u/Interesting-Fly4102

I’m an SDE1 at Amazon and I’ve been here for ~10 months. During the January layoffs/reorgs, I got moved to a completely new team. It’s been about 4 months now, and I still feel completely lost.

Just when I thought I was finally getting the hang of my old team’s services, I had to start over again. The engineers on my current team have all been here 4+ years, and the knowledge gap between me and them feels massive. I genuinely don’t know how to close it.

I watch the KT videos, read docs, try to follow discussions, but I mostly understand things only at a high level. The moment conversations go deeper into service-specific context/history/design decisions, I completely lose track. Sometimes I’ll ask someone for help, understand the first 30% of what they’re saying, and then slowly lose the thread of the conversation entirely. By the end, I don’t even fully understand what the solution was or how it applies to my problem.

Because of that, I keep needing to ask follow-up questions again and again. And honestly, I can feel people getting tired of helping me. I constantly feel like everyone is secretly wondering how I even got hired.

I feel like such a fraud here.

What makes it worse is that I’m weirdly burnt out too, even though I’m not working insane 12-hour days or anything. I think part of it is the constant anxiety of feeling behind all the time.

Another thing I’ve noticed: AI is making my problem worse. Instead of sitting down and deeply understanding codebases/services, I use AI to unblock myself quickly because deadlines are tight. So tasks get done, but my actual understanding barely improves. I feel like I’m losing the ability to patiently trace through systems and build mental models on my own.

At this point, becoming an SDE2 feels impossible. I genuinely don’t know how people develop strong domain knowledge when they’re already drowning just trying to keep up day to day.

Has anyone else gone through this? Especially early-career engineers or people who got reorged onto unfamiliar teams?

How did you actually overcome this?

I’m obese and I genuinely feel very unattractive most of the time. Please don’t reply with “you’re not ugly” because that’s not really the point of this post.

What confuses me is that despite having very low self-esteem, I’m also weirdly cautious around people because I’m scared they’ll develop feelings for me when they shouldn’t.

For example, I intentionally keep some distance from male coworkers because I don’t want workplace dynamics to become weird if someone starts liking me. I’m also careful around my friends’ boyfriends because I never want to accidentally create emotional complications.

And I know how contradictory this sounds. On one hand I feel like the ugliest person alive, but on the other hand I act like people around me could potentially fall for me if I get too close to them.

So now I’m wondering is this a common psychological thing? Is there a name for it?

I’m genuinely curious because I can’t tell if this is normal human behavior taken too far or if my brain is just being irrational.