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Emotional Reflections – Job Search 2025
In March of 2025 I decided to switch teams at Amazon. I had been successful on both the Kindle and Partner Network teams, spending more than three years in each organization. I wanted to see what I could do if I had the chance to build something from the ground up. It was risky, to be sure, a new organization, a new manager, a new director, and a new team focus. Sadly, for various reasons, reorganizations led to the new director departing, and business challenges stifled our engineering plans. With no clear team charter as a result, I was impacted as part of the Amazon layoffs in October 2025.
I mention the circumstances because it’s important context for the emotions that follow. I was definitely not surprised it happened, and I had in fact cleaned out my desk the Friday before. Amazon has changed over the last several years, and not in a good way. It’s very Day 2 now, and in many cases toxic leadership-driven organizational cultures are rewarded even as those leaders poorly model Amazon’s Leadership Principles. I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed my time as an Amazonian, and am grateful for all of the colleagues I worked with. But in my opinion, the company culture has drifted off course internally. I’m sure that’s not a surprise to anyone paying attention to prevailing public opinion as of today.
So, while I was not surprised at the outcome, I was unhappy that a proven track record of success at such a challenging tech company could be pushed aside because of circumstances. I would still have made the same decisions at the time I made them, because they were the right ones when they were made. But I do admit I was very frustrated that despite my time of successful delivery and execution I still found myself in this situation for reasons outside of my control. And I did wonder what would have happened if I had not decided to change teams, even apologizing to my wife at one point for the outcome of that decision.
It was difficult telling my children it had happened. Even though they are both near adulthood, at 18 and 17, it’s still hard for them to understand the magnitude of the situation, especially when I am a rational thinker and I very rarely let my concerns show. I told them my full time job was now finding my next opportunity, and that that was what they would be seeing me do until I was successful. It’s important to model the right mental approach, and one of my strengths has always been clarity during a crisis. And this qualified, even if to them it felt like it was just “Dad needs to find a new job.”
All that said, I wanted to reflect on my reactions to these experiences as I’ve navigated my job search to what is a satisfactory conclusion, as I’ve happily joined Atlassian.
Initial Reactions
There is a general consensus that someone shouldn’t “spray resumes” out at any job postings once a layoff occurs. I’m going to disagree. From a tactical standpoint, this makes some sense. But from an emotional standpoint, I felt the act of doing something was cathartic and helped me maintain my focus during a difficult time. Emotionally, I wanted to take action. Emotionally, I didn’t want to miss out on a potentially great opportunity that maybe didn’t entirely align with my overall background. And from a “well let’s see what the world thinks of me” standpoint at a time where I was basically being told I was no longer needed, I did a lot of applying above my current level, for director positions and even some executive positions.
I got two positives out of this “spray resumes” strategy. The first is, I was able to feel like I was making progress as a few applications garnered interviews. The second is, I was able to take time and figure out how I wanted to rebuild my resume, but not feel like I was being forced to do that rebuilding under duress. Eventually I did cut back on the amount of resumes I was submitting, but I still took some shots at positions above my level, and still would apply to places that looked interesting even if I wasn’t a perfect fit.
I think cutting back entirely to only applying for very specific positions risks missing out on positions that might not have been the best fit, but that I would be excited about. It’s difficult to predict at any time how my resume might be received by a hiring manager.
The other thing that I did, and it was a mixture of tactical and emotional response, was to investigate the possibility of going back and getting my Master’s degree at my alma mater, WGU. There was one prerequisite class I needed to enroll in a Master’s program, so I took time to complete that course in between job searches. At times I regretted doing taking the class as it consumed time, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to find a new role and wanted to set the stage for alternative options, even if those were long term options.
Amazing Support
The outpouring of support was unexpected and humbling. As a manager, often you don’t see the impact you have on people even if you have established a solid relationship. And a lot of times, your team members don’t have the context or the awareness to recognize what you do. I remember one time someone I had promoted to Senior Engineer two years prior messaged me to thank me for all the work I had put into their promotion; they had recently sat on a promotion panel for the first time and realized how much work went into it.
Several people wrote heart-felt recommendations on LinkedIn, and people who I hadn’t spoken to for years reached out to offer support, links to open positions, and referrals, one of which led to my offer at Atlassian. I sometimes have difficulty asking for support or putting myself out there online, but the overwhelming amount of people reaching out to check in on me was amazing, and gave me the confidence to reach out more than I might. Ordinarily I’m the one helping others. I am humbled to be receiving similar help myself from my colleagues and friends.
