111–120 of 281 posts
... or literally thousands of people in the military right now, oil rig work, countless other IT help desk jobs, etc.
This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they w…
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. There's no such thing as totally "free shipping" or "free returns" either. One way or another, the customer is paying for it.
This is only true in the sense that there is a cost to move goods, but it is not true in the sense that retailers charge more to move the good to you. If it were, I wouldn't be able to reliably purchase goods shipped to my door for equal or less than what I pay in physical stores. When shipping is included in the price, that means that the shipper bears the cost of shipping by taking a smaller margin. If I were to be…
By the same argument, customers are paying the costs for Best Buy's internal logistics and retail floor operations to enable “free browse and instant pickup”. If those costs are higher than Amazon/NewEgg's costs for "free shipping", I'd expect to see exactly the relative prices that you're seeing.
Try working for some IT firm that supports healthcare, utility, defense, or what not, and I can assure you that there's rotation duty where you need to be on-call within xx minutes, 24/7.
During college I was interning for IT firm that provided networking for local hospitals, and they had the same rotation. My friend who got me the gig, worked there FT, and he basically had to forego social activities every 3 or 4 week, because he'd be on call 24/7.
> Remember when I mentioned Amazon's moving and signing bonus? Little caveat on that, if you leave or are fired within 2 years, you have to pay it back. Paying back a signing bonus if they fire you seems super rough. Is this common elsewhere? 2 years also seems high - the time I got a signing bonus, it was "pay back if you leave voluntarily in 1 year" which was much nicer than the described. Unfortunately, much of th…
Part one is in your first year where you get a lump sum signing bonus with your first paycheck (paid monthly) with the understanding that if you leave you would pay back a pro-rated amount proportional to how many months were left in the year.
Part two is in your second year and is paid partially with every pay check and if you leave you don’t pay anything back, you just don’t get the remainder of the money to be paid out the rest of the year.
After year two stock vests tend to vastly outpace the signing bonus pay but I’d imagine this varies on the stock price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you proposing to run a complex system that essentially powers a big chunk of the entire internet and can go down any second without on-call? If a big selling point of your system is the ability to be on 24/7, on-call is inevitable. But it definitely can be way less gruesome than it currently is at Amazon for a lot of teams right now. For example, my on-call schedule is extremely relaxed and low-stress, it is…
>How are you proposing to run a complex system that essentially powers a big chunk of the entire internet and can go down any second without on-call? hire more people?
Hiring more people is a great idea for making on-call less stressful, because it allows for much sparser on-call shifts (e.g., one week every 8 months vs. one week every 2 months). But I don't see how hiring more people gets rid of on-call completely. Someone will always have to be on-call.
You cannot just hire people who do on-call-only duties and nothing else, you have to be very closely familiar with the code and features being written in order to resolve issues effectively. Which usually means that you need to be someone who actually worked on those things, not just some glorified extra-fancy customer-support worker.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Amazon has forced attrition Do you know how they implement it? Is it the old Microsoft model with obligatory bell curve distribution of performance reviews?
Every org of, say, 100 people has a quota of X poor performers that they need to produce to senior management every year. Each manager of, say, 10 people rates their own reports. The managers in the org compare notes, and count up how many poor performers they have between them. If the number is below X, managers who did not downrate enough people are told to go back, and find more people to give bad ratings to. If t…
OK, that's what I meant. Thank you.
I was part (as a manager) of a smallish org that started doing that after being acquired by a big corpo. I just left :)
This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they w…
> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I jus…
To add to this, in my time there I worked during the weekend 3 times (i don’t count oncall here). My work day included 8 hours at most. I would get in at around 8AM and leave at 4PM. (optimizing the commute)
I started as an SDE 2 by the time I left I was a Principal SDE.
Do good work, be in a good org.
Amazon is not a huge, homogeneous entity. It’s more like hundreds of small companies that are forced to work together, bound together by senior leadership.
GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd.
IMO it's the lowest effort blogging platform (for people who already know how to use git). You don't have to go to a webpage - just write some text in the editor of your choice.
You don't even need to use something like Hugo since Github will render markdown files properly.