Speedrun Your Tech Promotion

During Q1 of 2020, I was promoted to Principal Engineer at Amazon. I received hundreds of congratulatory messages via email and Slack when the announcement was made, and hundreds more when I updated my job title on LinkedIn. The lockdown had just started, so I suspect many more people than usual were glued to social media. As I sat in my makeshift home office receiving these messages, I thought to myself that I should feel happier. Was this it? What the people sending those messages didn't see was that I had been put up for promotion and failed five times over the previous four years. My success did not feel as good as those five previous attempts felt. Not by a long shot.

Getting to Senior SDE was the exact opposite experience; I felt like I was on a rocket ship. I started at Amazon as a support engineer in 2006 and made a lateral move to L4 SDE-I in December of 2007. I advanced to SDE-II in Q1 of 2009 and made it to Senior SDE (SDE-III) in Q1 of 2012. I was flying through the ranks, …