Why I am in the Same Team since I joined Amazon

I joined AWS in August 2017 as a Software Development Engineer 1 (SDE 1) fresh out of my graduate college. I joined a team responsible for credential distribution to the Amazon internal hosts & AWS EC2 Instances. I am in the exact same team all these years. I am now a Senior Software Development Engineer ( SDE 3). Recently, one of the interns asked me “why I stayed in the same team for such a long time?”. This led me to think on reasons for staying such a long time. This post is my could be answers for that question.

• Impostor Syndrome - The feeling that I am not that good enough for other teams. Initially when I joined the team, I was low on confidence. I felt, I had lot of basic knowledge gap. I think, at the back of my mind, I had this feeling that I got lucky in getting into this job rather than actual skill parity. So, I thought I need to acquire that knowledge before I can even attempt to try for other teams. Impostor Syndrome is in full display here. This feeling was there for some time. As I gained more experience in the domain as well as general software engineering, this feeling reduced.
• Amazing team members - When I joined the team, its existing team members were simply brilliant. They are great engineers and there was lot to learn from them. It was intimidating for sure, but that also pushed me to acquire more skills. Many of them have left the team now and a lot of new engineers have joined. At present, team members are still great both new and experienced engineers. They still maintain a very high standards.
• Great manager - Having a good manager with whom you can communicate well and understands you well is very crucial. Manager should accelerate your career progression by making sure you are challenged enough by giving very interesting projects. Manager should help you in clearing your hurdles and help you to focus on the most important thing of a project. Manager should also challenge me technically, question my technical decisions in order to reach better technical decision. At some point in the team, I got a manager who ticked those qualities.
• High Impact Product - The services we own in the team are very critical and core to the company. As a result, the changes we make to the service has high impact. This gives a satisfaction for the work we do.
• Freedom - I believe each person has different method of approaching the work. They follow various methods and use various tools to do their work. Each will have their own set of practices. Example some want to work early in the morning and some late in the evening. Some need focused slots and some wants to work in collaboration. Even for the technical decisions we take in a project, every one brings in their own flavor. For all this there needs to be a freedom given the developer to the way they do their work. This is present at my current team.
• Learning Opportunists - There are many new things I keep learning in the team and from the org our team is associated with.

As of now, I value these and hence I am staying with my current team. The criteria can change in the future and thus it will re-evaluated when the need comes.