I handed in my notice at Amazon on a Tuesday in January 2025. It was cold, the Tube was a mess, and my manager's first reaction was "are you going to a competitor or starting a company, because the retention conversation is different either way". I told him neither. He said "then what on earth are you doing?". It was a fair question.

I'd been at FAANG-scale companies for twelve years. The compensation was obscene — the last total-comp number on an offer letter in front of me was comfortably into seven figures a year in GBP equivalent. The work was hard, the people were smart, the job was, by most reasonable standards, the best job I was ever likely to have. I left anyway. These are the actual reasons.

I had stopped being surprised

Not by the work. The work was interesting in the way a hard crossword is interesting. What had gone missing was the sense that I didn't know what was going to happen next. I could look at a project on day one and more or less write the post-mortem that it would eventually need. The unknowns had become unknown in their details but not in their shape.

I didn't recognise this at first as a problem. I thought I was getting better at my job. What I was actually doing was losing the edge that comes from not-quite-knowing. Being permanently almost-competent is, it turns out, where most of my good work had come from.

The meetings got ahead of the making

At Principal level the ratio had slid to roughly 70% meetings and 30% making. I told myself for about a year that the meetings were the making — that leverage through other engineers was a kind of making. Some of it genuinely was. Most of it was not. Most of it was a conversation about whether a thing should be done, followed by a conversation about who should do it, followed by a conversation about whether the conversation had reached a conclusion.

I missed the feeling of shipping something. I had forgotten what it was like to finish a day with a commit in it.

The money stopped doing anything

This one is uncomfortable to admit because it is an enormous privilege. The compensation crossed, for me, somewhere around the point where the mortgage was paid off and the pension was going to be fine. After that, each additional RSU cliff did precisely nothing for my life.

I know this is not true for everyone. I know there are people who need the money for reasons that are urgent and real. I am not in that group any more, and pretending I was would have been a dishonest basis for staying.

I had lost taste

This is the reason I've only been able to articulate after six months of distance. The longer I was inside a single large company, the more my judgement about what was good narrowed to what was good inside that company.

I could tell you whether an internal design document was strong. I was losing the ability to tell whether an idea was actually any good, as a thing in the world, outside the specific market-and-regulatory-and-political-economy that the company operated in. Taste is the thing the industry depends on senior engineers having. It does not survive twelve years of optimising for a single reward function.

What I'm doing instead

I'm writing. I'm advising six companies, all UK- or EU-based, all small enough that the advice actually gets acted on. I'm doing a bit of teaching. I am not starting a company, because I know myself well enough to know that I don't currently have the appetite for it, and I'd rather admit that than pretend otherwise.

I make less money. I make a lot less. I also, for the first time in four years, finish most days before dinner, read something that isn't a design document, and occasionally have an idea that surprises me.

The regret question

The honest answer is: I had a bad month around August last year. Impostor syndrome, a consulting project that didn't go well, a LinkedIn timeline full of people I worked with getting promoted to levels I'd never reach now. For about a fortnight I genuinely thought I'd made a mistake.

Then I got on with the next thing. And the next. And around October I noticed I hadn't thought about the decision in weeks. That, it turns out, is what "no regret" actually looks like. Not the absence of doubt. The absence of the thought.

— Nivaan