throwaway9191aa

> should not give up whatever we got so far.

Absolutely! I declined multiple offers this summer because they would have been pay cuts. We agree.

> Few professions earned this quality of life

Well that is a can of worms. I'm going to guess Doctors deserve much better. I think the unfortunate reality is that, maybe, tech workers haven't earned this quality of life. Instead, we are the lucky recipients of decades of growth. This is something that isn't even shared in Canada or Europe, much less Asia, in terms of salary.

> This is the stuff the car industry did when they just offshored jobs,

Agree, this is going to be bad. Now that we have shown productivity with work from home, how tied are companies to these high USA salaries?

I'm not ok with it. But I also remember that when I'm running around looking for a job, the people with that job are making the demands. This is something that tech workers haven't actually experienced for a decade, but every other industry has.

> okay with these levels of lay offs and still revere these companies

Revere these companies? Founders are taking risks to make a LOT of money. They aren't here to make employees money. I don't revere these companies, and I don't put any stock in their Family Friendly or work life balance encouraged, marketing nonsense.

I had "trouble" finding work over the summer. But the actual details are that I was asking for $275k and $300k at two companies. Both gave me a verbal offers, but hiring froze. The third company, gasp, wanted me to come into their office (20 minutes down the street).

I also lived through 2001 and 2008. I think the last 12 years of perpetual growth have created some amazing expectations from people. I can only hope that, once I get laid off, I'll have to "settle" for some $175k job in an office after my 3 months of severance runs dry.

For the sake of argument, let's just assume that all of this is true and they are acting in self interest and everyone is horrible all the time.

I would still take the deal. I would work there if they hired me. If there are enough people like me to continue the business, then this thing turns out to not be shitty. Only time will tell.

Any links would have been great :) But yes non-responders do exist, and some people even discover serious cardiac conditions through exercise.

In an attempt to clarify "decent amount", maybe this helps? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-01041-1

I don't generally understand these surveys. This one seems to indicate the term "non-responder" is not just unhelpful, but possibly damaging.

"Thus, just because an individual does not improve their VO2max or 1RM with training, this does not mean that they have not derived a multitude of other benefits from exercise, many of which, such as increased social interaction seen in community exercise settings"

What I don't see in this survey is anything related to "off the couch" improvements, which is clearly what we are talking about. Neither myself nor GP said we went from regionals to nationals. We went from cigarettes and beer to recreational riding. I have a hard time believing those gains aren't available to almost everyone. But, I didn't find a study so it doesn't exist :)

I'll add myself as a second data point here. Lots of beer. Lots of cigarettes. Lots of sitting and programming.

Now most of my friends think I'm some kind of elite athlete and I am not, I just rode around on a bike every couple of days for several years. It is incredible what a change in lifestyle can do.

The average person can absolutely everest, or ride 100k, or whatever, given a bit of training. Of course, training for a year so you can ride your bike up and down a hill all day isn't that appealing to most folks. But it could still be done.

Oh yes, the pipeline deployment process is pretty amazing. I agree, for good reason. My manager has actually recommended I look at profserv teams because of the ability to deliver results for customers.

When I started in AWS, I watched customers implement hack solutions for themselves because it would take our team too long to deliver a proper solution (so hard to give specifics on HN :) ). That was the hardest thing for me to handle. The mindset is what works best over the next N years, not what works best for a set of customers right now.

Honestly that is the right mindset. Early adopters know they are early adopters and will have to work around problems.

I think the take away from this conversation, for anyone still following, is that a lot of developers (like myself) want to move really really fast. AWS has processes in place to prevent this movement from breaking customers. While it is so annoying for me, it really is a win for customers.

I absolutely think you should plan out how your customer will solve their problem with your product, including concrete examples, and make sure you are always headed towards that goal. I'm very waterfally that way.

In this case I'm talking about the tasks in each sprint. I think 1 day of planning per sprint is a lot. We are supposed to be agile. If we missed a task, swap it with another. If something isn't actually important, bring in something new. We end up doing this anyway... so why all the upfront planning each sprint?

Related back to the above comment, (my opinion) people really love to establish rules and processes and are not able to handle ambiguity. I spend a lot of time (remember the 4 hours a week) arguing whether a story is a mouse or a hedgehog.

IMHO it's splitting hairs, let's just do the work and we estimated a little wrong it just isn't that important.

Certainly not speaking for the folks above.

While I am critical of many things Amazon does, what I see in the media about AWS is usually laughably false. We aren't all in broken marriages due to on-call duty.

The stories I read about drivers urinating in their pants because they have too many deliveries scheduled simply does not reflect the behavior I've seen from drivers in my area (I ride a bike everywhere, Amazon drivers are noticeably bike friendly in a way that makes me think they aren't under pants-urinating pressure).

