391–400 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...
When we talk about vacation weeks, we mean sets of 5 working days, not 7. Right? So e.g. 2 week vacation == 10 work days off.
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> There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. I couldn't help noticing that if you go the Amazon.com page for Isaacson's Steve Jobs bio http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/14516485... , you see http://www.amazon.com/One-Click-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-com/dp/159... on the first pag…
I can't speak authoritatively since I didn't work on that component, but Amazon takes the integrity of these things very seriously. I would be extremely surprised if any of these widgets are "tainted", as it were. For all the crap I've thrown at Amazon in this thread, if there's one thing they are clean of it's working against their customers. It is, by a very long shot, the most customer centric big company I've eve…
I'm pretty convinced this is true in general. I just couldn't help wondering if this one case would be a little too tempting for them. But absolutely, it could be completely on the level.
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Like others have said, decide on the merits of your internship. I left recently (a few months ago) and much of Yegge's rant rings true - but like all big companies, it is not universal. My main caveat when others ask me about working for Amazon is - know exactly which team you'll be on . That will be the difference between a hell on earth scenario vs. a pretty sweet job. From your internship, you have much more infor…
This is quite comforting :)
The fact that he didn't mean to post this is proof enough that G+ sucks. And he's spot on about everything he said. Google doesn't get platforms at all. Look what happened to Blogger, arguably their most successful platform (which they didn't even build).
I'm struggling to see how someone intelligent enough to work at Google could not figure this out. Perhaps it was just an error caused by posting too quickly, or it wasn't an error at all.
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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.
Since 100% of successful Google products will be large, it makes sense to design for scale from the get-go. But if some of Google's products won't end up being platforms, it might make more sense to bolt that on later.
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Very informative and well-written post, thank you. Nice evolution of the MLK quote. What I'm wondering next is, What is the practical take-away for startups and relatively small efforts that are looking to scale? Regardless of tools-stack, what should a forward-thinking developer do? Is the answer to design around a RESTful API specification right from the beginning, then building layers of server-side and client-sid…
It's a little hard to talk about this broad topic without bloviating. Here goes. So first, take that stuff Steve said about extensibility to heart. He has another blog somewhere, oh here it is http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.ht... about software that is alive because it's extensible. That is true of your startup too. You don't want to be a "site", you want to be a "service". And that means y…
It would be fantastic if someone - maybe you, since you've got a high-level 10,000' view down to the on-the-ground detailed experience - could consolidate this into an article and provide a guide on how to build software as a platform from the get-go. Any chance of that? :)
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…
But doing Computer Science for the sake of Computer Science is a good thing. It would be a shit world if all fundamental CS research was driven by problems of scale.
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I wouldn't have told them to fuck off, but I'd have thought long and hard about the politics of the situation and what sort of edge I have (if my situation was as dire as yours was made to be). It seems like that could have been your moment. You don't like politics, but it seems like at some point you have to come to terms with the necessity of politics to effect change in a situation, that is to say if it's worth it…
I think in a healthy, functioning, company there is some politics. The thing about amazon is, it doesn't matter to anyone that I had pointed this out months ago. From my boss up to the person who reported to Bezos, every one of them would be embarrassed by it, but what could I do? Threaten to tell Jeff Bezos? He doesn't care. He was in the ticket and they were all pointing the finger at me. Me coming back and say "Bu…
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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...
When we talk about vacation weeks, we mean sets of 5 working days, not 7. Right? So e.g. 2 week vacation == 10 work days off.