Hi there. So, I wrote this. I'm the original author. I'm amznymous (still proud of that username) It's wild to see this pop-up at the top of HackerNews 5 year

Hi there. So, I wrote this. I'm the original author. I'm amznymous (still proud of that username) It's wild to see this pop-up at the top of HackerNews 5 years later, but I'd be more than happy to answer any questions anyone has. I'm still at Amazon and have been on a couple of different teams since then, but this was definitely written at my lowest time at Amazon. I've had low times since then and high ones as well. I'm still an SDE II but on-track to become SDE III soon. I've interviewed elsewhere but was either unimpressed with the company (Facebook) or the company was not impressed enough with me and asked to try again later (Google). Facebook interviewers all looked absolutely exhausted and stressed and lifeless. They zoned out in the interview and just in general left a bad taste. One low point was when I found out (years after 2015) that the whole project that I had brutalized myself over was shutdown. Deleted. Scrapped. All of it. It was devastating and cathartic. I've become a bit more balanced, jaded, and care-free since then. Not totally, but just a bit. It's all just code. It's all just business and sometimes the business fails and everything you did doesn't matter anyway. I'm still glad I wrote the paste, if it helped one person out there. Based on reddit responses, I wasn't the only one going through this. ============================= Since then things that help: 0. Get that "Fuck You Money" I pinched pennies and followed Dave Ramsey's approach to get 100% debt free and thriving to ensure I never was locked in as I felt I was. 1. Being absolute about my sleep schedule. 2. Finding a good team. When you find a good team/manager, stick with it. Manager matters 10x more than the company 3. Therapy. duh 4. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl 5. "The Depression Cure" by Ilardi. This is NOT A SUBSTITUTE for therapy or medication. ONLY use it as a supplement . The tl;dr is take care of your body or your mind will pay the price. 6. Soft skills: developing skills on how to provide estimates, pushing back on deadlines, and finding compromises between what business wants and what's feasible. It sounds obvious, but sometimes it really is just as easy as saying "that will take 2 weeks, what can be cut?" (Obvs, my opinions are my own and not my employer's)