Navi's first big tech job — on Amazon's Alexa org — ended with an impulsive resignation two months in.
Background
- Went to Washington State University (not UW — he wasn't a strong high school student); grinded hard on DSA interview prep and a good GPA to land Amazon
13:12,13:34 - Was self-aware that people skills were his weakness: fine working alone through documentation, but "working with other people was very, very difficult"
13:34
What went wrong
- The Alexa org was "not a well-oiled machine": lots of manual work, very stressful. A week before he joined, a teammate wrote in the team channel "This feels like a thankless job"
14:05,14:29 - Five or six new grads joined the same team within one to two weeks, more than doubling a team of ~4 experienced engineers — but deadlines meant nobody actually onboarded them
15:34,15:55 - Every experienced engineer was committing at 3:00 a.m. with 8–9 a.m. meetings the next morning — not manager-mandated, but implicit: "if you're one person who's not doing it at 3:00 a.m., you're going to be the first in line to maybe get kicked out"
16:14,16:33 - Host's context: Amazon at the time had a target of 6% unregretted attrition per year, pushing managers toward PIPs and cutthroat dynamics
16:56 - Navi had to submit his resignation three times before it was accepted — he suspects because a voluntary quit counts as regretted attrition and looks bad
17:21