The most important question left unasked : Did he make enough money to retire after it?
His agreement stipulated that he had ISOs for 709,568 shares at a strike price of $.001471. http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847... "This Amended and Restated Incentive Stock Option Letter Agreement (this "Agreement") amends and supersedes paragraph 2(c) of the Employment Agreement between you and the Company dated October 24, 1994, regarding the grant to you of a stock option (the "Option") f…
And each of those shares has split into 12 today, so I think he's probably doing alright for himself.
Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn’t figure out? Shel : Stay up late. Hahaha. I remember building an online art gallery back in 1996. It was for an internship. I got it because I bluffed and said I knew HTML. After I was hired, I purchased a book on HTML. Turns out, the company's "CTO" did the same thing. We both learned o…
I seem to recall that googling (well alta-vista-ing) bugs in the 1990s was definitely a thing. Always seemed to end up on a usenet group though.
And every now and then you would come across someone describing the exact problem you ran into ... and the message trail would end with the OP saying "Nevermind, fixed it". Without sharing how!
An Amazon employee less than #10 does a seminar about SDE careers at Amazon where he/she brags about how Amazon fired all their early engineers because "they weren't good enough." Yeah the people who got Amazon off the ground weren't good enough. Then he/she talks about how if you want to be promoted you better start sucking up to the people deciding your fate in "smoke filled rooms" because you're wrong if you think it has anything to do with your work. This is supposed to be a seminar on how to get promoted at Amazon. It is truly vile and goes to the core of Amazon's culture. Smart people are only there to be exploited.
So I read this article interested to see how long engineer #1 lasted: 5 years.
I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour, I'll be back to check on you in 20…
Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code (unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately, most web software seems to already…
I've made this comment before, but people don't seem to understand how used one can get to a specific setup.
I've spent for example 20 years working with MY Visual Studio setup, with a normal desktop keyboard and mouse. Then I get handed that crappy flaptop that no one wants to use.
You do what you can, but still your effectiveness basically drops by 40%.
I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).
How do you do, fellow Kaleidan [1]?
We worked together with Eric Benson and Dan Bornstein on ScriptX [2], which was basically Lisp with objects instead of parenthesis.
I found ScriptX quite useful for web programming [3]: "Link Globally, Interact Locally"!
ScriptX's legacy lives on: After Kaleida shut down, John Wainwright, the architect of ScriptX, created a very similar language called MaxScript [4] for 3D Studio Max, which I later used at Maxis for programming the character animation content pipeline for The Sims [5].
Agreed, it was very frustrating. They required that we follow the exact same set of interview questions for every candidate, verbatim. We were not allowed to ask technical questions or do any kind of proficiency questioning / testing, etc. When pressed, they said that we could ask follow up questions to their set of questions, and that we should be able to determine technical proficiency by inquiring about past exper…
Giving your HR group the benefit of the doubt, in my experience, when the pendulum has swung that far to the "process" side, it's because the company has been burned in some way in the past.
... And retaliates by burning everyone in it every day. That said, ive read more positive HR stories in this thread than I've seen everywhere else combined.
May be so. These were pretty easy questions, though. Like 'What steps/commands would you use to reset the password on a [Make] [Model] managed switch through the serial port?' Very easy to Google. Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google.
> Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google. Never underestimate anybody. I've seen numerous examples wherein folks would copy/paste an obviously inferior answer (or even incorrect) from a Stack Overflow post that contains a much better answer.
This rings a bell right now. :-)
Last week I integrated with a service using (shudder) SOAP.
I tried the XML call with curl and couldn't get it to work. I cursed, I frothed. The reply error was some Java dump, not helpful.
It took me embarrassingly long to realize I got the HTTP header fields for SOAP from something wrong I googled -- it worked when I copied the header line from old code I wrote before... :-) :-(
I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour, I'll be back to check on you in 20…
Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code (unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately, most web software seems to already…
The better solution I've seen to this problem is for them to warn in advance that something like that will happen, suggest bringing your own machine with you, and point you at a skeleton git repository to start working on.
EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.
My understanding from others (second hand) is that there was lots of Perl. (And that this persisted for quite some time). True?
Yes, there was a ton of Perl in the early days. This came about because Paul Davis was a Perl aficionado and did a lot of script writing with it early on, and the non-programmers, of which there were n-2, could pick it up much more easily than C (of course). Which is how some of them became programmers. Incidentally, we used C, not C++, though I liked OOP, because I had previously had less than great experience using C++ on large projects. We used a C++ compiler though because it could catch more errors than the C compiler could. This is one area where Steve Yegge was a bit off in that famous post.