| The company I worked for as a dev lead was acquired by private equity and by the time I had any knowledge about AWS the infrastructure gatekeepers and consultants took over. I started looking for a job and got lucky that another company was trying to build an in house development department led by a new CTO. They had outsourced all of the development before. The new CTO was very forward looking and wanted to make the company “cloud native” and improve the processes. He only had a high level understanding of AWS as did I. He took a chance on me and I became both the de facto “cloud architect” and the person he called when he wanted a customer facing project done from the ground up without having to deal with the slow moving “scrum process”. I was quite happy at the company and would have stayed a couple of years probably even knowing I could make more money somewhere else and then Covid hit along with an across the board pay cut. I was still not really looking, a 10% pay cut at a time when we couldn’t travel or really go out was an inconvenience but not earth shattering. Then a recruiter contacted me for a software development position at Amazon. I wasn’t willing to relocate or do the leetCode monkey dance but we talked a little and then she forwarded my information to a recruiter on the AWS side. I saw the interview process was basically a high level technical interview to determine whether I knew the basics of AWS (I did) and all about the Leadership Principles. I knew I could answer the “tell me about a time when...” questions with the best of them and the interview process was going to be fully remote. To keep a long story from getting longer - I work at Amazon as an AWS Consultant from the comfort of my own home in the suburbs in a low cost of living area. |