Maintaining Confidence
One thing a layoff does, is it messes with your confidence. An overloaded, fractured job market simply piles on. My success rate in getting an interview was about 7%. I consider that high based on public anecdotes, but to be honest, my experience is pretty lengthy and pretty deep. The number of positions I was perfectly qualified for and didn’t get a chance to interview with was high, and those rejections pile up.
I knew enough about the public discourse to know I needed to buckle down and concentrate on the successes, but it’s always in the back of your mind that this situation might not end well. I come from a non-traditional background; I was 15 years into my technical career before I got my degree. The imposter syndrome is real. And it undermines you. I’ve delivered at every stage of my career, and delivered projects at Amazon. Surely I can succeed elsewhere?
I made a number of choices to keep my confidence. One, I ignored the negativity and shrugged off automated rejections as mostly unimportant. Two, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I doubled down on having my resume and cover letter reflect who I am way more than reflect what an ATS wants to see. That alone helped reestablish my confidence as I went through all of my accomplishments, and reminded myself of all the good things, and then saw my application responses increase. And three, I didn’t abandon my instincts or my principles.
Trusting My Instincts and Principles
Once the interviews started happening, and I was able to handle those conversations mostly well, I was able to rely on my instincts and principles as I continued through my search. I’ve already spoken about the poor phone screen experience that led me to withdraw from a position. In another case, which ended on a very friendly note, a company had decided that they were not going to move forward after the first of two coding interviews. When I asked for feedback on where I could improve, the company actually backtracked and decided they were willing to go forward as I was “close enough” to code competency for a management role. I spoke to the recruiter at length and realized that it was unlikely that the next step, a front-end focused second coding interview, would go any better. We’d be having the same “close enough” conversation again after that one. I really liked the company and felt I would be a good fit, but they have their technical bar, and that’s their prerogative. So I withdrew from that interview loop as well.
In another case, I could tell from instincts and conversations that one company wasn’t sure what they were after as far as role, but that I could have a big impact if I came in. I’d been through a full loop and then two conversations with a senior leader, and they were still undecided. I would likely have accepted an offer at that time, so I drew a bit of a line in the sand and sent a polite email to the recruiter asking what remained in the process because I’d be happy to accept an offer if they extended one. They removed me from consideration the next day.
The one thing I did not want to do was make a bad situation worse by accepting an offer for a role I could tell might not be the right outcome. So I trusted myself and tried to not make any sudden decisions.
The Coding Interviews
The coding interviews varied quite a bit. I recognized that I would need to try my hand at LeetCode style challenges, and started working through those while familiarizing myself with the new AI tools and reorienting myself within Visual Studio. Eventually as the interviews started to come up I abandoned my LeetCode experiment, as I only had so many hours in the day and had no idea what questions I was going to get, and so no way to prioritize problem types.
One thing I noticed is that while companies say they aren’t doing LeetCode style questions, they still are, they are just hiding them better. One company’s task was to finish implementations of a preexisting feature that was essentially building upon a depth first search algorithm, even though it was more of a game-like presentation.
While these were the more fear-inducing parts of the process, I feel I did well in each one. I never felt like I was truly failing any of them, and after making it through the first one reasonably well, I was able to put the fear and uncertainty aside and ground myself in putting forth my best effort, trusting my ability to problem-solve, and leveraging my communication as much as possible. In particular, I felt that talking out loud at every step of the process in a coding interview, including articulating why I would stop to think, helped to keep me calm, while also allowing the interviewer a bit of a look into my thought process around trade-offs and other factors.
I am grateful my ability to focus enabled me to present myself in a reasonably confident way as I kicked off 7 years of programmer rust.
The System Design Interviews
The system design interviews also varied, but I felt I did better with these. In one case, an interview for a team that owned centralized product APIs, I basically sketched out a design that matched what their general plan was to coalesce their APIs. Historically back-end and systems has been my strength; when I interviewed for Amazon the design question I was asked revolved around being able to predict when an order of bananas could be delivered, and at the end of my walk-through of that plan, involving ordering systems, delivery scheduling, and a bunch of other things, the interviewer basically acknowledged that I had nailed what they did already.
