The past few weeks in Big Tech have felt unhinged.
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.
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:
Maybe I should just change teams.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
“Everywhere life is the same.”
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 month 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.
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.
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.
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