Why The Best Reinvent Themselves Every 2 Years | Carlos Arguelles

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Nov 25, 2025

Carlos Arguelles, a senior principal engineer with a rich background at tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, shares insights from his dynamic career. He outlines how being laid off pushed him to reinvent himself and emphasizes the importance of patience and adaptability after setbacks. Carlos discusses the challenges of scaling infrastructure at Amazon, the lessons learned from significant outages, and contrasts corporate cultures. He stresses the value of influencing others over just technical skills and the necessity of continual learning in tech.

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ANECDOTE

Black Friday Outage That Sparked Change

Carlos's team skipped load testing for Black Friday and assumed scalable components would be fine.
The Oracle database became the single-point failure and caused an eight-hour outage that forced rethinking of testing.

ADVICE

Use Stories To Drive Tool Adoption

Socialize success stories to get adoption for shared infrastructure.
Open-source internal tools to let other teams contribute and scale usage.

INSIGHT

Monorepo Forces Tests Before Merge

Monorepos force shifting testing earlier because commits affect the whole company.
Micro-repos reduce blast radius, which can make teams complacent about pre-merge testing.

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Carlos Arguelles came to America at 15 with no English and no money, eventually becoming a Senior Principal Engineer who broke Amazon during Black Friday. He then turned that disaster into infrastructure the entire company uses today. From 12 years stuck at Microsoft to the real differences between Amazon and Google, Carlos reveals what actually separates engineers who plateau from those who break through. This is the career advice nobody gives you until it's too late.

Guest Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-arguelles-6352392
https://carloarg02.medium.com/

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