So when I see stories about the FCs, I assume the same. I guess I am biased towards thinking the media focuses on the negative and totally ignores anything good. So... yea I guess I "don't see" all the bad things. Still pro union... but treated like dirt is probably a little far.

[edit, have worked for aws for about 5.5 years]

> Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills.

That has been exactly my experience, after 5.5 years. My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week (there are 9 of us). It is way more important to try to plan out work than it is to actually do the work.

> The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them.

I did burn myself out trying to reduce operational load. I wasn't arguing for it the right way, so I ended up doing it myself. I was able to measure my results, but it didn't even count towards a promo because I didn't "harmonize discordant views"... instead I just did what needed to be done.

Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture. That is false. Try to find out how many of those folks have actually worked outside Amazon before taking their advice.

Current FAANG. Most of the folks I work with give terrible interviews. You really can do these questions correctly, but most don't.

My AWS interviewer (I got super lucky) asked me a really basic question about linked lists. Then expanded to a double linked list. Then we talked about inheritance. Only then did we attempt to find the nearest parent of two nodes in a tree. It was a great example of determining knowledge, and whether that knowledge can be applied to problem solving.

When I shadow interviews I usually hear folks ask candidates something like "find repeating k-clusters in a string" and then just silently wait for the code. Or even worse, design a filesystem. Then critique the candidate for not thinking of weird symbolic link ownership edge cases. Unsurprisingly, this is just what it is like to work at AWS :(

The question needs to have multiple solutions that you can discuss with the candidate. The question needs to have some follow up like "What if you were writing this on an embedded device? How would that change your solution?". These situations DO arise every day. Here is a simple problem, with annoying institutional requirements. Can you still come up with something? Or did you just memorize the algorithm?

I don't! :)

Yesterday I was on a conf call during my son's soccer practice. I was walking around the woods with my daughter at the same time. I was doing none of the above well.

It occurred to me recently that most folks who have been promoted around me don't have children, or just started to have children. There is no upside at work, only in your life.

[edit more] And this morning my daughter told me to get off my phone as I was checking emails (I'm oncall at the moment).

Kids absolutely know that you aren't paying attention to them.

I'd love to quit and just take some time off. I worry that this is the wrong example to set. I've been working regularly for 20 years, but my kids don't know that. But I dunno... thats just fear I suppose.

I'm not well versed in BTC, so my prices may be wrong. But this is webscale in a way I haven't thought of before.

It is alleged they stole 119754 BTC, which in 2016 was < $1000USD. Which would have been < $100,000,000. Today, it is worth 5bln. (not that 100mm is nothing.... but it is a lot less).

Could you imagine stealing something that most people thought was a toy. Suddenly it became so valuable that the government could justify who-knows-how-much resources to catch you?

But... is the interviewee proxy doing this as a side gig? If they are good enough to get paid (presumably) for taking interviews, how can that be more valuable than just taking one of the jobs they successfully interview for?

Is there a non-paywall link that everyone is looking at? Or maybe I'm the only one without a subscription to the Economist.

Or is the headline the only reason this is upvoted to #1, and people are just assuming what the article says?

I was reading https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/overview-a..., which looks a little different than your chart, but the craft beer thing (imho) is dangerous (and I love craft beer).

Most of the beers I like are 7.5%, except stouts which are 10-12%. They also come in large 16oz cans. Two of these is almost 4 drinks. "Craft beer enthusiast" can start to approach heavy drinker very quickly.

It isn't that easy to do. Anyone advertising their ex-con status is sabotaging themselves. So what signal do they use for every inbound resume?

So the company can't just trash the resume. After the interview, if things are moving forward, the candidate can inform the hiring manager of the situation. But if the company doesn't do background checks, they don't ask so you don't tell.

How does one get in touch with this UnderdogDevs group without a twitter account, or otherwise public account? I haven't seen an email address anywhere but am probably just missing it.

As long as you don't talk to your manager ahead of time. I watched a colleague tell our manager that the job wasn't in line with what was explained (colleague was right, he wasn't a fit). Instead of the manager moving him into a new roll, my colleague was PIP'd. When my colleague did try to transfer, the PIP blocked it.

If you have a good manager, maybe its fine. But if your manager needs some headcount to cut.... don't trust them.

I'll just +1 this as a datapoint.

I am not looking externally until I'm sure I'm done at AWS. I've done 80+ interviews here, and I'm consistently amazed by what drives people to say "The candidate wasn't up to the coding bar". As far as I can tell, you are almost never up to the coding bar. I think we interview so many people just to remind ourselves that if we leave, we aren't getting back in.

Just to head off the "So why don't I argue for change?" questions, I'd rather work on self improvement than fight tooth and nail to make the hiring process a little bit better. I'll let somebody else add that to their promo doc.