understand — and a chance to get better at the part no model can do for me: explaining reality without shrinking it.

Theodore Roosevelt said the credit belongs to the person in the arena.

Right now, the arena isn’t a new team. It’s this one — speaking clearly, pushing back cleanly, and staying long enough for the skill to catch up to the chaos.

If you’re staring at a transfer form for the same reasons, reply and tell me what you’d be trading away. I want the real list — not the LinkedIn one.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Everyone says AI is changing the world. Ask how, and the room goes quiet.

William Gibson had the more honest version: the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. I have been watching that future from inside Amazon.

Engineers here can reach for nearly every frontier model.

You stop rationing tokens.
You start rationing attention.

When the cost of generating code collapses, the software engineer does not vanish. The job relocates.

The old edge is gone

For a long time, a good SDE had a private advantage. You knew the domain. You knew which service owned the truth. You knew the failure modes nobody wrote down.

That edge is being flattened. AI is unusually good at understanding as well as writing code, and we have been using it to write almost all of it. Not as a parlor trick. As the default. The gap that used to be “I know this system and you don’t” can now close in an afternoon.

Nobody is better than a well-directed model at producing the first version of the code. What the model does not have is the thing Fred Brooks named in 1986:

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

We treated that sentence as a warning. AI turned it into a job description.

The tools caught up

Two tools make this concrete.

Amazon’s Kiro is a spec-driven environment: requirements, then design, then tasks, then code. If an agent can write the implementation, the scarce skill is writing the spec it cannot misunderstand.

Kiro Crew is the next layer — an open-source, multi-agent workspace that keeps working across sessions. One engineer, several agents, overnight, while you are in a customer meeting.

The tools get better every release. When the instrument improves weekly, the job cannot stay annual.

A week that used to take a quarter

Here is the pattern, collapsed into one week.

An operations team asked for something that sounded too small to staff. When a workflow stalled, they did not want another dashboard. They wanted one sentence on the page they already had open: why this stopped, who owns the next action, and what to do in the next five minutes.

Two years ago, that request would have entered the old machine: a one-pager, a design review, weeks of implementation, a launch checklist. Six weeks if you were lucky.

This time the conversation started Tuesday morning, with the people who actually click the page. They did not want “more visibility.” They wanted to stop guessing. By lunch, Kiro had a spec. By evening, there was a working slice in a branch. The feature was real before the second sunset.

The cycle flipped

The old sequence was: customer, requirements, design, alignment, implementation, test, release. The expensive middle was everything after “we should build this.” Because building was slow, we treated requirements as sacred and kept engineers away from customers.

That logic only holds if building is hard. It is not, in the same way, anymore. Give a clear requirement to an agentic workflow and, depending on the feature, you can have something real the same day.

So the sequence flipped. Implementation can be delegated. The conversation that decides whether the feature deserves to exist cannot. That conversation is landing on the SDE.

The majority of time-to-release is no longer writing code. It is customer alignment and team alignment — often by the engineer who used to be protected from both. You sit with the customer, hear the actual problem, turn it into a spec, keep the team pointed at the same target, and ship again before the last launch has cooled.

The new job, same title

Nobody sent a memo. The work just moved.

The service still has to stay alive. The code still has to be correct. That part got faster, which makes it easier to get sloppy. The engineer who cannot review an agent’s output, or refuse a bad requirement, is not more productive. They are a high-speed liability.

The center of gravity is different. The job is now: talk to the customer without a translator, write a spec an agent can execute, align other humans, and ship so often that the calendar itself becomes the hard problem.

That last one is the part I did not expect. You can spin up five agents. You cannot spin up five versions of yourself to sit in five rooms and mean it.

The title still says Software Development Engineer. The week says something closer to product engineer and conductor of a small orchestra of models.

If you are still optimizing for “I can write this service from memory,” you are training for a race that already finished. Syntax is no longer a moat. Taste is. So is sitting with a customer long enough to hear the requirement they did not know how to say.

AI did not make software engineering smaller. It made coding smaller. The rest of the job — the human part, the “what should exist” part — got louder.

The title has not caught up. The expectations already have.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I am not someone who liked sport.

Not as a kid. Not as an adult. Not even as a viewer.

I liked indoor games. Cards. Boards. Anything with a table between us.

Cricket, tennis, football — the outdoor stuff people mean when they say sport — felt worthless next to studying.

I also hated watching it.

IPL. Football. Whatever was on.

I never understood the dedication. They were having their best time while playing. Why spend yours watching?

Then I got older, and the anxiety got louder.

When people run out of things to say, they talk about the weather. Men usually talk about sports.

A match. A player. A rule I could not explain.

Friends watch on the way somewhere. Colleagues watch between tasks. Someone puts a game on in the car and the car becomes a stadium.

My mind would start before anyone asked me a question.

I don’t know this. I don’t know the rules. If I stay quiet, I look odd. If I speak, I look fake.

So I called the whole thing boring.

That was easier than saying I was scared of the conversation.

The problem isn’t sport. It’s the room.

Here’s what I had wrong.

I thought I disliked a game.

What I actually disliked was being found out in a room where everyone else seemed fluent.

Sport talk is not really about sport.

It’s a shared language. A way to stand a little closer without getting personal. If you don’t have the names, the grudges, or the rules, you are not quiet. You are outside.

Most people in my spot do one of three things.

They avoid the topic.

They pretend they follow it.

Or they decide, forever, “I’m just not a sports person.”

None of those worked for me.

Avoiding made the next conversation scarier. Pretending is a full-time job. And “not a sports person” is a story you tell so you never have to try.

Watching didn’t fix it

Once, I talked myself into a full game.

Not a lifestyle. An experiment.

One thing was obvious fast.

You have to pick a side. That’s how people enjoy it.

I couldn’t.

I kept supporting both teams. The other side had also worked. They had also earned the chance to be there. Why choose one?

It felt fair.

It also made the match almost impossible to feel.

Watching sport works when you borrow a team and the score becomes personal. If you refuse to do that, you are watching a contest and feeling nothing. That’s not a moral win. It’s the wrong job.

I still don’t want that job.

What I hate more is the person eating popcorn, saying ugly things about a player they have never stood near.

You are not there. You didn’t stand a chance in front of that player. The remote is not a whistle.

Theodore Roosevelt said it cleaner than I can.

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You can skip the game. You don’t get to be cruel about it.

What actually worked

I still don’t watch much sport.

I started playing tennis.

About 30 days. One hour at a time.

I am not bad. That surprised me.

I play with a beginner. Same level. We learn together, and the level goes up because neither of us needs the other one to already be good.

That changed more than any match I forced myself to watch.

Shame needs an audience. A partner who is also new removes most of the audience.

I don’t hate playing anymore.

I can also say the true sentence now. I had anxiety about this. There is nothing wrong with admitting that.

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Thirty days is not a new personality. It is enough to stop lying about the doorway.

Good is mostly access

I used to think skill was a verdict.

Good players were good. I was not. Done.

Then I started repeating a swing.

People love the 10,000-hour line. The researcher behind it, Anders Ericsson, said the number was never the point. What matters is repeating the right thing, with feedback, in a place that lets you correct the last attempt.

So here is the version I believe now.

If a player is good, they usually got to do something thousands of times in a decent environment.

If a player is bad, they often never got that chance.

Not a lesser person. A missing hour. A missing court. A missing partner who would let them be clumsy.

That’s the lesson I wish I had earlier.

You are not behind. You are early.

I loved it enough to automate it

Our society books amenities on an app.

Tennis court slots open at midnight, for the day after tomorrow. The morning slots people want are gone before coffee.

I didn’t trust myself to remember the window.

So I set a small job to run at 12:01 and book the court while it was still open.

