I Quit Amazon After 2 Months

Part of the reason I uploaded this was because I saw your video about your struggles before you started working at Netflix. Appreciate what you do Prime!

"10 sick days" This is so weird to me how in the US the employer can literally just limit how many days you can be sick like it's in your control or something.

Tom didn’t quit JDSL after 2 months

Pushing through shitty places is what allows companies to stay shitty

Please do not intepret what Prime is saying as you should tolerate and push through any and all hardships. That is a one way ticket to serious burnout which may have lifelong impact on your quality of life. Choose your battles carefully. You don’t go to the gym for the first time in your life and suffer through breaking your back trying to squat 200kg expecting to come out stronger. Definitely strive to become resilient, and push through some tough situations. But be mindful of your capacity and if your struggle is far outside your weight class and should be left to be fought another day.

Daamn.. and I thought I've hit the bottom at some point. Got back to programming at 35, wasted more than a decade... But I'm telling myself 'better late than never'. Gotta stay positive

I cannot say how much i appreciate people talking about personal struggles like this in the industry. I myself am struggling with some addictions right now and a lot of anxiety. There are a lot of days in the grind where I am just crawling to be better and it often feels useless and futile but it gives me a lot of hope to see people who I look up to beat their struggles and come out on top. More than any other of your contents I think these would be the ones that I will take with me going forward, the other being influenced to start using vim lmao.

I have the utmost respect for you and your willingness to use your platform to share your personal struggles. It takes a lot of courage. I am glad you are doing better now, and am thankful that you are in a position to help others going through similar situations.

I used to be a pretty sensitive guy and as a new dev my mentor assigned was a guy that no one got along with and they thought he was an asshole. Turns out he was just majorly autistic and would say exactly what he meant. No tact at all BUT he also genuinely never said anything intending to be rude, it was all just people that wanted nice over truth and he could only do raw truth. It was the best thing that ever happened to my career and i worked with him for 10 years. After getting past my sensitivity and realizing it wasnt personal, I just took his advice no matter how it was delivered. Love truth over smiles

This video is legit - both OP and Prime spit a lot of wisdom here. Only thing I kind of disagree with is around 10:00-14:00 when Prime says you should "break through shitty, difficult situations instead of quitting" (paraphrased). Yeah, you might grow. Alternatively, you might get gaslit, abused and wrung out till there's nothing left. Arguably worse, you might get molded into a shitty manipulative Amazon-robot for the rest of your life. I spent 11 months at Amazon after college and quit for similar reasons as the OP and, similarly, my manager tried to tell me "oh don't do that you don't need to quit we can make this better." Bullshit. Trust yourself. If something feels wrong, it likely is. Amazon taught me how to work in a pressure cooker but fuck sticking it out once you know something is fundamentally wrong. There's a reason long-time Amazon alumni have similar reputations to the company as a whole. Stay too long and you might see yourself become one of them.

This was one of your best streams. Thank you for this. It really helped me look back at some things I've been through and look at them a different way. And this was the advice I needed going forward.

You're wrong about everyone being the same on the inside and nice people being fake. You have a very corporate perspective.

Sounds like this guy wasn't in a very healthy place to begin with. Amazon is indeed a very stressful environment. If you're not mentally and emotionally healthy, it will certainly break you. Hope he's doing better now.

I'm glad he overcame all that. Prime and him definitely had it more difficult than most of us. The beginning is always the hardest. Everyone feels imposter syndrome. I also felt it, but fortunately for me, I knew impostor syndrome was a thing, so I just kept at it and studied more. I knew I wasn't great, but it was just a phase and it would come to an end. Also, thanks for the inspiration PrimeAgen.

Nailed it in so many ways on this one. Imagine what the world would be like if every engineer still had Prime's mindset.

Yeah if your manager says "don't ask questions" then probably your only sensible options are talk to them and drill down into wtf is going on, and ideally get that problem solved, or, if they're an a-hole, go over their head to get them deleted, or quit. If you're young and inexperienced at dealing with people, quit is probably the only option.

For a year - I was getting extreme anxiety on things I could/should do better. It was gripping me - I was successful but had this feeling - so painful feeling failure - and my performance started getting called out and I was spiraling. My wife had me see a therapist for months. Some more Months later I was going blind… turns out I had a brain tumor. Had the tumor removed… that extreme anxiety was gone! Had a golf ball in my head on my pituitary. I feel I understand more what people go through. I also learned things about myself. Was wild/scary hard but that was a experience I had.

Love when you get real on vids. Something incredibly sincere and powerful when you talk about getting out of a shitty situation. Or maybe it just resonates cause I get it.

You bring up Salesforce plugins... a buddy of mine left a 6 figure job that he had in downtown Chicago, moved back to UT where he is from, started a Salesforce plugin shop with a buddy of his and is making more than double than he was before. Going deep on a topic is not just real advice, or good advice, it's really good advice.

My first six months as a developer, I was often tempted to quit, worrying that I might get fired. However, it didn't take long to see that the company had just as many shortcomings, and I had the excuse of inexperience for mine. This led me to change my attitude to "I'm not going to give up. If they want me gone, they'll have to fire me." This got me through it. The Dunning–Kruger effect also applies towards one's ability to accurately judge negative situations.