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Comment by maket | Hacker News Reader

He said "In my defense", justifying laughing at the junior dev because he (the junior dev), had 3 years of experience at Amazon.

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Right, which suggests that coders from Amazon generally have rubbish code, excusing the laughter.

No, it means he expected that particular person's code quality to be better than that, because he lasted at a 'Big Four' company for three years and thus should have decent coding chops, but apparently didn't, thus the incongruence made him laugh. It doesn't mean all Amazon coders are shit.

The original wording is ambiguous. I too read it as if OP had some issues with people coming from there.

I like figuring out how to look at a sentence how others do (like those images that can be viewed two ways). But I'm having trouble with this one. Amazon devs being generally bad would not be suitable for use as a defense ("in my defense") for his behavior. I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is something that's generally permissible.

I too originally read it as saying that it was expected to be bad coming from Amazon. And the "in my defense" part is that, if you know the coder is from Amazon, then you understand why the code might actually be truly bad enough to elicit a chuckle (as opposed to just chuckling at normal bad code). In other words, it's like saying "in my defense, it was super bad code".

That said, I think the interpretation that "he had 3 years experience at a big company, he should have been better" is probably the correct one.

> I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is something that's generally permissible.

They are so bad that laughing is permissible.

Maybe you just don't spend enough time around arrogant people to interpret this sentence this way :)

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