swaits

Is it fortunate? Working at a place that holds a high bar on hiring, pays extremely well, and provides extremes of learning and growth in tech? Yeah, that’s a pretty good spot to most rational people. Building systems for 20M request/second teaches you cool stuff. So yes, it’s fortunate.

Of course it’s not for everybody. I never said it was.

Nobody is going to take seriously a person that thinks working at Amazon is a pyramid scheme.

After you work at Amazon please report back your experience.

I worked at Amazon. Twice. In total about a decade as a Principal Engineer. I left voluntarily a few months ago.

I have zero regrets about my time at Amazon. I learned lots, worked with some incredible people, and had fun doing it.

And the culture? It was life changing for me, especially when I first joined. In all the best ways.

And Amazon today? All I’ll say is that at their size, maintaining solid culture is damn hard. The hiring spree peri-Covid definitely added unimaginable stress to maintaining the culture the company was built on.

They’re a big company, and thus a big target. It’s easy, cheap, and even lazy to kick them with stuff like this.

The truth is that while it’s changed a lot over time, anyone fortunate enough to work there should embrace it.

I also use jj to checkpoint. When working on a change, each time I get to a stable point I squash and start fresh with an empty change.

You can absolutely continue doing that.

I gave Aurora a quick spin before going back to Endeavour. Didn’t work well for me.

And I didn't have to learn anything like the hell of git refs. The UI is self-explanatory as long as you know the feature exists.

Another very nice thing is that conflicts aren't roadblocks. They're legit changes, first-class jj citizens. So, when I do something that ends in a conflict, I can just move over to a different change, do the work I'm already trying to do, and then go back and resolve the conflict when I want.

I switched to EndeavourOS. Between flatpak and brew and mise, I have relatively well sandboxed applications. This gives me most of the benefits of the immutable OSes, although nowhere near as rigorous, obviously. For a technologist, though, it's fine.

Real world SQL from the analytics, DE, BIE side of things is _extremely far_ from readable. It's a form of actual hell.

There is a staggering amount of ignorance present in the other comments here.

I was ignorant too. But I spent a good amount of time educating myself this year. I hope others do the same so they can make completely informed assessments. I worry about tribalism and politics driving too much of the thinking.

Look up NSGA and NSGA-II for a good starting point. Then Kagi your way deeper into the rabbit hole.

One bit of advice for the creators/maintainers: stop saying “cloud native”. It’s effectively meaningless, and definitely confusing. But most importantly, it’s irrelevant. Start with customers and work backwards. And in that process, ask if they really care about “cloud native”. They don’t. So don’t water down or distract people away from a great thing, please.

What a strange thing to require. It comes off a bit like X-Y. You seek high performance. But you state it as wanting zero copy networking. There’s a lot more to performance across the overall system than that.

The early years (from decades ago) are long gone. But I fired it up again a few years ago and intend on posting more actively henceforth.

We should remember people for their good and their bad, not wipe them from the history books.