With my offer to Amazon being processed and my start date set to February 6th, I currently have my career path set alongside the Alexa AI Organization. I interned with the org back in my summer internship, so naturally, they wanted me to return to the team that I have originally interned with. Usually, that would be the case, but for me, I was placed with a group of interns primarily concerned with working on their internship projects and not working with any existing product teams.

The hiring manager that I was placed with talked to me about working with a new team based in Bellevue Washington since the rest of the engineers on the team was based in the area. The team is moving to a hybrid work schedule, coming into the office 2-3 times a week. I think this move would be good for my career development since it would mean that I can get help in person vs managing everything through email and slack messages, and I would be able to network in person as well. Granted, the idea of moving from California to Washington for work is rather daunting for me, but I believe that it would enable me to grow more as a developer and as a person.

The projects within the Alexa AI org should be interesting to work on, plus I can always transfer internally between teams if things aren’t working out well, so that shouldn’t be too bad. Since I’m still new to the software development industry, I think it’s important to try out different things in order to see what I like and don’t like to do, as well as to determine what makes a good team/manager to work under. I’m blessed with good friends and mentors, and I appreciate all of the advice that they have given me. I do want to improve my technical writing, teaching ability, and the quality of my code, so I’ll use the time before I start to work on those things during this class and the time before I start my new job. Hopefully, the economy won’t implode itself before I start, and I can begin my career in earnest.