Viewing profile — ex_amazon_sde

> How well this does this work for Amazon? Not so well. Some teams have a high threshold for hiring, some don't, but overall it's been going down because it becomes more and more d…

Private companies and banks see coops as the devil [for very obvious reasons] and fight them using regulatory capture and not engaging in business with them. It's pretty well-known…

> graduating without programming skills is impossible I interviewed a lot of people and quite a few could not implement fizzbuzz.

Amazon. It uses an internal tool but the implementation is not important. Applications and libraries and packaged independently just like any Linux distribution.

> APT shuts down daemons and keeps them down for an unreasonably long Are you doing live upgrades on production servers? Don't. If you are doing updates anywhere else a couple of s…

Ex Amazon here. I've been in companies that owned their datacenters and it was much, much cheaper than using any cloud service. Poorly managed datacenters exist but that's an organ…

Matrix always felt like an unnecessary company-driven reinvention of XMPP. Now I start to see why.

Debian has a big CI system to do end-to-end integration test https://ci.debian.net/ and https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds It also provides continuous snapshots: https://sn…

It's standard practice in many large companies.

> who ... understand the OS internals? ... How about write a library for their fav language? How about actually troubleshoot a misbehaving *nix process? Ex-Amazon here. You are des…

I cannot generalize for the whole company. When writing jobspecs in my team we never made lists of the "popular frameworks of the month".

> and that's unthinkable Google seems to be better in some ways, but I met plenty of ex-Googlers complaining about the stress and the competitive environment.

Ex-Amazon here: burnout due to stressful work and on-call duties is the n. 1 reason for attrition. It's very well known that people leave FAANGs in general due to stress.

> So I can't fault people for trying to avoid this mess. Ex-Amazon here. Being deeply familiar with OS fundamentals and internals, "low level" tools, and so on is crucial. A lot of…

Ex-Amazon here. One thing than Amazon really understands is that if you build you also create the opportunity to develop skill and knowledge. Also you avoid vendor lock-in. Even Op…

> transferring jobs out of the country entirely Or IN the country, depending on where the place-of-birth lottery put you.

This *really* depends on the company.

And yet I've seen plenty of people leaving for less stressful companies. The world-wide pool of *good* developers is not infinite and both Amazon and Google have been lowering the …

I used the same tool an the numbers were very similar 7-8 years ago. The amount of people that I saw leaving matches that attrition rate. Many were put on unjustified PIPs. The 6% …

Ex-Amazon here: indeed the level of skills, management, code quality and so on changes a lot across teams. Unfortunately people outside of Amazon make sweeping generalizations abou…

The "median citizen" is an absurd concept given the income distribution. It completely fails to capture income inequality. Also access to free education, free healthcare and so on.…

It's not.

> Also make software self-destructing with a warning This is not how forensic analysis works. Data is copied to read-only supports before any attempt of access is made.

> I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes. I worked for Amazon and post…