This is my sixth team at Amazon in 5 year.
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.
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.
I went and checked whether this was only my month, or a thing people had already measured.
Happiness spreads, and sadness spreads. In 1994 Elaine Hatfield called it emotional contagion: we catch what we watch. In 2008, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis reported happiness moving through friends, spouses, siblings, and neighbors. Coworkers were the exception. That effect did not show up at the office.
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.
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.
Peter Drucker wrote that there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
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.
What I am keeping
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.
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.
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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