I am grateful for education (and AI) to get what I wanted here.

This was the first time those tools got me something I actually wanted on a Saturday morning.

That’s the tell.

When you love a thing, you stop negotiating with it. You make tomorrow morning easy.

Try this

If sport talk makes you go quiet, don’t start by becoming a fan.

Do this instead.

1. Say the true sentence. “I don’t follow it. I get anxious about it.” Admission is not a flaw.

2. Play, don’t watch. One hour. A beginner beside you. Same level. Shame hates company that is also new.

3. Judge skill as access. Good is usually reps in a decent environment. Bad is often a missing chance. Neither is a life sentence.

4. If you love it, remove the friction. I booked the court at 12:01 because I wanted the morning more than I wanted the excuse.

You don’t need the rules of cricket to start.

You need one hour, one supporting person, and permission to look new.

I still go quiet when the match comes up. The difference is I no longer treat that as a biography.

I can say I don’t follow it.

I can also say I play.

Reply and tell me the room where you go quiet. That’s usually the thing worth starting.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I moved from Amazon US to Amazon India, the work got bigger, the expectations got heavier, and the habits that made me successful in Seattle started getting in the way.

I had to forget a lot of them.

In Same Company, Different Worlds, I called culture the operating system and the company the application. The application stayed Amazon. The OS changed.

What I did not say then is the harder part.

Coming home was not only unlearning America in the cafeteria.

It was unlearning the job.

Alvin Toffler spent Future Shock arguing that in a world that keeps rearranging itself, the rare skill is not just learning.

I used to think growth meant adding skills. Lately it has felt more like deleting instincts.

Amazon is not one company. It is a lot of small ones.

One thing I still like about Amazon: it lets you change teams. If a hiring manager wants you, you can move. The internal transfer process is not a maze. That is how I got from the US to India in the first place.

This is my sixth team in five years. On average, one team per year.

Not all of those moves were a plan. Re-orgs are normal here. Amazon builds itself out of small, autonomous groups — the famous “two-pizza teams” — each with its own customer, its own roadmap, and its own unwritten rules.

“Amazon culture” is not one culture. It is a collection of microcultures that share a logo.

You feel that the moment you land somewhere new.

The first five teams were in the US. This sixth one is in India.

In the US, I could stay in my lane as an SDE and still be considered strong. If I needed another team’s time, I could take it to my manager. My SDM would talk to their SDM. Priorities got negotiated one layer above me.

Here, that cushion is thinner.

I have watched junior engineers walk into rooms with another Software Development Manager — alone — and ask for what their project needs. Not as a special assignment. As the default.

The first time I had to do it, my body treated it like a mistake.

It wasn’t a mistake. It was the job.

Ownership has a thin line

Amazon’s Ownership principle is short on purpose:

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

Andy Jassy has called Ownership the most attitudinal of all the Leadership Principles. It is not only “I will finish what I promised.” It is “I will pull the right people together when the problem is bigger than my ticket.”

That sounds noble until you live it.

Because once “never say that’s not my job” becomes the air you breathe, the line between your responsibility and your manager’s responsibility gets very thin.

Someone can always say: this is ownership.

Last week I got asked to send an email to senior SDEs and SDMs about a real bottleneck — the kind of efficiency problem that slows a whole project down. I was also asked to include everyone working on it. Basically the org.

Previously, my manager would have done that for me. A meeting. A hallway conversation. A sentence said by someone with the right title, so nobody had to feel called out in writing.

This time, the sentence was mine.

It felt like I was about to upset a few people, and the whole org would be in the audience.

I sent it anyway because it needed to get done.

By the end of the day, the replies were stacked. And they were supportive. The bottleneck got named in public, which is often the only way a bottleneck becomes real. The work started moving.

Nobody died. Nobody piled on. The story I had written in my head — you will look disloyal, you will embarrass someone, you will pay for this — did not happen.

The fear was a forecast written by my old job.

The new job answered differently.

Amazon has another principle for this exact discomfort: Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Leaders are obligated to challenge something when they disagree, even when it is uncomfortable or exhausting. They do not swallow the truth for the sake of social cohesion.

I had been practicing Ownership on the code.

I had not been practicing backbone on the people.

Those are different muscles.

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The cave, for me, was not a harder system design. It was putting my name on a sentence that might make a senior person uncomfortable.

I keep a line for yearls like that:

When you feel nervous or anxious, trust that you are on the path of growth.

The nervousness was information. It was pointing at the edge of the old job.

The hardest part of a new job is not the new skill. It is the old reflex.

Psychologists have a name for why this is so sticky.

In the 1940s, Abraham Luchins showed this with a simple experiment. He taught people one way to solve a puzzle. It worked. Then he gave them a new puzzle with an easier answer sitting right there. Most of them never saw it. They kept using the old way. He called it the Einstellung effect: a habit so useful it blocks a better option.

That is career growth in one lab result.

The US version of my job had a method that worked: do excellent engineering, escalate people-problems to my SDM, stay slightly behind the curtain.

On this team, that method is the water jar I have to put down.

At Amazon, the jump from SDE II (L5) to SDE III (L6) is not “write harder code.” L6 is the level where you are expected to move work across teams, influence people who do not report to you, and name the thing that is stuck — in writing, with your name on it.

The email was L6 work wearing an L5 badge.

Forgetting is not betrayal of your past self. It is respect for the present one.

Max De Pree put it in a sentence:

If they can measure you, you can measure the relationship

I was still chewing on that email. Then, I came across Tim Denning’s piece on habits he stole from a millionaire boss.

Point four stopped me.

Every company, every manager, every project has KPIs. The person being measured — the engineer, the project lead, the one whose name is on the date — is treated as accountable. Miss the number, and the pressure comes downhill.

Tim’s point is that this should be a two-way street.

The person being measured should be allowed to walk the same accountability back up the chain: here is the vision, here is what I want, here is what this level of risk should buy.

His boss’s line was blunt:

Most people (including me) would not phrase my career like a movie quote. But I agree with the physics of it.

If you never ask what you want, the table does not magically set a plate for you.

The lesson is not “be aggressive.”

The lesson is: silence is also a negotiation. It just negotiates against you.

I know why people stay silent right now. The tech market has been ugly. I survived layoff rounds at Amazon. A lot of smart people learned the same lesson I almost learned: become a “yes” employee. Don’t push. Don’t ask. Don’t be the person who makes a manager’s week harder.

I understand that instinct.

I am not going to live in it.

I believe this:

No decision is right or wrong. It is always the trade-offs.

By not asking firmly for what you want, you are accepting a trade-off: less money, a slower title upgrade, a smaller surface area to lead.

You can call that loyalty.
You can call that patience.
You can also call it leaving value on the table while you take on more risk.

I don’t agree with that trade-off.

I have been getting LinkedIn messages and direct emails from other companies. All smart people receives that.

That is not a threat I plan to drop on a table. It is information. The market is still willing to talk to me. So why would I be less willing to talk to the people I already work with?

A date is not a plan

I already sat down with my manager and my skip-level once.

We aligned on a target: submit for SDE III (Level 6) in Q2 2027.

I wrote that down in public three weeks ago. Ambition without shared reality is just a private fantasy. That meeting made the fantasy a calendar item.

A date is not a plan.

What that meeting did not fully put on the table is the rest of the vision.

The projects I am on are high priority, high importance, and urgent. This is a high-pace team. The work matters. The dates are real. And the team is already asking me to do L6-shaped things: talk to other SDMs myself, send the org-wide email, own the bottleneck instead of handing it upward.

That is the next conversation I will have with my manager and my skip-level.

The work already looks like the next level. Let’s treat the reward like we treat the risk.

Not as a demand. As alignment.

