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Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

lastweekinaws.com

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Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#251

Post by mjevans »

Jldevictoria wrote: post #211
AaronFriel wrote: post #144

> Non-Competition. During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sol…

Do these hold up under Washington state law? I know most states do not support non-competes when it comes to lawsuits, it wouldn't surprise me if Washington is one of them.

Do you really want to find out if this is true through the courts in person? Particularly when you might also not currently have any source of income?

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#252

Post by kelnos »

Jldevictoria wrote: post #211
AaronFriel wrote: post #144

> Non-Competition. During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sol…

Do these hold up under Washington state law? I know most states do not support non-competes when it comes to lawsuits, it wouldn't surprise me if Washington is one of them.

My understanding is that most states do support non-competes. California is one of the few (only?) states where non-competes are specifically legally unenforceable.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#253

Post by goostavos »

scarface74 wrote: post #238
zippergz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a "recruitment list" to be removed from, unless you remove all traces of yourself from the internet. Sourcers don't work from a shared list. Also, you might be surprised to hear how often people will say "no" at one point, and later say "yes." Circumstances change. Asking again later works.

What’s crazy is that I have a very light LinkedIn profile, what I do have shows I graduated from a no name college over 20 years ago and that I am your bog standard Microsoft Enterprise Developer/Architect. Yet and still Facebook/Google recruiters are “impressed” with my profile and would glad to have me interview. They are no better than the foreign spammer recruiters. Ironically enough, the two companies that I do…

Ha! I similarly "impress" recruiters with my LinkedIn as well, which is amazing, because I've gone out of my way to make it as useless as possible. For instance, I list my current title as "brogrammer." All past history is similar one-liner descriptions.

Yet recruiters remain "impressed", and think all my "skills" (not listed) are a great fit for "shaping the future of [X]"

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#254

Post by walshemj »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #104
scarface74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? It just so happens that all of the products produced by Google, Microsoft and Apple that need a lot of blue collar workers are done by contractors in a different country. I bet none of the…

> Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? Okay, but we're talking about what Amazon is doing now , not how other hypothetical companies may or may not treat potential employees.

As opposed to other companies that outsource their warehouse labour like JB Sports in the UK?

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#255

Post by walshemj »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #216
gtsteve wrote: post #106

I once met a guy who was a programmer for a hedge fund. The strategies and knowledge he had would be very useful to competitors. They didn't have a non-compete agreement in the contract, as this is almost never enforceable here, instead he agreed to a six month notice period - after working two months' notice they then paid four months' salary for him to take a holiday while his knowledge became less and less useful…

Can confirm that this is generally how critical financial positions work. They do have a no-compete but the expectation is that the no-compete is paid for at the previous wage. It's quite common to get a 6 month severance during the cooldown period.

Without payment non competes are flat out unenforceable in some legal systems.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#256

Post by goostavos »

kmarc wrote: post #232
oarabbus_ wrote: post #72

I interviewed with AWS for an analyst/business intelligence engineer role. When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of: select date_trunc('month',datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc('month', datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1 The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. "Don't you need an ad…

This happens everywhere; The superstar software developer (no) who knows everything (no) gets to interview you, and sometimes they are simply not right. Your story reminds me my ~7th (?) interview with Google where for LRU caching I mentioned Java's LinkedHashMap; which resulted in he explaining me "what a ridiculous, memory-wasting data structure would that be!" - and going on for a good 5 more minutes bashing my la…

This is pretty much why no one should feel bad if you're rejected after some FANG interview. It all 100% comes down to the people in your loop. You're likely to hit an ass hole or two.

I made it into Amazon, but honestly, after sitting in on a bunch of interviews, I now appreciate the amount of pure dumb luck involved (i.e. I got a loop of people who liked me and had questions I understood) rather than any skill (which is, well, pretty limited in reality).

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#257

Post by walshemj »

ohaideredevs wrote: post #60
C1sc0cat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why its a given for professional tech jobs in the UK.

That's really depressing. Genuinely. If a candidate made a platform of protecting worker IP (created on their own time), I would vote for that candidate based on that alone.

You would have to completely rewrite employment law - there are better achievable things to work for (banning abusive non competes, an all non competes for all workers paid under 75% of the median salary) and I say that as an Activist.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#258

Post by oarabbus_ »

SilasX wrote: post #245
jaf656s wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One result set is equivalent to another, and as long as you aren't using unnecessary nested loop joins or such, there are a dozen ways to solve a query. If they consume similar resources I'd almost always opt for the simplest one to understand. In cases where the simpler one is less efficient, I might still use it if the task didn't require absolute optimization.

Sure, and that would be a fair criticism, to say, "is there a version of this that's more intuitive and easier to read with the same load on the server?" But the interviewer (assuming the OP faithfully represented the exchange and the domain) is insisting that the query does not do what was asked -- when it does -- and is saying so based on the interviewer's own incomplete understanding. That's not a good reason to r…

Exactly, it would have been fair game to ask why I used a window function instead of an aggregate function + subquery joined back onto the main result set. Or, to ask if I could rewrite the query another way which would be more efficient.

However, the interviewer didn't simply insist the query does not do what was asked (when it did indeed return the correct results).

Instead, the interviewer actually insisted it was an invalid query which would not run at all.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#259

Post by m463 »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #224
rb808 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than be annoyed, you'd probably get bonus marks if you could show him the group-by query (sounds like you could have done that easily), then explain why your way is better. The interviewer would have been impressed at your maturity and skill.

The actual interview was more akin to the interviewer telling an interviewee that "python doesn't support multithreading"; something patently false. No, this kind of erroneous statement should not be glossed over. For your information, this was the later stage of questions. The very first question did involve a simple summation group by, so I'd already demonstrated my understanding there. I showed no frustration or a…

"python doesn't support multithreading"

wait, what about the GIL?!? did they fix that?

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#260

Post by lacampbell »

bsg75 wrote: post #204
burtonator wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things can always be childish when working with a bad interviewer. I once had an engineer keep interrupting me while I was explaining how sockets work because I wasn't covering small minutia details. Interviewing is an insane process. This is why building networks is more valuable so you're basically being interviewed by people you've already worked with.

> I once had an engineer keep interrupting me while I was explaining how sockets work because I wasn't covering small minutia details. I'm going to be in trouble when it comes time to interview again someday. I am not nearly as accepting of muscle flexing (anti-social behavior) as I was 10 years ago.

You and me both. I had to walk out of an interview because the interviewer had become borderline rude and I could not think of anything at all professional to respond with.

Here's to future self-employment!

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