Issue #40

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 millions of dollars on day one, and eventually, over a billion dollars over the system's lifetime.

I was in charge of the tech stack. We kicked butt and delivered all of the software in six months, despite a ton of obstacles. We were resource-constrained, so I wore many hats. At various points, I was a TPM, QAE, PM, and Dev Manager, and I put in nights and weekends.

We launched in the morning, and things were going swimmingly. There were no major issues for users in the U.S.

Back then, I played recreational soccer and captained a team. We had made the playoffs, and we had a game that night.

As I was driving to the game, my pager went off. There was an issue with the back-end system for report generation for users in Asia and Europe.

And I ignored it. I turned off my phone and pager and put them in my bag.

It was a cold and wet winter night in Seattle—the kind of night where you're soaked before the game even starts.

I recall that I scored a goal that night, but I don’t even remember the score or whether we won or lost.

I didn’t turn my phone back on until I got home and took a warm shower. I logged into my computer a little over three hours after I was paged. I had missed dozens of pages and phone calls from my manager.

Our systems had crashed and burned. Nobody could get them back up in my absence. I was able to diagnose the problem quickly and recover. But the damage to the business and my reputation had been done. Some of our users left the platform, including a high-profile one.

My performance review for the year was marred by the phrase “uneven leadership.” For the first time in my career, I received a mediocre performance review, despite just being promoted that year.

All of this happened because I wasn’t there when my team needed me.

I wasn’t assigned the next big project for the group, despite the six months of great work I had just put in, and the years of goodwill I had accrued.

I tried to repair my reputation quickly. I proactively jumped on calls when we had other operational issues. I volunteered to do more work.

But it takes time to regain your reputation after you lose it. Nobody wanted to assign more scope to someone who had demonstrated “uneven leadership.”

What I realized after the dust had settled was that the importance of moments isn't distributed evenly. My team needed me at a critical moment, and I made the wrong choice.

I reckon it took about two years for my reputation to be rebuilt to near where it was before the incident. Really, though, I don’t think it truly recovered until my manager left for another company.

This experience taught me a valuable lesson about the weight of leadership and the fragility of trust. It showed me that success isn't just about what you achieve, but also about being present and reliable in crucial times.

I haven’t had anything close to that sort of knock to my reputation since then.

So please, don’t play fast and loose with your reputation. There’s no need to make the same mistake I did.

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