Technically, this is part of their job. Amazon wrote it down. Hire and Develop the Best says leaders develop leaders and take coaching seriously. Strive to Be Earth’s Best Employer asks a manager a set of questions that should make any skip-level sit up:

Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next?

A good manager’s job is not only to extract delivery. It is to inspire, to motivate, to put the team’s needs and the individual’s growth in the same room, and — when the evidence is there — to promote.

Here is the vision I will share:

I want to be promoted from SDE II (L5) to SDE III (L6).

Then I want to try the SDM path.

Not because I am bored of code. Because the part of this work I keep coming back to is other people’s growth. That is also why I write Master Mentee. I like being close to someone else’s career while they are still becoming who they are.

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Most people don’t do this conversation because it can go the other way. It can bruise an ego. It can be heard as impatience. It can be filed under “ungrateful.”

That is the trade-off.

Jeff Bezos used to talk about one-way doors and two-way doors. Most decisions, he said, are two-way doors: if you are wrong, you can walk back. You should make those quickly, at the team level.

A career conversation with your manager is a two-way door.

Staying quiet for two more years because the market is scary is how a two-way door rusts shut.

If your manager (or your employer) cannot meet you on growth, title, and the shape of the work — after you have done the uncomfortable version of Ownership — you may be working for the wrong person (or company).

That sentence used to sound dramatic to me.

It sounds like hygiene now.

What to carry forward

Four things I want to remember — and maybe you do too:

1. Growth is often subtraction.
The skill that got you here can become the reflex that keeps you here. If a new country and a new team ask you to do things your old manager used to do, that is not a glitch. That is the curriculum.

2. Ownership without backbone is just extra work.
Taking on more tickets is easy to confuse with leadership. Naming the bottleneck, in writing, with your name on it, is closer to the real thing. I thought that email would land like a fight. It landed like support. The story in my head was the last thing I needed to unlearn.

3. A date is not a plan.
Aligning on Q2 2027 mattered. It is not the whole conversation. If the company can hand you KPIs, dates, and org-wide visibility, you can hand them a clear vision: L5 to L6, then the path after that. Silence is a decision.

4. Accountability should travel in both directions.
Your manager’s job is to grow you. Your job is to make that growth impossible to misunderstand. If the door stays closed after an honest ask, you learned something more important than a yes.

I don’t know yet how the next conversation will go. I will write about that when I have the ending.

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Until then, I am practicing a smaller sentence:

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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What I left behind

In the US, a few things felt like defaults at job — not perks, just how work was supposed to work:

• You are respected more. People listen when you speak.

• You are treated better. Your time, your personal boundaries matter.

• Your work timings matter. Nine to five is not a fantasy; it is the baseline.

The smaller comforts fade into the background too:

• Free barista coffee at the office

• Leaves auto-approved

• Flexibility that is assumed — “I have a hard stop at 5” accepted without drama

None of this felt special while I was there. It felt normal — almost invisible. You do not wake up grateful for a predictable calendar. You assume that is just how professional life works.

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It is only when those things disappear that you realize how much you had taken for granted.

What I found when I landed

Then I started working from India, and all of those defaults disappeared — quietly, without announcement, as if they had never existed.

Meetings are scheduled for US time zones. PST-friendly slots dominate the calendar. Nobody asks whether 8 PM IST works for you; they ask whether the US team is available.

There is no shared concept of 9-to-5. Work hours are not defined. They stretch. They bleed. They follow whoever holds the most power on the call, not whoever is sitting in the most inconvenient time zone.

Manager’s asked me to schedule meetings past 6 PM. Not once as an exception — as a pattern. The implicit message: your evening should be flexible.

Here, even sick leave needs approval. When you are unwell, system still need permission.

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That is the part nobody warns you about when you move back. Not one big loss — a hundred small defaults you never named, suddenly missing all at once.

I am not writing this to complain about India or to romanticize the US. I am writing because it is surprising — genuinely surprising — to watch how land changes your external value.

The same person. The same skills. The same employer. The same job title. Mostly the same work.

Different geography, different country, different rules. The respect, the treatment, the regard for your time — it did not travel with person in their suitcase.

A story from a very different world

There is an old story that I can relate — not because my situation is the same, but because the shape of the pressure feels familiar.

Sir Thomas More was King Henry VIII’s powerful Lord Chancellor. When Henry broke from the Catholic Church to declare himself Supreme Head for Church of England, everyone was expected to fall in line, take the oath, and echo the crowd.

Thomas More refused. He did not organize opposition, but chose absolute silence instead. Under Henry’s 1534 Treason Act, however, staying silent was legally treated as a denial of the king’s title. Silence became treason.

He was tried in July 1535 with a foregone conclusion. He was sentenced to the brutal death of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, though the king later commuted it to beheading as a rank-based mercy.

More was executed on July 6, 1535. His crime was not violence, but simply thinking differently and refusing to repeat what everyone else was saying.

Henry’s England tolerated no dissent. The crown used trials as public performances to demonstrate that defying the group carried a devastating cost.

On the scaffold, More’s last words were:

“I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

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He had refused to say what everyone else was saying. He paid for it with his life—not because he was loud, but because he would not pretend.

Setting a boundary — and paying the social cost

So I am setting boundaries around my work hours.

At minimum, I am starting with this: no calls between 8 PM and 9 AM.

If you are reading this from a US or European time zone, you might think — what is the big deal? That is just thirteen hours.

See it through my eyes for a week.

If your manager says: Prioritize this meeting over everything. Every colleague shows up in zoom meeting at 10 PM.

You are the only person who does not. Then peer pressure comes into the picture.

It is not a scheduling conflict. That is social isolation inside your own team. You are not just declining a meeting. You are visibly, repeatedly, going against the group. And groups notice.

Previously I declined a 8 PM sync. Maybe everyone else joined. I don’t know. Nobody said anything — which somehow made it feel worse, not better.

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We are not in Henry VIII’s England

Here is what I hold onto:

It is not the same world anymore.

At Amazon — my employer — the culture claims to reward people who push back on right things. Disagree and commit. Have backbone. Challenge ideas, not people. Whether that holds at 10 PM IST is a different question — but the principle is there.

The pressure I feel is not state power. Nobody is going to the Tower of London for declining a 10 PM call.

But the human pattern — the discomfort of being the one who goes against the group, the subtle cost of visible difference — that pattern is old. Very old.

Recognizing that does not make the boundary easier to hold. It makes it easier to understand why it is hard, and why holding it anyway matters.

What I am taking forward

I am not moving back to the US tomorrow.

I am building a life here. But I am also building rules for how that life includes work — rules that protect my mornings, my evenings, and my ability to show up as myself, not just as the person who always says yes to the late call.

If you have a similar story, I would genuinely like to hear how you handled it. Not the LinkedIn version. The real one.

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I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Disclaimer: I use AI to proofread and help shape the final version of my articles. But every piece is reviewed and published by me. Not an automated newsletter.

I’ve been at Amazon for more than 60 months — almost five years. This is my sixth team.

Changing teams wasn’t always my decision. Only twice did I move intentionally. Every other time, it was a re-org or a business need. But I always liked working in different teams, and still do.

Six teams. Four different organizations within Amazon. Four completely different work styles.

This might help if you’re joining Amazon and trying to understand the team you landed on. Or if you’re a manager trying to build an environment where people actually thrive — not just deliver.

This piece goes one level deeper: same company, same pay band, same leadership principles — but the team culture can change everything.

When salary stops being the motivator

In FAANG, including Amazon, people are paid well. In most cases, salary alone doesn’t drive the work.

After five years across six teams, one pattern became impossible to ignore.

There are two ways to get work done.

1. Inspire internal motivation

The original idea: driven by autonomy (choosing the right path) and mastery (doing it well).

