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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#341

Post by hinkley »

skyyi wrote: post #335
olladecarne wrote: post #36

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant s…

>people are there for a paycheck >adding a single line anywhere feels like playing Russian roulette I worked at a company where all 4 founders were still there (15 years in) and that was very much our reality. I think the founders still cared, but that didn't matter - beyond a certain size (>100 employees), the majority of the people in the org didn't care the same way.

Jamie Zawinski thought there were two kinds of people. Those who want to make a company successful, and those who want to work at a successful company. He was salty enough about what happened at Netscape Corp that he quit the industry and opened a bar.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#342

Post by scubbo »

merrywhether wrote: post #322
scubbo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do PRs from branches in the same repo on GitHub just fine if you want to. Having them in a separate repo makes more sense because 1) it doesn't require the dev submitting a PR to have anything above and beyond simple read access to the target repo Right, that's my point, though - why is there no distinction between "ability to create a real, actual, complete branch on a repo" and "ability to create a 'fake'…

FWIW a personal “fork” is being made for you, the tooling just makes it invisible.

Fair enough! I thought I remembered it being a (likewise invisible) branch on the upstream repo, not a separate repo entirely - but I've been out for a while and might be misremembering. Regardless, as you say, it's immaterial - so long as the tooling makes that invisible, the UX is the same.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#343

Post by dimmke »

matai_kolila wrote: post #329
dimmke wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not. I wouldn't be so sure about that. I certainly prefer to use software that has a nice interface, is fast and responsive and has thoughtful features. I remember the first time my iPhone opened a pop up at just the right time asking if I wanted to share a wifi password with my Mac. Wow! Delightful. And I am willing to pay…

I’m sorry but this is complete nonsense; there is no pleasure derived from viewing “beautiful” code from the perspective of the consumer such as in your other examples. A program is not like a car, a chair, or a house, and if any of this were brought up in a design meeting for code, you’d rightfully be laughed out of the meeting. But it’s fine to disagree about these things up to the moment where you attempt to slow…

>I’m sorry but this is complete nonsense; there is no pleasure derived from viewing “beautiful” code from the perspective of the consumer such as in your other examples.

You're taking it too literally. "viewing" in the case of software is "using". When I'm using a well designed, performant piece of software I can feel the art in it. When I'm using something thrown together I can feel that too.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#344

Post by hinkley »

olladecarne wrote: post #120
yodsanklai wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). I would expect Google to have better engineering discipline than Amazon or Meta.

It was much better 5+ years ago. It's impossible to maintain high code standards when a company grows as fast as Google has. Eventually the law of large numbers applies. It's probably still better due to starting from a stronger base, but they are all converging.

There’s really a percent growth rate above which you just can’t build watchers fast enough to keep making sure the new people integrate. The more time the watchers spend trying to watch the less time they have to demonstrate the culture by their actions, and less time to reduce code rot personally.

So you either hope that others will be inspired to do better by your example, or you become a gatekeeper who loses respect because nobody likes to be lectured by someone who isn’t walking the walk.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#345

Post by scubbo »

int_19h wrote: post #278
scubbo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do PRs from branches in the same repo on GitHub just fine if you want to. Having them in a separate repo makes more sense because 1) it doesn't require the dev submitting a PR to have anything above and beyond simple read access to the target repo Right, that's my point, though - why is there no distinction between "ability to create a real, actual, complete branch on a repo" and "ability to create a 'fake'…

I see your point. FWIW I personally like it because it lets me move between my desktop and my laptop almost seamlessly - just push any changes on one end, and pull them on the other. It also means that, if any (or even all) devices suddenly die on me, whatever I was working on is still safely in my private repo. But, yes, this does mean pushing things routinely a lot, not just when it's time to make a PR.

Fair enough! I only have a single development machine, so that advantage was invisible for me - but that makes sense!

You could theoretically get the benefits of both approaches, though: have your own personal repo to which you push "in-progress" commits for durability and portability, but maintain Amazon's tooling which generates PRs with a diff between a _local_ commit and the target (by, behind the scenes, generating the ephemeral fork from which to Request a Pull), and permitting updates to that PR from local (not necessarily "pushed to an online repo") commits. That's _still_ advantageous over GitHub's model, because:

* If you don't want to have a personal repo, you don't have to

* Even if you do, the process of updating a PR is simpler and more flexible when executed purely with local Git commands rather than by manipulating a remote repo

I appreciate the perspective, thank you!

