Head of Business Development

Buisness analyst path

Hi all. I am currently working in the functional team for one of the projects in my company. I was earlier working as a backend developer but I was struggling and I like the wrk that I am doing now. Since the functional team involves Business analysis, I wanted to know how I can strengthen my resume by targeting that role and what all skills should I sharpen.

What type of corporate villains have you encountered with in your company? Comment your story.

Here’s my story in the field of software engineering: There’s this colleague of mine who is on a pure tech role but hardly codes. The person spends his entire time on LinkedIn sharing new age tech stuff and projects himself to the world as if he is the Messiah of architecture. The guy preaches the same gyan to members of my team. For the last one year, this guy, in the capacity of Software Architect has not pushed a single line of code into our application source code and this is on record. Yet, he is highly regarded as an expert in technology. The guy has killed the careers of some genuine software engineers with his unique approach to make it look like he is taking a lead to own stuff in tech space. The guy has had tremendous career growth, got promoted 3 times in the last 5 years. In my view, the guy is a tech junkie whose knowledge carries no value. Yet he managed to butter the leadership team to reach to position that he is currently in. Did you encounter any such people? If yes, comment your story.

Struggling to Adapt in My New Role as SDE 1 at Amazon

I’m two months into my new role as an SDE 1 at Amazon, and I’m struggling to complete tasks. The codebase has too many high-regression areas and dependencies on away teams, and I find myself moving too slowly out of fear that I might break something. In my previous organization, I always worked in monolithic repositories with a debugger, but now it’s completely different. It’s difficult to locate the relevant packages and test my hypotheses before even writing documentation. I also find it hard to understand the complex architecture. To make things worse, my team doesn’t own any service. The project I’m working on has a huge blast radius, and the code feels like spaghetti. I’m constantly fearful of being put on a PIP since I’m lagging behind and not performing well. One of my teammates told me that we are judged based on the number of code reviews, lines of code, and stack ranking—which increases my anxiety even more. I keep context-switching between tasks, and meetings consume most of my time. My sleep has dropped to just 4–6 hours a night, and I end up working Saturdays and Sundays as well. I don’t know if this is sustainable or even the right approach. Sometimes I feel like I made a mistake by joining Amazon. At my previous company, I was rated an “Exceeds” performer, but here, I’m falling behind. In performance reviews, I might be compared with my peers. For example, someone who joined after me was assigned to a project where the LLD was already completed, so his work is mostly implementation. Because of that, his lines of code and CRs are much higher, while I’ve only managed to raise one CR so far—a small change with limited impact. This makes me feel bad and demotivated. On top of this, no one in my team is particularly helpful. Sometimes I even feel like they are misguiding me. They keep saying things like, “Don’t stress too much early on,” or, “It’s fine to go slow, don’t work on weekends.” But I can’t shake the fear that they might just be trying to make me the scapegoat. Now I’m at a crossroads: should I switch to another team or stay where I am? My manager is good, oncalls are not hectic, but I don’t feel the same way about the team. The senior engineers are offsite, and the onsite folks aren’t consistently supportive. Also, since I only joined in late June, I’m wondering whether I’ll even be included in the performance review cycle next year. Do you have any recommendations on how I can turn this around?