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Steve's Google Platform rant

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Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#361

Post by kachhalimbu »

jeremyjarvis wrote: post #121
jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Amazon and got an offer recently, but I have to admit, it did kind of sound like this kind of job. I really liked the offer stage, where I asked for 4 weeks vacation (what I have now) instead of their standard 2 weeks. "That's not negotiable! It wouldn't be fair if you got better benefits just because you're better at negotiating than others on your team!" True. Offer rejected.

Noooo. They seriously only give 2 weeks holiday a year? that's insane.

I get 7 days paid holiday here in Taiwan. and additional 1 week as a part of Chinese new year. 2 weeks/year is twice better to me.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#362

Post by justoneshot »

TruthPrevails wrote: post #152

Hello All, I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last…

If your ok wearing a pager Amazon is the best place to get the scaling experience on your resume. They put college hires on giant SDE mission critical systems with no training, because they dont have senior engineers. Except the highest engineers that do not get swapped out and need not comply with schedules. My friend works there. He is always either love it or hate it. He likes most of other programmers but a lot are really bad coders. The technology is cool but the management is clueless and stupid, they cant tell good code and they make up schedules all the time. My friend laughs at production code and code reviews. The managers like the worst programmers the best because they are biased for action and don't care if they push out stuff that breaks as long as they dont get the ticket or get credit for fixing it later. The manager is a huge fat guy who always talks about the meeting with Jeff Bezos and makes them go to socialize with recruits. Their softwares were copied from some other Amazon project and most of the engineers spend their time trying to put out fires for "Jabba" because it is so bad. I interviewed there and got an offer from the fat guy who told me it was more exciting than my other offer because the other guys just doing reporting and data. But I want to do that and data-driven analysis. Amazon says that its data-driven but the boss says it's boring?

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#363

Post by flgr »

debaserab2 wrote: post #233
Jun8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the etiquette of posting it here is debatable this post is gold, it is not (totally) an ordinary disgruntled coder rant. It's worth reading even for the small list of problems that he gives that Amazon faced when trying to go to an all-services architecture. But if I had to summarize the main point, I would choose: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platf…

I agree with you in principal but I think practically this isn't always possible. Sometimes you don't know if a product is worth being an entire platform until it's been thoroughly field tested. It's too expensive to assume that everything is. Perhaps in Google's case there could have been more foresight, though.

Isn't it the same with scalability? You won't know if you need a product to be scalable until you have actually launched it and seen its success.

Yet, every product developed at Google seems to be developed with absolute scalability in mind from the get-go, wasting lots of effort invested into scalability in the case of the product failing to get significant customer adoption.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#364

Post by gaius »

funkah wrote: post #184
kabdib wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR is not there for you. HR is there for the company. Never forget that.

The HR people in my company help me all the time. It's a shame that so many workplaces are so adversarial.

Then to be perfectly honest they are bad at their jobs. The purpose of HR is to protect a company (which in practice means, its senior managers) from the employees.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#366

Post by vidarh »

jrockway wrote: post #329
jdietrich wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal minimum in the UK is now 5.6 weeks; That's still amongst the lowest in Europe. I simply cannot comprehend how even the best paid workers in America expect less holiday than the lowest-paid European labourers.

The reason is because the market doesn't demand vacation time. We get paid more and have less taxes, though.

Regarding income, it varies greatly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income

As for taxes, I'm Norwegian, live in the UK and looked into moving to California. At my income level taxes would end up within 2-3 percentage point of each other regardless of which of the three places I'd live.

Difference being I'd get far more services for my tax money in the UK or Norway.

There certainly are places in the US where you'd pay far less taxes than in almost all of Europe, but far from everywhere.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#367

Post by [deleted] »

johnyzee wrote: post #80
ajtaylor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe and Australia have forever ruined me with their standard 4 weeks of vacation time. I can't fathom ever going back to anything less.

Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You have to wonder how we ever get anything done here...

[deleted]

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#368

Post by reinhardt »

johnyzee wrote: post #80
ajtaylor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe and Australia have forever ruined me with their standard 4 weeks of vacation time. I can't fathom ever going back to anything less.

Six weeks here in Denmark and a maximum work week of 37 hours. You have to wonder how we ever get anything done here...

You sure the legal minimum is six weeks? Just got hired and my contract says five weeks paid holiday (sorry can't disclose the company name).

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#369

Post by vidarh »

gaius wrote: post #364
funkah wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HR people in my company help me all the time. It's a shame that so many workplaces are so adversarial.

Then to be perfectly honest they are bad at their jobs. The purpose of HR is to protect a company (which in practice means, its senior managers) from the employees.

No, the purpose of HR is to manage one of the company's most valuable assets. Acting adversarially is a great way of driving away the most valuable assets.

Re: Steve's Google Platform rant

#370

Post by reinhardt »

nirvana wrote: post #7

I worked at Amazon from before Steve left to sometime later. I remember being excited when Larry Tessler was hired, and dismayed at the way he was treated. Everything Steve says about Amazon is true, only, it was much worse. Amazon was, by far, the worst employment experience I've ever had. I'm not saying that lightly, I worked for a dozen startups, a couple of which crashed hard in the most gut wrenchingly painful w…

Thanks for sharing. Makes me feel even luckier for failing to get an an offer after being flown in from the east coast in for an interview, around 3 years ago. The gloomy Seattle weather was the first turn-off. The smug (American-?)Indian guy that interviewed me with his legs on the table, chewing a gum and barely looking at me was the second. Glad to dodge this bullet.
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