I used to talk about that night like it was a triumph. A war story. The time I solved a problem no one else could at midnight and saved the release. My team called me a hero.
But something else was happening. I never really recovered from that first crunch. It eroded my boundaries around work. And for good reason. Deep down, I knew I was being evaluated more harshly than my peers, but the proof wouldn’t come out until years later1. I lived in fear of others thinking “we hired a Black engineer once and she couldn’t cut it”2, and that fear pushed me harder than any manager could.
So I started each early morning by cracking a Full Throttle energy drink from the vending machine.
I pushed myself so hard that others outside of Amazon started to take notice, even going so far as to take pictures.
- Rey, J. D. (2021, February 26). Bias, disrespect, and demotions: Black Employees Say Amazon has a race problem. Vox. https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/2/26/22297554/amazon-race-black-diversity-inclusion ↩︎
- Of course, nobody says this aloud, it’s implicitly understood when they contrast “meritocratic” hiring with “diverse” hiring. ↩︎