I’ve worked all my life as a contractor and in small startups (5 people teams at the most) and I’m having a hard time adjusting to life at Amazon, though it may have been the same at another big corporation. 1. I spend a lot of my time piecing together information from multiple conversations trying to get a clear picture of things. It might be because of the size of my team, but getting consensus and clear answers takes up a lot of my mental energy; chasing after someone, setting up meetings, design reviews, etc. 2. I get annoyed by people chiming into conversations without full context. I know they have the best intentions, but still feel annoyed by them. I also get super annoyed about coworkers asking for my feedback or pinging me with their questions. I help them whenever I can and get very good feedback about how helpful I am, but I still get frustrated and exhausted by this. 3. When my manager asks me for ETAs I have a hard time answering because the tasks involve other people, away team work, clarification with stakeholders. Also, since I’m jumping from one thing to the other, I struggle to load the full context to be able to give good answers. I’m improving a bit on this by keeping detailed notes on stuff I’m working on, but even if I can keep track I feel like I make very small dents in multiple things rather than real progress. In general I’m overwhelmed by working on long tasks with dependencies on too many people/teams and exhausted by all the interactions. This sounds to me like a communication problem which I guess would be common in big companies. Any tips or anyone with similar experience? General recommendations on working on big companies also welcome. YOE: 6 TC: 187
Call out dependencies earlier. Follow ups and keeping mgr informed. Also start guessing what’s mgr gonna ask in future. Think from his / her angle. If pressure builds from top it will trickle down.
I think you’ve just outlined what’s wrong with the corp world. 😁
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