This is an unpleasant, but important one. Layoff. I have faced this question several times last year in 1:1 “How can you keep your head steady on work when so many roles are impacted around you? Does that not concern you?” My shorter response had been - “If I tell you I am not concerned, I will be lying. But, if you can convince yourself that layoff is not the worst thing that can happen, that will take the pressure off”.  Then I shared 3 stories from my professional journey: Fresh out of collage, I joined a software company back in 2005. I had a plan and a dream to be successful, but someone else had a different one. That company laid off 40% of its population in 3 months, including me. I felt broken, humiliated and scared. I did not tell my parents about this for a week and was searching for jobs walking door to door of each tech firm. But, no company in town offered  job to a fresher. Ultimately I revealed the situation to my parents and they offered me what I needed most: a hug and assurance. Eventually got a job; but I had to leave safety net of my hometown. But this is where my career acceleration started. Most importantly, I learned how to survive by myself in a different city. That layoff, which seemed catastrophic at that moment, actually set the foundation for my career. 4 years later, I applied for a job in US and relocated. Again, I had plan and a dream. But, I ended up being in a project that had no material connection to Company’s mission. Team members started leaving and that included my hiring manager. There was no one to support me. My employment visa did not even allow me to switch job or city. So, I was stuck and stuck bad. I wished everyday, this team just let me go. My inability to take action and decision, pushed my frustration to its limit.This is when I decided to join academia and completed my masters in CS.  It was hard to dual between job and study; but it was beautiful. I could not change my professional situation, but enhanced my education. 3 years later, I joined Amazon. Walking into Amazon was like a dream come true. Very soon, I realized - this is way advanced game than what I was accustomed to. The speed of the company, the intense focus on solving complex problems and the culture is something I am not made for.  I declared at home - I won’t survive here. My family again shared what I needed the most - a hug. Rest is history. I started believing into Company’s mission, culture and myself. I worked very hard to elevate my skills. I kept delivering most fascinating customer experiences for Amazon and raised rank to Principal engineer.   Morale of the story:  1. Control the input metric and don’t wrestle with output metric. 2. Your family is your most valuable asset. Protect it more than anything else.  3. Layoff is not the worst. So why to be scared. 4. Job can be eliminated, not your career. Focus on your career and job will follow.

Everyday, we share and celebrate our personal wins with our professional network. But, today I am celebrating promotions (L5 and L6)  of two of my mentees (working from two different countries) at Google. No - they did not get promoted because I mentored them, instead it was 100% their leadership and impact that got rewarded with very well deserved promotions. Why am I telling this story? Because, I practiced something different from my prior mentoring camps and that paid off to hit this organizational goal.   (1) Sponsor and support: It is one thing to mentor and completely different to support one's career. Mentors can preach what good looks like in a 1:1 setting, while the supporter walks with the candidate till the end of the journey. It needs curving out time to be present in their design reviews, tech talks or hard negotiations. It helped me to calibrate their progression towards success.    (2) Make it a goal: One may ask - how did you find this much time? Well - I turned this into my organization and leadership goal. Also, I started sponsoring a few org wide initiatives that are aligned with respective promo needs of these individuals. That helped me to negotiate time with my leadership. (3) Career accounting: This is one area where I struggled in my career - managing the books of career accounting. We miss documenting where my time is spent and why? This is where we start losing focus on what is most important for the organization and career. I did spend a good amount of time with my mentees to practice this trait and improve their focus on career goals. (4) Structuring a personalized growth plan: Every individual is at a different maturity level in their career trajectory and therefore, growth strategy has to be personalized. While that is not surprising, it is important to structure with a network of feedback providers and prior promo committee members. In short, I opened up a direct communication channel to get input on where each mentee needs to demonstrate strength and that helped to remove ambiguity. (5) Upward management: Many of us struggle to manage our managers and partners. This comes in the form of expectation management, communicating priorities and goals effectively, establishing trust while demonstrating judgment and ownership. This is a specific area where I started a focused coaching within my camp and promo packets reflected those evidences. I wish all the very best to my mentees in their new roles at Google. Cheers!

It’s been 1.5+ yrs since I started working at Google and several individuals from my LinkedIn network asked me some common questions - “How are you adjusting to the cultural shock between Amazon vs Google ”? I waited for 1.5 yrs since I needed some data to calibrate my journey and share answer in a professionally responsible manner. Also, the tech industry has endured tremendous turbulence in the last 2 years and I had to adjust my surfing gears more than ever. Let me start with - yes, I had cold feet when I stepped outside my 9 yrs old “Amazon” home. But, I can also assure you this decision was not impromptu and took ~5 months of mental exercise. Here are some things that I practiced to weather the change and get acclimatized.   (1) Set right expectations: This is probably the most important one to avoid mental stress and fatigue. Like any trade, there are risks when stakes are high. I spent nearly 2 months finding the trade offs and compromises of my choices which led me to build the plan to address my own concerns.    (2) Build career strategy: With expectations set, I put a methodical structure to accelerate my journey. First 4 months, I was 100% hands-on with SDE-1 and 2s to understand the builder tools (yes, they know the best!), server frameworks, development and deployment best practices. Then I scheduled 50% of time on project delivery, 30% on identifying top engineering problems and 20% time working on the 3 years vision. (3) Stay original and authentic: My strategy was to fight all of my inner urge to practice Amazonian traits at Google (all though some part of me was screaming inside). That said, I did not throw any Amazon leadership principles and instead moderated the tone in the new world, while embracing the Googlyness. (4) Respect what came before: I put a self note on my desk to fight all urges to be judgmental and opinionated about all prior organizational and engineering decisions. Instead, I scheduled meetings and spent several months absorbing what came before and internalizing the vision. (5)Developed my professional network: “Earn trust” is table stakes if you want to grow in your career. Building trust and network is a huge time investment and takes careful planning. Frequent 1:1 with mentors and leaders in my organization definitely paid off to seed the right network structure at the early stage. (6) Learn and be curious: For a builder, it is not fun to throw away familiar tools. pick up new ones and accelerate.  But, here is one thing that helped. I stopped burdening myself with the idea that I am missing my old tools, instead motivated myself to learn technologies those power planet scaled software. Success metric to share: Today I Am driving ~100+ SDE organization as the tech lead. Achieved code review bar raiser in two programming languages Became chaos testing ambassador in Google Ads.  Led a performance improvement objective in Google (won Bronze tier) Launched 2 critical features.

After an amazing and impactful 8+ years at Amazon, I am stepping outside to start a new journey at Google #google . This amazing journey at Amazon was not possible without exemplary leaders, coaches, mentors and guides. I am privileged to be part of few products and technologies that only handful of people gets to work in their life time. I sincerely thank Amazon and my leadership team to grow me from an engineer to leader of leaders in last 8 years. A new day 1 is ahead of me now and super excited to be part of the Google's mission.

Defying gravity.

Tony Li #Kudos I am continually impressed by the results you produce! #GreatJob

Proud to be part of the team and to be able to work on such an innovative product! Go Prime Video. #prime #video

Another huge milestone