2. Apply external pressure

The opposite: driven by deadlines (meeting demands) and avoidance (not wanting to fail others, or not wanting to be seen failing).

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I’ve lived in both. Not once. Many times. That’s how I arrived at what follows.

When pressure gets the job done — and poisons everything else

External pressure works. Things ship. Deadlines get met. Dashboards turn green eventually.

But not in the right way.

You accumulate complexity. Tech debt piles up. People stop caring about the craft and start caring about survival. The environment stops feeling human.

The main concern is bureaucracy.

Every decision needs a document and approval. Every mistake needs a narrative. Process replaces judgment. Velocity replaces quality.

A few other things I noticed in pressure-first teams:

Status theater. Weekly meetings become performance reviews in disguise. People learn to report progress, not discuss problems.

Documentation as armor. Design docs aren’t written to clarify thinking. They’re written so that if something breaks, someone else takes the blame.

Hero culture. Firefighting gets rewarded. Prevention gets ignored. The person who does the production fix at 2 AM gets praised. The person who fixed in BETA stays invisible.

Quantity over quality. The work is never “the right thing.” It is just “the delivered thing.” Shipping beats correctness. Closing tickets beats solving problems.

People come and go. There is no long-term tenure. Those who stay usually aren’t the strongest builders. They’re the best at playing the visibility game — always in the right meeting, always aligned with whoever holds the red pen, always quick to attach to a win and slow to own a mess.

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Out of this, the end product as a person is angry and frustrated.

And here’s the part that stuck with me most:

I’m not in touch with anyone from those teams.

Not because we had a falling out. Life just moved on. When pressure is the glue, the relationships don’t survive the re-org.

The other side: slower, quieter, and built to last

The inspiring side can feel boring at first.

Nobody is yelling. Nobody is counting your hours. Nobody is treating every sprint like a referendum on your worth.

But it has long-term value.

Innovation comes out of it. Yes, pressure can force a breakthrough once in a while. But it doesn’t scale. You can’t scare your way to a second great product.

You like the people around you. You go above and beyond — not because someone is watching, but because the work and the people deserve it.

You find the right project and the right person to do it. That person does an amazing job and never need to re-do that again.

Deadlines still exist. But they’re used in the right amount — as guardrails, not weapons.

Motivating people is hard. You do it by helping someone find their motivation — the impact of the project on real people, the craft of doing it well, the trust of the team counting on them.

You show up on Monday morning with energy. You go home with more energy than you arrived with.

That environment creates a different kind of person. Not soft. Not naive. Grounded. Generous. Ambitious.

The manager — and the culture they protect — is the difference.

What the research says about this

This isn’t just my experience. Psychologists have studied it for decades.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed Self-Determination Theory, which distinguishes between autonomous motivation (you act because the work matters to you) and controlled motivation (you act because of pressure, rewards, or fear of judgment).

Their research — and a recent meta-analysis of workplace studies — consistently finds the same pattern: when people feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they perform better, stay longer, and report higher well-being. When those needs are blocked — when work is driven by compliance and fear — burnout, turnover, and disengagement follow.

Dan Pink popularized a simpler version of this in Drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose beat carrots and sticks for knowledge work.

On the other side, Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows why inspiration scales and pressure doesn’t. Teams where people can ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas learn faster and perform better over time. Teams where people stay quiet to survive may hit a deadline — but they rarely build anything that lasts.

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Pressure can produce a successful sprint. It rarely produces a career, service, product, — or a friendship — you’re proud of five years later.

How to spot which environment you’re in

Early signals matter. Within a few weeks, ask yourself:

• Do people admit mistakes openly, or rewrite history in retros?

• Is the best engineer the most respected person — or the most politically visible?

• Are design discussions about the customer — or about who will get credit?

• Would you recommend this team to a friend?

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Same company. Same LP deck on the wall. Completely different operating system.

What to carry forward

Three lessons — for any team you might one day lead:

1. Pressure delivers. Inspiration compounds. One hits the date. The other builds people who stay, learn, and raise the bar around them.

2. Watch how work gets done, not just what gets shipped. Tech debt, turnover, and silence in meetings are data. Read them early.

3. If you lead, choose the environment on purpose. Autonomy and mastery aren’t perks. They’re how you get work that survives the next re-org.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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That was December 29, 2024 — the first time I’d ever put my career hopes on a page where other people could see them: Reflecting Past: Years of Growth and Looking Ahead.

It wasn’t a flex. It was a commitment.

Today, if you only looked at my headline, you might think nothing much happened. The work tells a different story. So does the writing.

1. Career: Same title, different altitude

I’ve taken on more complex and ambiguous projects. I’m leading projects end-to-end by myself. The work itself is the proof — not a new badge on a business card.

More importantly, I started owning my career instead of waiting for someone else to “notice.”

I aligned with my manager and my manager’s manager on a clear target: submit for promotion in Q2 2027.

That alignment matters.

Ambition without shared reality is just a private fantasy.

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Next step: don’t chase promotion in a silo

I don’t want this to happen in isolation.

My next move is to talk to Senior SDEs early — not for approval theater, but for honest feedback while there’s still time to course-correct.

I’ll tell people around me, plainly:

I’m pushing myself to operate at the next level. I’m aiming for the next-level promotion. Tell me where I’m falling short.

Growth gets faster when it’s visible — and when you invite criticism early.

Takeaway: Don’t wait for a title to prove you’re growing. Make the work louder — and make your ambition public to the people who can help you raise the bar.

2. Writing: No fancy title needed

Since I started writing publicly in October 2024, I’ve published 42 posts.

At the moment, I don’t want a fancy writer title. I’m happy being the Master Mentee author.

Thinking and sitting down for a few hours on the page has been life-changing. I see the world differently because writing forces me to slow down enough to notice it.

I suggest everyone start writing — and publish it.

The first few pieces feel hard. Then you learn a liberating truth:

The world is so busy that almost nobody cares about your articles as much as you do.

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That sounds harsh. It’s actually freedom.

You’re not being watched as closely as your fear imagines. Publish anyway.

Takeaway: Writing isn’t about becoming a “writer.” It’s about becoming someone who can watch their own mind clearly enough to learn from it.

3. Self-awareness: Watching the mind

I became more self-conscious in the useful way — not more anxious, more aware.

I watch my thoughts. I notice which direction they’re going. I mess up from time to time. Then I try to learn the mechanics behind the mess, not just the surface story.

That leads to a belief I keep coming back to:

Mistakes never happen in the present

A mistake always lives in the past.

Think about how people talk about old relationships:

“I chose the wrong partner.”

In the moment, it rarely feels that clean. You’re choosing with the information, courage, and self-knowledge you have then. Years later, with new information, the same choice suddenly looks “obviously wrong.”

That’s when many of us do the cruelest thing: we beat up our younger self for not knowing what only time could teach.

A famous story of the same trap

In 1985, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple — the company he co-founded.

At the time, it looked like the ultimate wrong turn. Public failure. Humiliation. A “bad choice” stamped on a brilliant career.

Years later, Jobs said getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to him. It stripped away success-ego, forced him to start again, and eventually led back to Apple with clearer judgment.

The point isn’t that firing is good.
The point is this: the “mistake” only looked like a mistake after the ending was known.

In the present, Jobs was making decisions under uncertainty. In hindsight, the world rewrote the story.

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Psychologists call this hindsight bias — the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect. In the 1970s, researcher Baruch Fischhoff showed that once people learn how something turned out, they rewrite the past. Outcomes feel inevitable. Uncertainty disappears. Past-you starts looking foolish.

But past-you didn’t have future-you’s information.

So I try not to beat myself up the way I used to. I ask a better question:

What did I learn that I couldn’t have known before?

