This week marked my second week ex-AWS. Over the past year, I've been preparing, saving and hyping myself up for the road I've committed to. I'll be going on alone and starting... something. Although there's a degree of nervousness about my uncertain future, it's been overwhelmed by an eagerness for adventure, excitement & a quest for learning that will become my new way of life.
When I joined AWS 6 years ago in Cape Town I taught myself to stay vigilant and be careful not to get wrapped up in "corporate bullshit" and politics. I'd just come from my first real job as a DevOps guy at a small startup that was as stable as a juggler on a surfboard. I was ticked off at the time and so decided to take an interview for a cloud support engineer role at AWS - not caring about the outcome and skeptical of joining a "big" company.
What I found inside was completely different. There was a strong culture & focus on results and outcomes; with diverse people who were all eager to help each other out. It was a fun environment to learn and create connections with people who were excited for the future. In many ways it was like the startup but with a rigor and meritocracy that I'd been unknowingly missing.
It was truly an economy-class seat, no meal included, on a rocket ship. At the time people questioned my move, making comments that maybe I was over-qualified for a customer support role. When it came to personal & soft skills, I was behind, and I had to learn to step outside my comfort zone to answer customers calls and chats and become an advocate for them internally.
It was a fun and chaotic time - but that leads to strong bonds with your colleagues. It was through those connections that I even considered moving to the UK as a Startup SA. It was a role I was excited about. There was one startup BD that came to our office in Cape Town to recruit support engineers for customer meetings, startup events and presentations. It was scrappiness and resourcefulness that made me want to join this exciting new team that was just being newly formed. Although it meant leaving my friends and family in South A, I thought it would be the right opportunity to quench my curiosity for technology.
I joined the Startup Team as covid kicked off, I was able to make the most of it and learned to adapt fast in a new country and a new role. During my time as a solutions architect went on to do things that were unthinkable back in Cape Town. I delivered presentations at WebSummit twice, helped coordinate Biotech events, workshops, a few webinars series, hosted 100 office hours sessions with startups across EMEA and built some internal tools. I saw the startup team grow from a few people to multiple teams.
Four years is a long time in tech. The first year you are just watching the gears move, the next year you might have some input into how they are interconnected and by the third year you have a chance to change the gears to a pulley system if you think it's needed. Barring the false start of covid I find that my learning gradient has started to tilt down as formality came in and scrappiness was replaced by mechanisms and metrics. I've found something working with startups, so other roles didn't excite me. In the beginning I wasn't a career man, having time to think after my last promotion brought me back to those values, I'm not a career man now.
I started to think about the value I'd been able to deliver for customers over the years. Experience revealed that over time there was no accumulation of the efforts that I'd put in - everything seemed to start again when the year ticked over. This was paired with a few podcasts that started pointing me towards ideas such as momentum, brand and content as a source of value. Value that could be enough to sustain a person or even a small team of people was being sucked into the corporation. I felt, over time, that I wasn't reaping the value from the hard work I'd sowed and, if I did, it was inconsequential to my what I wanted to get out of life.
Compounding is not just for stock portfolios and interest rates. It can also apply to ideas and value creation. I've become a convert to building flywheels (thanks Jeff). If you can get something small to deliver value; and customers are able to pay you for that value; then take what you receive and allocate it towards creating more value; then you've got a perpetual value creation machine. This is something that I just couldn't build for myself within the walls of a company. It's not to say that you can't build momentum in a company, you can. It's that the allocation of time, resources and capital is not up to you.
Then there's AI. Although my engineering background has given me a modest skepticism for the way AI is thrown around by marketers on the internet, I do think that it will change the way knowledge worker jobs are done. Maybe not in the next two years but in five there is a strong possibility that things like solutions architects will be abstracted in the same way that cloud abstract the need to manage virtual machines. This is a concern.
If it hadn't been for the ChatGPT launch at the end of 2022 I would have left sooner. I felt at the time that the new AI boom was an opportunity to leverage the safety of a big company to learn about a new technology in a landscape that was unsure and fast evolving. It was like I was transported back to the time of dot-com bubbles that I'd only read about before. I got another economy-class seat to how a tech company pivots in the face of disruption. I'll be honest, it also helped that a promotion in early 2023 left rest-and-vest as a viable option.
One of the safe-havens I can see for AI disruption like this in the knowledge economy is to own a flywheel instead of helping to crank someone else's. I think that there will be more people who are given access to build technical products and so the barriers to starting a business and becoming an entrepreneur will be reduced. There will still be a need for ideas, creativity and decision making but undifferentiated admin will be mostly eliminated.
Lastly my thoughts have been submerged in philosophy since the passing of my dad last year. It's a reality that in some way is a blessing as it's taken me on a journey to understand what it it's all for in the end. All the accumulation of money, saving and working for a paycheck can give people a great retirement plan. Done incorrectly though, and you could end up with many years of overworked hours spent doing things that don't bring joy to you or the world.
It's been 6 years since I joined Amazon and 10 since I left university. If it takes 10 years to live a life up to here, then perhaps I've got a few more to left to go. I'm hoping to explore more areas outside of my traditional wheelhouse and follow my own curiosity. I recognize that it may come off strange to some, but I feel it's the path that's right for me and I'm not afraid of being misunderstood for long periods of time now.
I've grown to know the Amazon culture over the years, and I think it will guide me well. I've got a spring in my step and a new sense of adventure. I'm hoping that this path is one that I can walk for many years to come as I evolve and grow searching for my next economy-class rocket ship seat.