Originally posted at http://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3

Trigger warning: mention of suicidal ideation

tl;dr: I burned out as a developer at Amazon at the end of my second year. I’ve since found a healthy and sustainable work-life balance and enjoy work again. I write this to A) raise awareness, especially for new-hires and their families, and B) help give hope and advice to people going through the same at Amazon or other companies.

There’s been no shortage of anecdotes, opinions, and rebuttals regarding Amazon’s corporate culture as of late. I write this not to capitalize on the latest news-feed fad, but to share what I had already written and promptly deleted. I didn’t think anyone would want to hear my story, but it’s apparent people are going through a similar experience and don’t have a voice.

I’m a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon; SDE II basically means a software developer with at least 2–3 years of industry experience. I started at Amazon as an SDE I.

An attempt to design an interactive input control for a text-based game. Given a question, fill in the blanks in the correct order by selecting parts of the answer from cards.

• Buffer: a set of empty cells of a specific length, used to collect selected items to match against correct answer.
• Chain: an ordered set of tiles selected by the user.
• Input: user actions (taps and slides).
• Slide: continuous motion while the finger is touching the screen.
• Tap: a short touch after which the finger is lifted. Treated as a short slide.
• Tile: a card with part of the answer.

Recently I've had the opportunity to make a couple of apps just for me. Why not solve my own problems?

One of the things that bother me is a little bit of extra weight that I just can't lose. Frankly, I just eat too much, or rather, snack too often instead of having a proper meal. I thought, why not track my meals and see if it gets better? Surely, there's a ton of apps on the App Store to track meals, calories, water and what have you, even suggesting meal and shopping plans. Yet I didn't need any of that.

What I needed was a low-key food tracker that only required one or two choices to make and did't think it knew better than me what to do. I already had a pretty good food routine and had no problem maintaining weight, what I wanted to achieve was a slight calorie deficit. Now, what it was about was basically a variant of intermittent fasting, but one that I controlled, not one that controlled me, like e.g. the 16:8 diet where you don't eat for 16 hours every day. I wanted to slightly raise