After a breakup, a bad hire, a failed project, a “wrong” career move — everyone becomes an expert. “It was obvious.”

It wasn’t obvious.
It only became obvious after the ending was known.

Takeaway: Don’t punish your younger self for choosing without today’s wisdom. Judge the choice by the information available then. Learn. Update. Move.

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What to carry forward

Three lessons from this season — for anyone, not just me:

1. Own your growth in public. Don’t wait for a title to prove you’re leveling up. Do next-level work, tell the right people what you’re aiming for, and ask for feedback early — before the decision is already made.

2. Keep writing without needing a new identity. You don’t need a fancy identity to start. Write. Reflect. Share. The habit changes you more than the title ever will.

3. Treat mistakes as information updates. New data doesn’t prove past-you was stupid. It proves present-you knows more. Learn the lesson. Skip the self-punishment.

If this resonated

If you’re in a season where your title looks the same but your insides don’t: you’re not behind. You might be compounding.

Visualize again. Write it down. Tell someone. Then go do the work that makes the next title feel inevitable — not surprising.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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It stopped me in bed.

Not because of the big ending. Because of the small scenes. The unpaid Dean Witter internship. Sleeping in a BART bathroom with his son. The paint-stained interview. The father who refuses to turn hardship into anger.

Chris Gardner gets hit again and again - right when things start to look up. Most people in his shoes would become bitter.

He doesn’t.

In the film’s quiet thesis, Gardner wonders about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence:

“How did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue…”

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That line hit me harder than the Oscar-bait ending.

I was him in my early 20s. And the struggle started long before that.

1. Hardship doesn’t require a hard personality

I can imagine almost anyone in Gardner’s position becoming irritated, agitated, and angry all the time. Life throws a hard ball the moment things look good.

But Gardner keeps walking. He protects his dignity. He protects his son. He protects the dream.

“You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you you can’t do it. You want something, go get it. Period.”

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That hit close to home. The financial struggle was real. I had to find ways to earn money. And I was always pulled toward computers and the internet.

2. The night I broke my father’s laptop

I was 12 when my father bought a Lenovo laptop.

In India then, a laptop wasn’t “a gadget.” It was luxury. Closer to a cleaning robot or VR headset.

I wanted to help him. Viruses were everywhere. Antivirus subscriptions were expensive. So when a friend’s brother offered a “free” install file, I felt like a hero.

I plugged in the pendrive. Installed. Rebooted.

The laptop froze.

No touchpad. No keyboard. No restart. No shutdown. Just a dead machine until the battery died.

I cried myself to school the same day. My father worked late nights on that laptop. I was sure I’d destroyed everything. I wasted all those father’s night.

You might wonder how “antivirus” freezes a laptop. Twelve-year-old me had a conspiracy theory: antivirus companies spread viruses to win customers. Looking back, it was almost certainly malware dressed as help. The lesson wasn’t tech. It was what happened next.

My father didn’t yell.
He didn’t shame me.
He said: We’ll get it fixed. If not, we’ll buy another one.

We did get it fixed. No data lost.

And that soft landing lit a fire. I didn’t run from computers. I ran toward them. I needed to know how they worked and what they could do to a life.

Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset helps explain why that moment mattered. When adults treat mistakes as recoverable, not as proof you’re “bad” -- kids stay curious instead of collapsing into shame.

My father gave me a soft landing. Curiosity did the rest.

I later saw the same trait in Chris Gardner: do the hard thing without turning your pain into punishment for everyone around you. Life can go wrong. Every move can veer off course. Character is how you respond.

3. When family finances collapse, the mind goes into survival mode

Few years later, my father got a chronic illness. Hospital bills crushed the family income. Savings started to look temporary.

So I started saving. Thinking twice before eating out. Hunting deals to buy stuff cheap. Finding money where most people only saw apps.

Behavioral science has a name for that pressure. In a famous Science study (Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao, 2013), researchers found that money worry can tax cognitive bandwidth, roughly like a 13-point IQ drop or losing a night of sleep.

Scarcity doesn’t only empty the wallet. It captures attention.

That was our house. Survival first. Ambition second.

India’s new application market boom had one loud game: refer and earn.

I played it hard.

I promoted apps while studying full-time. Resold rewards in the secondary market. Then came LINE’s big scheme:

• Every 25 referrals → bonus

• At 300 referrals → a new iPhone

25 was easy. 300 was war.

I hit the milestone. Held the iPhone. My sister wanted it but we sold it for the money our house needed.

Then I did it again, not on one account, but more than ten. Then I moved into direct dollar payouts for installs. Enough to keep the house running, paying hospital bills and tuition fees.

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In Gardner’s language: this was the unpaid internship season of my life. Ugly work. Necessary work. Not glamorous. But forward.

4. Progress has a bill - pay attention to which one you’re paying

But progress has a bill.

I failed two subjects in my first college semester.

That was the fork.

If I kept grinding referrals at full speed, I might have saved more months… and lost the path that later led me to Amazon.

So I stopped. Recalibrated. Kept moving, just in different direction.

This is the part inspirational movies sometimes skip: the edit.

Hustle without a steering wheel becomes self-sabotage. Gardner didn’t only grind. He chose the path with the highest long-term compounding, the brokerage seat, even when it meant unpaid months and sleeping on bathroom floors.

“Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something. Not even me.”
— Chris Gardner to his son

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The quieter version for students and early-career hustlers:

Don’t let short-term survival tell you that long-term self-destruction is “necessary.”

The Soft Landing Rule (a simple mental model)

Chris Gardner taught me one thing the movie never says out loud:

Most people turn pressure into anger. Anger into bad decisions. Bad decisions into more pressure.

The successful ones do something else:

1. Take the hit without becoming the hit. Life can be unfair. You don’t have to mirror it.

2. Turn soft landings into fuel. My father’s calm didn’t erase the mistake. It converted shame into curiosity.

3. Hustle for survival — then edit for the future. Referral schemes paid bills. Stopping them protected the career. Both mattered. Timing mattered more.

4. Walk forward in baby steps. Not every stride has to be dramatic. Forward is forward.

Call it the Soft Landing Rule:

When life throws the hard ball, respond soft enough to keep learning — and firm enough to keep moving.

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Chris Gardner slept in bathrooms and still showed up like a professional.
My father faced a dead laptop and still chose repair over rage.
We faced hospital bills and still chose curiosity over bitterness.

One question to keep (and one research-backed reminder)

The next time life hits you mid-progress, ask:

Am I about to harden… or land soft and walk forward?

Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec (1994) found a painful pattern in regret:

So protect the dream. Take the baby step. Edit when needed. Keep walking.

Because happiness isn’t a finish line you own.

It’s a pursuit you practice. Every ordinary day you refuse to quit.

“Walk that walk and go forward all the time. Don’t just talk that talk, walk it and go forward. Also, the walk didn’t have to be long strides; baby steps counted too. Go forward.”
― Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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One month later, I’m still adjusting coming back to India — but this time the surprises weren’t about meetings or lunch breaks. They were about money, customer support, and a reminder that even carefully chosen career moves can suddenly feel uncertain.

The hardest upgrade isn’t the lifestyle. It’s the mindset.

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed since moving back is this:

Not because they don’t want better things, but because spending still feels wrong.

I see it most clearly in my parents. They spent their lives optimizing every dollar (rupee). My mother will go out of her way to buy the same vegetables for a few cents less. Leftovers never go to waste — they go to someone who needs them, or at the very least to animals. Every hour, she turns off every extra bulb (or fan), even when the house still needs light. My father keeps old slippers for years. Buying new ones feels like disrespecting what still works.

I inherited some of this too. I still check three online stores before buying anything — not because those few dollars would make me rich, but because if I paid X and later found the same item for less, it felt like someone had tricked me. Or worse, like I had been careless.