Surprisingly, the toughest interview ended up being one of the system design interviews. It’s the only one I came out of feeling like I did not do well. I’ll own the fact that I probably didn’t do a good enough job at the time of getting deeper into requirements. That said, this question was another LeetCode problem dressed up as a design, where the only correct answer was implementation of a breadth search data structure. In addition, I think linearly and holistically; often when I draw out component structures I intend to go back and make adjustments as I think through the larger problem. The interviewer interrupted at every step of the way if one of my components wasn’t completely done before moving on to the next one, and threw my thinking off. I can see the point, each component should stand on its own. But if I’m building a system looking at it from a high level first before digging into details should be a reasonable approach if I want to make sure I am thinking about the problem correctly. This interview was a clear misalignment between my perspective of the level of the question and the depth the interviewer was seeking, and was the only time I felt myself start to overthink and lose my focus.
Final Thoughts
This was a challenging time, with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of uneasiness. It can be hard to remember who you are, and it can be very isolating. Control is illusory, usually in a negative way. In this case, though, things I had no control over ended up having a positive impact on my search. Anger and self-doubt do creep in, but they aren’t productive except maybe as motivation. I was able to wrangle those emotions and put my best foot forward in the face of difficult circumstances.
Behavioral Interviews
I’ve had the opportunity to participate in many, many interviews over the course of my career, including over a hundred as an interviewer at Amazon. Over time I’ve developed a perspective on behavioral interviews. Over the past couple of months, as I’ve conducted my job search, I’ve had the chance to be on the other side of the equation with high profile companies such as Meta. That has sharpened my perspective on this interview approach.
About Behavioral Interviews
Behavioral interviews focus on past experiences under the belief that past behavior best predicts future behavior. Candidates provide examples of how they handled real situations. Through conversation, candidates reveal their skills, competencies, how they handle challenges, their approach to teamwork and collaboration, and their problem-solving capabilities.
Questions are typically posed as a variation of “Tell me about a time you did a thing”, and answers are generally expected to be in the STAR format. The STAR format is prescriptive, requiring the answer to be presented with a Situation, the Task outlined to solve it, the Actions taken, and the Result.
My Candidate Approach
One of my core goals as a candidate is to present myself as calm, confident, and competent. I don’t want to be reading from a script, or perhaps perceived as leveraging AI, so while I have my list of examples sitting in a spreadsheet, I have them mostly memorized; I want to respond naturally as much as possible. I want the interview to be a conversation, not an interrogation. I want the person interviewing me to get a feel for what a working relationship would be like. I like to think I’m a strong communicator, and making the interview conversation go smoothly is a specific goal I have in mind.
I also don’t necessarily follow the STAR format as closely as I’ve seen others do it. In my opinion, its rigidity leads candidates to believe they should prepare every potential answer ahead of time. As a result, it can lead to answers that lack personality, lack depth, and sound more like a resume reading session. It also tends to mean that answers come from that predefined set of prepared responses even if the answer doesn’t clearly match the question. I prefer to tell a story, to provide a narrative, with an opening, a description, and a conclusion. I incorporate parts of the STAR format into those narratives, but I’m aware of the limitations in that format and the likely gaps it will force into my answers. Instead, I’d like to address those gaps in my initial answer; I want to control the conversation, not allow for the possibility that a follow up will take me in a direction I may not necessarily be prepared to go.
Sometimes that means I take a moment and think before answering. I do this deliberately, and I think it’s acceptable, sometimes even necessary. I make sure that my eyes are not going to what might be perceived as another screen; I’m keenly aware of body language and when I do stop to think I tend to make sure I’m looking upward if I have to avert my eyes to gather my thoughts. I’d much prefer to take a couple of moments, cycle through my examples in my head, and then answer with something as befitting as possible, or acknowledge my answer might not be the best and explain why it might still be relevant.
This can lead me to ramble. I’m very self-aware and will pause at natural stopping points and let the interviewer follow up if they choose. One of the risks I pose to myself is being too verbose in my answers; these interviews are conducted on a clock and running out of time could potentially be a deal-breaker if important points are not brought up. As a result, it’s critical to have a perspective on time as well as a perspective on what’s critical to surface to the interviewer. I limit my introduction to a specific set of data and time. I have seen candidates who, once they start, are so eager to check all the boxes that they are not able to put the brakes on as they speak. In the hands of an experienced interviewer, that can be handled with a gentle interruption; but if a candidate encounters one without that experience, they can burn valuable time and risk not providing all the data points.
