381–390 of 418 posts
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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).
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This was not true at all, at least thru 2007. At that time, there were some minor services that made some use of AWS services, mostly newer things that had been created after AWS was created. AWS was not available to developers within Amazon to use at any time before the day it was publicly launched. At least not on a broad basis, and none of the main Amazon.com services ran on it in 2007. They did share some data ce…
Interesting... any current Amazon employee that can confirm/deny this? Perhaps things have changed since 2007.
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…
As an ex-Amazonian, I have to second your opinion. It was by far the worst employment experience I had at a tech company. In my 10 year tenure, I fortunately didn't come across any company as bad as Amazon, when it comes to how it treats its employees. The management doesn't have any value for the lives of their developers, and use them as tissues. Use and throw seems to their policy. If you can take their abuse, and…
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Yeah, I've heard that some AWS teams can have heavy operational load. If it's important to you to avoid that, you could consider somewhere in WAP/BuilderTools. That's where I work (so yes I am biased), and in my experience the operational load tends to be pretty light throughout the org. On my particular team we almost never get paged. Plus we get to build neat things in this org (remember how Stevey mentioned that A…
Just now found out that "no college hires" in Silk team. That sucks! College hires are high on energy and enthusiasm. I don't know why teams would not want college hires :(
Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels ... When I interviewed at Amazon, they were at pains to point out that the company is data driven. One person told me that even Bezos would put a lot of weight in numbers that disagreed with is intuition. Is Steve's anecdote an outlier, o…
It now 404's so I've posted it here: Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one.…
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Just now found out that "no college hires" in Silk team. That sucks! College hires are high on energy and enthusiasm. I don't know why teams would not want college hires :(
At the risk of being slightly offensive, college hires are high on energy and enthusiasm but low on ability to produce reliable code (on average). They can produce a lot of code, but they tend to have blind spots when spotting failure scenarios, resulting in "gotcha!" outages or bugs. Its not a big deal if they have a more experienced developer reviewing their commits, but if you're iterating fast on something that's…
There is one thing that Google has done well that no other company (Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook) seems to understand. Hire experts. They call this hire Ph.D.'s, but that's slightly inaccurate because having a Ph.D. does not make you an expert. They understand that building systems at large scale requires people who have a deep understanding of distributed systems that goes much beyond "My code is on SourceForge" ment…
Serious Microsoft hyperbolic bashing. The facts:
Hotmail: 369 million users, Gmail: 193 million ( around the end of 2010, does anyone have newer numbers? http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist... )
Bing, 5PB per container: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/4870003098/
Lots of containers, "Microsoft's online operation puts big data into perspective. Bing's infrastructure is comprised of 250,000 Windows Server machines and manages some 150 petabytes of data. Microsoft processes two to three petabytes per day. "You really have to figure out how to process that kind of data to keep your index fresh," Nardella says." ( http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/230700013 )
I could continue to go on but Microsoft is clearly running Internet-scale systems.
Anyway, after reading this I feel really hungry to read more of such posts which tell you what the turning points were of a company and why you should be doing it too or not. Anyone have any links to similar such-must-read posts?