I’ve intentionally improved a lot in this area. My parents still struggle. They don’t get happier by upgrading their lifestyle, and that surprised me more than I expected.

Why don’t people enjoy spending — even when the money is there?

This isn’t just my family. I see it in my friends too. One of them makes more than half a million dollars a year, and he will still spend an hour to save $10. Anyone looking from the outside would say that trade-off doesn’t make sense. But he isn’t doing it consciously. His mind learned that path years ago — and it never fully left.

Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do.”

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Money habits are no different. Financial psychologist Brad Klontz has a useful idea for this: our money behavior is driven by unconscious “money scripts” formed in childhood.

One of them is money vigilance. It looks healthy — save carefully, avoid debt, stay careful. Taken too far, it becomes anxiety and an inability to enjoy financial success.

Another is money avoidance. It links wealth with guilt, and that can lead to under-spending even on reasonable purchases.

When a carefully made decision suddenly feels fragile

Recently, Amazon announced another round of layoffs — this time specifically in its AGI organization, the same org I recently moved into.

You know that feeling when you make a decision carefully, and then the ground shifts underneath it? That was me. I moved from another team into an AGI team just one month ago, and then the layoffs arrived. Luckily, I wasn’t impacted. But I’m with everyone who was.

Layoff news is rarely gentle. It arrives suddenly, and it can change a life overnight. I saw that up close with a roommate who was laid off in Amazon’s first wave, just when it started across companies.

It’s scary — not only for the people who lose their roles, but for everyone around them who suddenly wonders what “secure” even means.

And yet, over five years — or twenty — that same disruption can become useful in ways you can’t see at the time.

A friend of mine is in London today because a layoff pushed his career onto a different path. At the time, it felt like an ending. Looking back, it was a beginning.

Steve Jobs put it better than I can:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

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There is not one path in life, my friend. Sometimes the path you didn’t choose is the one that opens next.

The other shock: customer support

The second big realization this month has been simpler — and more frustrating. Customer support here is often poor, and even international companies don’t feel the same.

Amazon US customer support is not Amazon India customer support. You can’t return many items easily, even when the quality is wrong, or the product arrives different or damaged.

That gap became very real when I recently bought term insurance. I wanted to protect my family from the unexpected.

The agent filled out the entire application for me — without asking, without sending it for review, and without even sharing a copy.

Then Indian law did something useful. An automated email landed in my inbox with the filled details, and many of them were inaccurate. I asked them to correct it. Over the phone, the agent casually said they had.

That “yes” didn’t give me comfort, so I sent a formal email to their official address and asked for a written response.

Then I went ahead with multi-step, multi-day, multi-week process of getting term insurance. Eventually the policy became active. Then I received the final documents — and the application still hadn’t been updated.

I reached out to customer service. The responses were unclear. Sometimes they closed the case without a proper explanation. I finally said something simple: if I don’t get a clear answer, terminate the policy and refund the money.

That got their attention. They filed a complaint, and I finally received a short written response that gave me just enough comfort to keep the policy:

“We have carefully re-evaluated the application and the information shared by you. We would like to inform you that, as per our underwriting guidelines, there is no impact on the aforementioned policy with respect to the declaration made by you regarding your health status.”

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Not a long explanation or specific details. Just a few generic lines.

I’m staying with what I have — not because the experience was great, but because I already spent weeks getting here.

Maybe the next company’s support would be worse. I don’t know.

What I do know is this: I need to change my expectations around customer support in India. Not lower my standards completely — but stop assuming every system will behave like the ones I got used to abroad.

What this month taught me

Coming back after years away doesn’t just reset your calendar. It resurfaces old habits, and it exposes new gaps.

Some of those gaps are personal — like the money scripts we carry from childhood.
Some are structural — like how customer support works from country to country.
And some are professional — like realizing that even a thoughtful move into the “right” organization can still leave you standing next to sudden uncertainty.

Same person. Same country I grew up in. Different expectations.

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Coming home has felt a lot like that. The place looked familiar. The current does not.

And that difference is still teaching me.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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This week, I want to talk about work.

I spent nearly five years at Amazon US before moving to Amazon India.

Same employer.

Same leadership principles.

Same performance reviews.

Same engineering bar.

Yet after just a few weeks, it felt like I had joined a different company.

Not because Amazon had changed.

Because culture had.

I’ve started believing that culture is the operating system. The company is just the application.

The application stayed the same.

The operating system didn’t.

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My first culture shock happened before anyone arrived.

On my third day, I reached the office at 9:00 AM.

The lights were on.

The coffee machine was running.

The cafeteria was open.

The office wasn’t.

Almost nobody was there.

I checked Slack.

Silence.

For a moment, I wondered whether I’d accidentally come in on a holiday.

Later that morning, one of my colleagues smiled and said,

“This is completely normal here.”

That was the moment I realized I had moved countries, but my internal clock hadn’t.

For five years, my mornings started early.

Now I was the only one following that schedule.

Ironically, a month later...

I stopped coming at 9.

Reverse culture shock isn’t just learning new habits.

It’s slowly letting go of old ones.

Lunch became my daily reminder that I had changed.

In the US, I naturally ate around noon.

Here, most of my teammates eat around 2 PM.

Two hours doesn’t sound like much.

But every day, I found myself sitting alone in the cafeteria.

At first, I thought,

“I’ll just wait.”

I never could.

My stomach was still living in Seattle.

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It sounds like a small thing.

But culture often hides inside small things.

Not holidays.

Lunch breaks.

Meetings taught me that time has different meanings.

One thing I quickly noticed was how differently people treated calendars.

In the US, if a meeting starts at 10:00, people usually join at 9:59.

Being on time is almost an unwritten rule.

Here, meetings often begin a little later.

And unlike what I was used to, they frequently run beyond their scheduled end time as well.

At first, that bothered me.

Now it doesn’t.

Not because meetings changed.

Because my expectations did.

The biggest surprise wasn’t work.

It was relationships.

During five years in the US, I almost never exchanged personal phone numbers with colleagues.

Slack.

Email.

Chime.

That was enough.

Here, sharing phone numbers is completely normal.

Managers call.

Teammates call.

Work flows naturally into personal communication.

I’ve chosen to keep my own boundary and still prefer messaging first.

But I also understand why many people don’t see that boundary the same way.

Different cultures optimize for different things.

One optimizes for personal space.

Another optimizes for accessibility.

Neither is objectively better.

They’re simply different.

One conversation made me genuinely uncomfortable.

It was an intern’s last day.

People started asking about the internship.

Then the questions became surprisingly direct.

“Who was the worst Senior Engineer L6?”

“Tell us three good things and three bad things about your manager.”

Everyone laughed.

The interns answered.

But I noticed something else.

Their voices became quieter.

The people they were talking about were sitting right there.

Including their manager.

I kept wondering how I would have answered that question as an intern.

I’m still not sure.

Then there were the late-night meetings.

One thing I appreciated in the US was predictability.

Most meetings were over by 5 PM.

Here, I’ve heard stories of meetings continuing at 2 AM to accommodate global teams.

Does everyone work insane hours?

No.

That’s actually one misconception people outside India often have.

But global collaboration does create schedules that can stretch far beyond the traditional workday.

It’s less about working harder.

More about working across more time zones.

What surprised me in a good way

Not every difference made the adjustment harder.

Some made it easier.

People spend more time talking before meetings.

Lunches are longer.

Conversations are more spontaneous.

Someone drops by your desk just to chat.

Teams celebrate together.

Food is better.

Relationships feel warmer.

It reminded me that productivity isn’t the only thing workplaces optimize for.

Sometimes they optimize for belonging.