What Can Go Wrong With The Process
It takes a certain nuance for an interviewer to be able to conduct a behavioral interview in a way that evaluates thought process when the candidate doesn’t provide the “right” answer. When an interviewer can’t do this, the candidate will find themselves evaluated on being able to articulate the answer the interviewer seeks rather than on how they mentally approach a problem. This is poor evaluation technique; not every candidate will approach a problem the same way, or have an approach that aligns with the interviewer, even if the result was successful. In the end, confirmation bias can be more impactful on the decision to hire or not than a clear evaluation of thought process and results.
There’s no way for someone to prepare for every possible question. As a candidate, it’s critical to be prepared to pivot to similar situations, or take that moment to think, or ask follow up questions while they find an appropriate answer. The risk here is that a candidate can be disqualified simply for not encountering a particular situation before, even though they may have been able to handle it perfectly fine based on their experience. After a discussion on coaching engineers, I was asked if I ever had to manage performance of a senior engineer on my team. I’ve been blessed with awesome senior engineers on my teams, so I honestly answered no, and provided a counter-response where I coached a senior engineer who was moving to management, not on performance, but on handling new expectations. I’m not sure if that disqualified me when they chose not to move forward, but I also strongly believe that I shouldn’t be disqualified due to not having encountered a specific situation. My background indicates I’d be perfectly fine coaching senior engineers in any situation.
I’ve gotten into the habit of cataloging the questions I am asked and taking my own notes after an interview completes to specifically target the ones I was not expecting. I actually like getting new questions, as I can incorporate them into my preparation.
There are interviewers who struggle to balance the time involved (typically 45-60 minutes) and the amount of data they need to gather. This can result in two poor outcomes. First, important data that could impact the hiring decision might be missed, as clarifying or follow up questions are not effectively executed. Second, and this happened to me recently, the interviewer is not able to conduct the questioning cleanly. I had an interview where I was interrupted after nearly every sentence to either direct or clarify what I said, before I had finished my point. This resulted in a disjointed experience, where the interviewer’s inability to coherently conduct questioning led to confusion, changes of direction, and a clearly poor result. If a company decides to pass on a candidate because there are missing data points, and the company is not willing to follow up to address those missing data points before making that decision, poor interviewing technique becomes an even greater risk to the process.
As a candidate, it’s important to maintain your composure at times like this and make sure that you are clarifying the questions you are being asked, and completing your thoughts before moving to the next one.
Final Thoughts
Interviewing is an inexact science. But behavioral interviews are even more subjective. Too often the inherent personal bias of the interviewer, the training provided, or the company guidance are more impactful than thoughtful evaluation and listening skills. The end result is companies are just as likely to hire someone that luckily manages to match their bias as they are to hire someone that actually matches their skills and qualifications. In a job market like the current one, where there’s an overabundance of candidates, companies are even less likely to feel certain about a hiring decision, and more likely to wait for that perfect candidate.
The Next Adventure
Yesterday, January 26, 2026, was my last official day as an Amazonian. I was impacted by layoffs in October 2025 after nearly eight years of successful delivery. The moment is bittersweet, as I’ve spent much of my time over this three-month transition period buried in job searches while trying to enjoy the holiday season in spite of the uncertainty. I’ve learned a lot over the last eight years, both what to do and what not to do, and I’ve worked with so many incredible individuals.
Immediately after the layoff occurred, I began looking for next steps. One of the more enjoyable aspects of my Amazon career was being a Document Bar Raiser. Giving back and helping so many people improve their writing was an amazing experience. I prepared a professional service, Hopeful Writing, to engage those who want to be better writers and offer professional help. I’m not sure if I’ll continue it or not if I were to get traction, but I wanted to be prepared in case I was not able to find a new role. Now that I’ve found one, I doubt I will engage much with this, except with interns or students.
That said, I’ve accepted an offer as Senior Engineering Manager at Atlassian, starting in mid-February. I’m super excited to work for Atlassian, and to continue to improve experiences for customers, developers, product owners, document authors, and anyone else involved in building something amazing for their customers. I wanted to find something I could focus on for the next several years, and I’ve been impressed with Atlassian for a while now and can’t wait to get started.
I’ll be posting more about my job search experience and reflections on this period of my life in the coming weeks.
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 