Three weeks ago I wrote that my title didn’t change, but the project scope did.
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.
It is the willingness to unlearn what used to work, then relearn the work in front of you.
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.
Joseph Campbell wrote, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
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:
“We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.”
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:
“Always ask for more money, better job titles, bigger teams to lead.”
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.
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.
Until then, I am practicing a smaller sentence:
Forget the old job fast enough to do the new one. Then ask for the life that matches it.
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