The biggest lesson

When I first moved back, I kept asking,

“Why is everyone doing this differently?”

A few weeks later, I started asking a better question.

“Why do I assume my way is the normal way?”

That’s when I realized something.

I thought I knew my own country.

Five years abroad had quietly taught me a different set of invisible rules.

Coming home wasn’t about remembering India.

It was about unlearning America.

And that’s what reverse culture shock really is.

Not forgetting one culture.

But discovering that you’ve become part of another.

I’m curious.

For those who’ve worked in multiple countries:

What invisible workplace rule surprised you the most?

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I’d love to hear stories from places beyond India and the US.

Pack a few bags. Parcel few packages.

Book a flight.

Start a new chapter.

Reality had other plans.

It’s been a couple of months since I moved from the US back to India, and I’ve learned something interesting:

Coming home can feel just as foreign as moving abroad.

People often talk about culture shock and reverse culture shock when they move back to Indai.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned.

The hardest thing to rebuild is trust.

In the US, shopping became effortless.

If an item arrived damaged—or simply didn’t fit—I returned it.

No arguments.

No stress.

A refund showed up a few days later many times few minutes.

That experience builds trust.

Back to India, I realized many products don’t even have a return policy. Once you buy something, it’s yours.

I never appreciated companies like Costco or Amazon.com until I no longer had them.

The difference isn’t just about refunds.

It’s about confidence.

When customers trust a company, they buy more without overthinking every purchase.

Trust is invisible.

Until it’s missing.

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Punctuality is more valuable than most people think.

One experience taught me this the hard way.

I hired a moving company, agarwalpackers.in “Bade Bhaiya”, to transport my belongings.

The sales representative confidently promised delivery within 8–10 days.

Day 10 arrived.

My shipment hadn’t even left my hometown.

Customer support repeatedly told me, “It will reach in two days.”

That wasn’t even possible because the shipment hadn’t been dispatched yet, and the journey itself takes around three days.

Eventually, the salesperson stopped answering my calls.

Emails didn’t help either.

After countless follow-ups, my belongings finally arrived on Day 21.

The delay was frustrating.

The lack of honest communication was worse.

People can accept bad news.

What they struggle to accept is being misled.

I’ll write a separate article about how the corporate culture within the same company surprised me.

But moving back also gave me something priceless.

I get to live with my parents again.

That sentence means more to me than any salary increase ever could.

For the past three years, I couldn’t even meet them in person because of circumstances outside my control.

Now I get to have breakfast with them.

Talk to them.

Simply be around them.

You don’t realize how valuable ordinary moments are until they’re no longer ordinary.

One idea changed my perspective forever.

I once read about author Sahil Bloom calculating how many dinners he had left with his parents.

Instead of thinking in years, he thought in moments.

The number wasn’t as large as most people would expect.

That idea stayed with me.

It made one thing obvious:

Success means very little if you’re too far away from the people you love.

Moving back wasn’t only a career decision.

It was a life decision.

Another dream quietly came true.

My parents lived in the same house for 35 years.

I always wanted to give them a better living experience.

Because my work required relocating to another city, renting was the practical choice.

Compared to apartment rents in the US, I found a beautiful apartment with something I’d always wanted:

A balcony.

Every evening, I come home, sit outside, and watch the lake, the skyline, and the trees.

Nothing extraordinary happens.

That’s exactly why I enjoy it.

Sometimes happiness isn’t buying something new.

It’s finally having enough time to appreciate what you already have.

My biggest takeaway

Moving back to India has been a mix of frustration and gratitude.

I’ve experienced broken promises, delayed deliveries, and moments that tested my patience.

I’ve also gained something far more valuable.

Time with my parents.

A home I genuinely love coming back to.

And a reminder that the best decisions in life rarely optimize only for money.

Sometimes they optimize for people.

Looking back, I’d make the same decision again.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 articles with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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“At the end of life, nobody regrets not spending more time at the office.”

A few days ago, I did something many people dream about but few actually do.

I left the United States and moved back to India.

Not for a better salary.
Not for a startup opportunity.
Not for some glamorous “digital nomad” lifestyle.

I moved back for family.

And the experience has already forced me to rethink money, success, comfort, and what actually matters in life.

The Shock of Living in Two Different Worlds

When I left the US, the weather was around 49°F.

When I landed in India, the afternoon temperature crossed 110°F.

It felt like my body traveled between two planets.

The heat here is relentless. You don’t casually “go outside” in the afternoon. You plan around it.

For the first few days, my entire strategy was simple:

Stay indoors.
Sit under the AC.
Survive.

Thankfully, modern India has evolved in ways many outsiders still don’t realize.

Amazon delivers quickly.
But what truly amazed me were the 10-minute delivery apps.

Need cheese? Need ice cream?
10 minutes.

Need PS5?
10 minutes.

Household items?
10 minutes.

It felt futuristic in America.

Ironically, some parts of India feel more convenient than America.

Yet at the same time, some things are much harder.

Most homes don’t have central air conditioning (HVAC) like in the US. Sometimes only one room has AC.

You suddenly become aware of energy usage, airflow, and even which room you spend time in.

Comfort becomes intentional.

The Dust Nobody Talks About

One thing that surprised me wasn’t the traffic or noise.

It was the dust.

In America, I almost never thought about cleaning floors daily.

In India?

You may need wet mopping every single day.
Sometimes twice a day.

Dust becomes part of your routine.

At first, this sounds annoying.

But then you realize something deeper:

Every country optimizes for different problems.

America optimizes for convenience and personal space.
India optimizes for adaptability and resilience.

Neither is perfect.

Both teach you something.

The Hardest Working People I’ve Ever Seen

One thing became obvious almost immediately:

People in India work incredibly hard.

Delivery workers bring packages in brutal heat without complaint.
Laborers work outdoors in temperatures that would shut down parts of other countries.
Small shop owners stay open long hours every single day.

It changed the way I look at “hard work.”

Many of us sitting behind laptops talk endlessly about hustle culture.

But real hard work often looks very different.

It looks like survival. It is survival.

The Salary Difference That Broke My Brain

The biggest mental adjustment hasn’t been weather.

It’s economics.

For example, household help here may cost around $10 per MONTH for washing dishes every day.

In America, similar work could cost $10 per HOUR.

That’s nearly a 30x difference.

Same human effort.
Same hour.
Completely different value assigned by geography.

Even in tech, the pattern repeats itself.

Same company.
Same role.
Same responsibilities.

But salaries in the US can be dramatically higher than salaries in India.

For years, I accepted this as “normal.”

But once you live in both countries, you start questioning everything.

Why does location determine human value so heavily?

I understand cost of living, currency conversion, and global economics all play a role.

But seeing it firsthand makes you realize how unequal and complicated the world really is.

That sentence feels very real after moving countries.

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Why I Actually Left America

Most people assume moving away from the US means something failed.

But sometimes leaving is not failure.

Sometimes it’s clarity.

The real reason I moved back was simple:

I wanted to spend time with my parents while I still can.

As parents grow older, time starts moving differently.

You begin realizing there are only so many conversations left.
Only so many dinners left.
Only so many ordinary moments left.

And one day, those moments disappear forever.

Modern society teaches us to optimize for:

Income.
Status.
Productivity.
Career growth.

But very few people teach us to optimize for presence.

That realization changed me.

The Lie We’re All Quietly Told

We live in a world that constantly tells us:

Make more money first.
Spend time with family later.

Build the career first.
Enjoy life later.

Sacrifice now.
Live later.

But “later” is never guaranteed.

I’ve seen people become financially successful while emotionally disconnected from everyone they love.

I’ve seen people spend decades chasing promotions only to realize they missed their children growing up.

And I’ve noticed something else:

At the end of life, nobody wishes they attended more meetings.

