The Perfect Team @ Amazon

About a year ago, I stumbled upon an opportunity offered by one of my old skips to work on calculating bills for AWS. It didn't sound too fancy on paper, but I was promised scale and cool teammates so, among other reasons, I made the jump. Looking back, I can't appreciate him enough for it. Without a doubt, this has been the model team for me among all the teams I've traversed through.

I joined with the same average amount of impostor syndrome as the next person. Sitting in my first meeting, I heard all these made-up words: Isengard, Kadabra, Hailstone, Floatzel, etc. My onboarding buddy was the first person I interacted with, followed by a random person from a sister team who noticed my confusion and promptly shared an abbreviation list they had found. To this day, I am still so moved by the amount of patience they had in dealing with my hundreds of dumb/repeated questions. With their help, I became equipped in record time and naturally integrated into the team, expanding the number of familiar faces.

My teams has a weird setup. My manager concurrently runs 2 functionally different teams so although the sister team worked on things further outside our scope, we are still pretty close. Obviously it also create some sort of rivalry (although it is clear that my team is better). Most people are really cool though, and some are definitely cooler than others. Whether intentional or not, they were all highly intelligent, unbelievably hardworking, and incredibly humble, which resulted in down-to-earth folks that I am excited to see every week.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards." This quote didn't fully click with me until here. If I try to examine any single interaction with my teammates, it's difficult to grow much appreciation from it. On the contrary, the feelings are usually pessimistic - uncomfortable, confused, or intimidated, sometimes even frustrated. However, evaluating interactions over the past year as a whole makes things clear. I realized I was never bored or indifferent. From work shenanigans to casual lunch chats, they struck a delicate balance between challenging me out of my comfort zone and providing enough support/inclusivity for me to not feel ostracized. Again, it wasn't a single moment. It was a culmination of (1) all the walks to grab lunch, (2) all the coincidentally overlapping walks back home, (3) the growing desire to learn chess and make my food less disgusting, (4) the invitations to Pilates class that I say I'll join next time, (5) the learning journey and innovation of gen z slang, (6) the campaign to frame a "bully" a bully, and (7) the nutrition concerns surrounding water chicken and asparagus.

When I came up with the title, I wondered how one would imagine what it looks like. After all, we each have our own reasons to be at our job: money, fame, influence, passion, etc. These reasons often shape our ideal work environment, which becomes the rarely-ending quest throughout our careers. This has been my ideal environment so far. Don't get me wrong, the experiences weren't all pretty and flowery all the time. But when you have a team where you can joke around while holding respect for each other, the stress tends to dissipate while the fun tends to linger. It made me mind less if I got paged at 4AM or worked a little extra throughout the week, as long as the team was better off from it somehow.

If you haven't noticed by now, this entire post is a head fake. I am leaving the team soon, and I want to write a elaborate thank you note to a handful of special colleagues that I've been so lucky to work with (they will know who they are). I learned so much from them and, although most don't know it, they helped me through many tough times this past year. The title is dedicated to them and I hope we will meet again!