Thread by @joshuaseattle

My post on LinkedIn about my interview experience in 1996 @amazon blew up. But a bunch of people asked me why I left after 3 yrs and boomeranged 14 years later. So I thought I’d tell the story here #AWS #amazon #techjobs

linkedin.com/posts/joshuabu…

Everyone assumes that if you’re “successful” by some measure they seen you got there through a series of brilliant chess moves or you were an overnight #success. Occasionally that’s true, but far more often it looks like this

My first 3 years at amazon were amazing. We changed the world of #ecommerce, survived competitive threats that were supposed to kill us, invented lots of 😎 #tech that’s now commonplace in websites. But it was also exhausting. I worked 6-7 days a week, every week for 3 years 😓

I was on call 💻 most of that time - this was pre-rotation days. The Motorola pager 📟 tone still gives me PTSD. I bought my own fold out chair to sleep in my office #frugal and I gained 25 pounds 🥵 and felt like 💩all the time

So after 3 years it was time to take care of myself. I left (leaving 2 years of ISOs on the table). I lost 25 lbs in 3 months just by not eating diner food after midnight & teriyaki all day (stay hydrated 💦 folks). I reconnected with my family. I started working out 💪

Also I sold all my AMZN stock in Feb 2000. At the time I felt dumb/disloyal but economically I couldn’t hold them. If you’re reading this in 2019 you’re like “you sound nuts! Amazon is the biggest company ever and worth $1T!” 💸💸💸

But google #stockmarket #recession

My stock sales financed my 🏡, a new 🚘 I still own, my wedding 👰& formed the base of my nest egg 💰that will hopefully let me retire before AI-driven Twitter bots 🤖 kill us all. Had I stayed I surely would have held for at least a year or so and sold at the bottom.

AMZN didn’t bottom in fact for 18 months (fell from $100 to $6) 📉and didn’t recover to the price I sold until almost a decade later in 2009! Do you really think you would have held all your shares during that time? Be honest 😇

In the time after leaving Amazon and coming back in 2014 I worked at a series of mildly successful #startup tech cos, but also at a cancer research center. I learned a ton about what makes me tick, where I am most successful & where I am less likely to be so.

In fact over the years from 2000-2015 I had 3-4 opportunities to come back (#boomerang) when former colleagues or bosses would offer me a role. It never seemed big enough or the right time #beentheredonethat

But when I was leaving Zynga I looked everywhere. The Bay Area, Seattle, Berlin. @awscloud had all my favorite colleagues (including my current bosss). Rejoining in 2014 was the right time, the right role, and I was fully ready for it #letsdothis

Since then I’ve put all the things I learned about myself between stints at Amazon to work & I think it’s why I’ve been successful & avoided the burnout of the first go-around. Amazon is no less intense, and while that’s mostly good, I know how to manage the “bad” side of that.

Sitting here now - It’s easy to look at the stock chart or articles today and think 🤔 “if only he never left he’d be worth $100M and the CEO!” but that wasn’t what was going to happen - it’s always revisionist history to say you knew how the future would turn out. #intheyear2000

In fact one could tell this story in a way that makes me sound prescient. “I knew AMZN was going to fall 90% so I sold my stock and invested in Seattle real estate before it took off. Then I joined Zynga pre-IPO and sold my shares before it fell...

Then I came back to amazon just before everyone figured out that we were on to something with this #CloudComputing”

But it wasn’t always that calculated. I did what I felt compelled to do at the time for a combination of practical and personal reasons (family, economic). #family

In summary: Success is rarely a straight line - even when it appears that way on the outside or someone tells you they had it all planned out.

Keep at it, figure out what makes you tick, take calculated risks, and you’ll end up in a good place /end