They wish they had more time.

More conversations.
More memories.
More ordinary moments with people they loved.

Success Means Different Things at Different Stages of Life

Maybe success in your 20s is ambition.

Maybe success in your 30s is stability.

Maybe success later becomes peace.

Right now, my definition of success is changing.

Yes, moving back may affect my income.
Yes, it may slow down parts of my career.
Yes, my lifestyle will be different.

But I’m willing to make that trade.

Because some things are more valuable than maximizing earnings.

Presence is one of them.

Health is one of them.

Family is definitely one of them.

Final Thought

Living in both America and India has shown me something important:

A higher salary doesn’t automatically create a better life.

Sometimes the richest moments are the simplest ones:

Eating dinner with parents.
Having tea with family.
Being physically present for people you love.

Money matters.

Career matters.

But eventually, life asks a deeper question:

Who were you there for?

And that answer can’t be outsourced, automated, or delayed forever.

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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Imagine you’re driving a luxury car down a perfectly paved highway. The AC is crisp, the music is perfect, and the GPS says you’re heading toward “The Dream.” But as you look out the window, you realize every other car is exactly like yours. Everyone is driving at the same speed, toward the same destination, with the same look of quiet exhaustion behind their eyes.

You want to take the next exit but the dirt road that leads to the unknown. Your hand freezes on the steering wheel. A voice in your head whispers, “Don’t. It’s safe here. Just one more mile.”

I recently held the “golden ticket” to stay on that highway forever. And then, I did the unthinkable: I took the exit.

The Gold-Plated Cage

I finally realized why so many people feel “stuck” in a life that no longer fulfills them: they struggle to find the courage to take non-average actions.

But the moment you decide to forge your own path, the same crowd starts to whisper.

The “Comfortable” Trap

Recently, I was selected in the H1B lottery. For many (myself included, a few years ago), this is the ultimate dream. It’s the permission slip to stay in the “Land of the Free” and stack U.S. dollars until your bank account looks like a phone number.

However, I am moving back to India. Since then, I’ve been met with a constant barrage of warnings. People tell me it’s the “worst decision” I could make. They point to:

• The USD Income: The sheer math of earning in dollars is hard to walk away from.

• First-World Convenience: Pristine roads, clean air, and organized systems.

• The “Kids’ Future”: The perceived responsibility of providing a “world-class” education.

• The Social Reset: The fear that your social circle will evaporate or change beyond recognition.

• Falling Behind: The internal panic that you are going “backwards” in life.

• Status Anxiety: Losing the prestige that comes with “living abroad.”

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The Elephant and the Rope Story

There is a famous story about a circus elephant.

As a baby elephant, it is tied to a small wooden stake with a thick rope. The baby elephant pulls and tugs, but it isn’t strong enough to break free.
Eventually, it gives up.
Years later, that elephant is a five-ton beast that could easily uproot a tree, yet it stays tied to that same small wooden stake. Why? Because it believes it is still stuck.

It has forgotten what it is truly capable of.

Many H1B holders are like that elephant. It’s not a lack of courage; it’s that they have been conditioned by the system for so long that they’ve forgotten their own power.

The Invisible Weight of the H1B

Nobody tells you what the H1B actually does to your psyche. It’s not just the 60-day grace period; it’s how it changes the way you carry yourself.

• Year one: You’re just excited to be here.

• Year two: You start noticing you word things differently in meetings.

• Year three: You realize you haven’t disagreed with your manager once.

Not because they are always right, but because the “visa math” doesn’t favor the bold. You watch a friend with Canadian PR quit their job to take a three-month sabbatical, and while you call it “amazing,” you don’t mention that you haven’t taken more than five days off in two years.

You make great money. Life looks perfect on Instagram. But there is a low hum of anxiety running in the background of your mind - a constant, vibrating frequency of “what if” that becomes your new normal. You forget what it feels like to be truly relaxed.

The “One More Year” Syndrome

The cycle is predictable. You work hard to get to the U.S., you get the H1B, you adapt to the culture, and you start a family. Your social circle becomes a mirror of your own life. Everyone has the same background, the same fears, and the same visa constraints.

You think about moving home, but you delay.

“I’ll move back in March 2028,” you say.

But 2028 arrives, and things got changed so suddenly it’s “just one more year.” Before you know it, 11 years have passed. You are now in a Green Card backlog that will take 50 years to clear. The “usual logic” takes over: “It’s stressful, but the pay makes it worth it.”

Escape the Average

This isn’t just an H1B story. It’s a human story.

Most people never take the exit and stay in their “cages” because they are gold-plated. They stay because the crowd is staying on highway. But to live a life that is truly yours, you must be willing to do what the average person won’t: Listen to your own intuition over the collective fear.

As Buddha said:

“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.”

If your thoughts are constantly guarded by the fear of losing what you’ve built, you aren’t living; you are merely “maintaining.”

True security doesn’t come from a document, a title, or a location - it comes from the realization that you are the one who built your success, and you can build it again anywhere.

Ask yourself this: “Are you staying on the highway by choice, or because you’ve forgotten you’re strong enough to take the exit?”

I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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I opened an email from immigration.

I was selected in the H1B lottery.

For most people in the world, this is the Super Bowl. The Olympics. The Golden Ticket to the “American Dream.”

This was my fifth attempt. For four years, I asked the universe for this email. I checked my inbox with a shaking hand, hoping a computer algorithm would finally validate my existence.

But this year was different.

I’d already booked my flight to India. I’d already secured my internal transfer. I was ready to go.

Then luck threw a 100mph fastball at my head.

The Luck Trap

The H1B isn’t about skill. It’s not about your “impact” or your fancy job title.

It’s a casino.

The house usually wins. But this time, the slot machine hit triple cherries right as I was walking out the exit door.

Most people would turn around. They’d see the flashing lights and stay for one more round. They’d let a random number generator decide the next few years of their life.

Not me.

The Power of Agency

Here is the mental shift that changed everything:

Before today, my story was: “I’m leaving the U.S. because of visa issues.” It was a story of a victim. A story of someone being forced out by “the system.”

Now? The story is: “I’m leaving because I want to.”

That is a 10x more powerful narrative. When you move from having to do something to choosing to do it, you reclaim your soul.

I’m not staying for the “Golden Ticket.” I’m going back to India because that’s where the high-quality version of myself lives.

The Noise of the “Standard Path”

My friends think I’ve lost my mind.

My family is worried.

In India, social comparison is a national sport. People look at the U.S. visa as the ultimate trophy. One relative told me indirectly, “Only a fool would lose this opportunity. People work hard just to get a foot in the door, and you’re walking away?”

But here’s what they don’t get: Market value is not the same as personal fulfillment.

They are looking at my life through a spreadsheet. I’m looking at it through my heart.

The Fear of “What If”

The hardest part isn’t the move. It’s the “unknown.”

We stay in mediocre situations because we are terrified of future regret.

• What if this decision is a mistake?

• What if I miss the dollar salary?

But we never ask the real question: What if I stay and live someone else’s dream for the next ten years?

That is the true risk.

The Common Ground Rule

I’ve started living by a new rule: Spend your energy where it helps everyone.

Focus on the spaces where nobody argues. Nobody argues with giving to charity. Nobody argues with being a better human.

I want to be in a place where my growth isn’t a debate or a point of comparison. I want to be in a place where I can contribute.

The lottery result gave me a choice.

And I am sticking with my initial plan.

Have you ever walked away from a "perfect" opportunity because it wasn't your opportunity? Tell me your story in the comments. Let’s break the silence of social comparison together.

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I send out Master Mentee 🎓 weekly with curiosity and a passion for growth. If you’re enjoying it, I’d be grateful if you shared it with a friend who’d appreciate it too.

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