112 karma · joined May 25, 2009
Being the engineer on-call when the website/service/app is down and the company is losing $xMM/minute while you debug the problem is the very definition of stress.
Some companies like Google cordon this responsibility off to SREs. While Amazon has started developing a similar job family, the burden of supporting critical services still largely falls to software engineers.
While software engineering is certainly not the worst job from a stress perspective, my experience (particularly with operations at Amazon) is far from the zen-like state the author describes. It can also be pretty exciting.
Here's how: any book, ever published, in 60 seconds or less. Kindle.
That's not my understanding of what Google did at all. Google fed back search results for keywords that didn't exist on the Internet -- period, and they started eventually showing up in Bing.
At a top 10 CS school, your experience would probably have been very, very different.
1. www.amazon.com 2. www.amazon.co.jp 3. www.joyo.com 4. www.amazon.de 5. www.amazon.fr 6. www.amazon.co.uk