Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

I was involved as a remote contractor on Longhorn (Vista) working the accessibility team on Narrator (the screen reader) and the Magnifier. I experienced all of this with the addition of a couple of layers of management at the contracting company I was working for at the time. It was a bit insane. Our code also depended (very tightly) on the new Shell team code but we were a ways away in the branch hierarchy from them and every week it seemed some change was reverse integrated down the tree to us that broke something in our code. I'm not sure why the accessibility team wasn't part of the shell team.

Most of the cool code that we implemented was dumped on the floor. We had an experimental feature that would play a varying tone (frequency and amplitude) as you moved the mouse around and got close or over certain controls. The idea was to give a way for non-sited folks to explore a GUI. It worked so much better than the final thing that was shipped which just read all the controls in x/y order in the currently focused window.

I eventually got off that contract and I was amazed that Vista was eventually released.

I was a contractor at apple and had to do some stuff to authkit. It was a friggin nightmare. Running daily builds of macOS is a nightmare and the amount of secrecy and “you only get to know what you need to know” is super painful. I disliked that part a lot. Apple employees also look down on the “sad grey” badge employees. Was really great getting emails every week for beer and bbq events with the disclaimer I wasn’t invited.

Both of these sound like areas where Amazon's "API-interative first" approach would help?

The memo text:

> All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

> Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

> There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

> It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter.

> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

> Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

> Thank you; have a nice day!

To be clear, that wasn't the memo text. That was Steve Yegge's pithy summary of it in his infamous Google Plus post that was meant to be privately shared inside Google to call out how/why Google is worse than Amazon at web services.

It wasn't one specific memo, but rather a series of guidances from leadership down and through the Principal Engineering community to both incentivize and require this kind of interop.

Also, a lot of folks (not you, but inb4) focus on the last 2 lines because it fits with their narrative of an idea of what Amazon is like. For the record, nobody sent out (or sends out) a memo with a "do this, or you will be fired" conditionals. (I'm sure there are extreme cases where HR is already involved and people are on their final notice. I'm also sure there might have been some anti-union-busting b.s. or how the climate change activists got fired in a way that i personally don't agree with. But it's not a standard practice)

How does one get such remote contract gigs at BigCo's? Can you mention the agency?

It was kind of a one off. One of Microsoft’s first 100% remote employees was getting bored working alone on the east coast so he got permission to hire a small consulting shop near him to work with him. I was part of that shop after a failed startup (they were also a startup accelerator that I was part of earlier). I don’t think they exist anymore - the partnership had a falling out around the same time as the dot com bust.

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