The Time I Lost My Reputation At Work

Back in 2012, I had just been promoted to Senior Engineer at Amazon. I was flying high, having been promoted to senior in just three years, and I felt like my growth was completely unconstrained. Shortly after my promotion, however, a single choice on one night severely damaged my reputation in the eyes of my manager for years.

Cultivating your professional reputation takes time and effort to build, and it can be demolished in an instant.

Back then, I was leading a team of software engineers on a project to create a back-end application for a specific type of merchant customer. Business owners could log in, manage their offers, get reports, and, of course, get paid. The details aren't so important, but it's crucial to know that we needed to build fast, and the application needed to work correctly; otherwise, we would completely inundate our support teams. It wasn't quite an Amazon-scale project, but there were tens of thousands of users worldwide managing and tracking hundreds of millio…