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#346

Post by scubbo »

larkfofty wrote: post #319
scubbo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really baffling to me. In fact, since leaving Amazon in June, I've been really frustrated by how much extra work setting up a CI/CD pipeline is in (say) Drone and Argo/Flux than with Amazon's internal tooling. You can set up a standard Amazon pipeline with a single command and answering a few prompts about naming, whereas with the open-source systems you have to hand-craft everything yourself, hack in a way t…

I've actually really been of two minds about this since leaving AWS, though it's been a few years. On one hand, I remember spending an absurd amount of time debugging esoteric internal tooling errors that were un-googleable. The cases where you were lucky enough to find someone else who had the same issue on the internal stack-overflow or wiki were the good ones. On the other hand, I've actually found myself missing…

Right!? The observability on OSS CI/CD pipelines seems to be pretty lacking. Maybe I'll look for an opportunity there for my next position... :)

In fairness, I guess this is the tradeoff you get for being forced into "one and only one way to do it". The benefit is that all the tools are likely to play nice with one another "all the way through the flow", because they only have one representation format to be compatible with. The downside is, well, there's only one way to do it; and if that way happens to suck for you (as, for instance, for an ex-coworker who needed to build multiple different versions of the same code against different base OS images for...reasons), the tools are going to hinder more than they help.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#347

Post by rightbyte »

Aeolun wrote: post #221
bb88 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of red flags in my career where managers put people on PIPs -- when in reality it's not a PIP but a personality conflict. And from what I understand at Amazon, it's kind of the same thing, but PIPs have been aggressively weaponized.

Isn’t that what a PIP is? A Personality Improvement Plan?

I seems to be used as an advance notice of termination?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#348

Post by hinkley »

dmurdoch wrote: post #184
dimmke wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I visited New York City and went to the MoMA. At the time, they had an entire floor dedicated to mid century design. I was always particularly taken with the Kennedy Armchair and the Eames lounge chair. Those pieces to me are undoubtedly art. But they also serve a function. They're chairs. A business analyst once told me - "you programmers have it so easy. It either works or it doesn't!" as if the vag…

So you've listed houses, cars, watches, food. All these things indeed serve a purpose as well as allow for creativity and expression. But the difference is, all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not. My customer does not care if my backend code is beautiful, and neither does my CEO because it won't make more money. > Is a dish or menu designed by a chef not art?…

> My customer does not care if my backend code is beautiful

Apple can only sustain the high margins they do because you’re wrong. Some people care a great deal. Some of those people have deep pockets. If none of your customers seem to feel that way it’s probably because they are Apple customers.

But you also have companies like Anker and at certain points in their history Sony, Samsung and perhaps LG. They got it. At least for a while.

People here don’t complain about Apple for silly reasons as much as they used to. But I’ve been laughing at people jealously predicting their imminent demise while cashing dividend checks ever since their shares were $40 pre-split (7x and counting IIRC). I’m going to get to retire at least a couple years early just on AAPL, even having done dollar cost averaging.

> B2B crud app

Ah. Businesses have a weird split brain problem and it’s difficult or impossible there. They want custom software for less than or around the price of off the shelf solutions. The OTS ones can be beautiful and occasionally get away with it. If you care about art of even ergonomics you’re gonna have a bad time. I encourage you to seek out a new vertical.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#349

Post by hinkley »

pixelrevision wrote: post #210
dmurdoch wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you've listed houses, cars, watches, food. All these things indeed serve a purpose as well as allow for creativity and expression. But the difference is, all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not. My customer does not care if my backend code is beautiful, and neither does my CEO because it won't make more money. > Is a dish or menu designed by a chef not art?…

They do start to care when it stops working or it takes forever to change due to it being a mess. This is the natural state most projects end up at unless the devs are putting in a ton of extra effort to keep it clean, organized and maintained. Devs that are thinking about keeping things beautiful, succinct and performant are much more likely to do that.

My Observer bias of late has been about open or nearly open feedback loops. People don’t adjust their strategies when the consequences come due later. I’ve been on a number of projects and seen a few more where management keeps turning screws to get stuff faster and then goes pikachu face when the whole thing grinds to a halt. Few if any of them see themselves as the agents of chaos in this situation. It’s not their fault, it’s someone else’s. And even if you can document it, it doesn’t sink in. Because that was something they did years ago and we don’t think about old things.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#350

Post by hinkley »

anyfoo wrote: post #164
Zvez wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a lot of complexity to be tamed, and in my experience that can be a very enjoyable part of actually engineering In my experience there is almost no correlation between complexity of the project and time needed to do 'non-technical' work. Quite contrary, the most complex things I did as a dev required me to do a lot of coding - to prototype, to experiment, to load testing and so on. And at the same time the e…

I fundamentally disagree with the notion that design and discussion, of often very detailed technical aspects, is "non-technical work" of any kind, or that sitting down and writing code is the only "technical work".

I’m not sure who to reply to in this thread about whether they mean to imply that debugging and simplifying aren’t technical work too.

Finding the right spot to make a 2 line change instead of the wrong spot to make 8 five line changes is seriously technical work

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