#49 “At Amazon I worked with a Black man who was working on his promotion to SDEII. Getting promoted was anything but easy for him: he wasn’t even being treated with respect by his teammates…”

“At Amazon I worked with a Black man who was working on his promotion to SDEII. Getting promoted was anything but easy for him: he wasn’t even being treated with respect by his teammates, let alone being held to the same bar for promotion. I heard his teammates yelling at him for a disagreement about an implementation detail, yet they gave *him* feedback that he was too aggressive.


When I got the opportunity to work closely with him on a project, his technical bar and his leadership skills were so clearly at the SDEII level. It was his first time working on a ReactJS project, and he was knocking it out of the park — his code was well-organized, he followed best practices, he asked the right questions.

On top of that, he was doing all of the mentoring and project planning for three ‘Amazon Future Engineers’ on his team. I sat in on his learning sessions with them. His project plan was comprehensive, and his teaching style was patient and thorough — exactly how, on paper at least, we expect Amazon leaders to be.


‘Amazon Future Engineer’ is a program aimed at increasing access to computer science education for children and young adults from underserved and underrepresented communities. It goes without saying that the situation was thick with irony — not only would the team not reward his engineering work, but they left him to shoulder the burden for Amazon’s diversity work, mentoring a new group of engineers that will enter the tech industry only to be treated with the same disregard and disrespect.”