Seriously. I don’t know any half way decent engineer that would ever work there twice.
I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams, and his arrogance really showed when not only did he refuse, but then insisted my exams are not don't even register on the same scale of importance as the opportunity to work for Amazon.
Somewhat related: a recruiter at Google cold-called me a couple months into my first job out of undergrad back in 2016 and was similarly condescending about "the chance" to work for Google compared to everything else. I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview.
I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs.
That job was great until I got put on a team with a guy who was a former middle manager at some IBM-like company and went from being surrounded by people lightyears ahead of me to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. The messed-up part was that it wasn't even punishment. I was rewarded after completing a project with my choice of which team I joined next, and I joined the wrong one. I assumed that joining a new team to utilize this newfangled "cloud computing" thing would be trailblazing, and I didn't do any diligence on who I would work with.
To this day, I still regret not rejoining the first team I worked for, otherwise I would still be at that company and happy about it. Then again, the boredom and discontent while being on that sucky team is the reason I started investing, and now I can buy a house in cash and fund myself to do whatever I want for at least a decade. Hard to complain about the way things turned out.
For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.
They're also privately held, which makes a difference.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...
This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek.
https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i...
https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.
Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.
Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.
I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.
Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-taxi-drivers...
Macguire's original study on taxi drivers:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10716738/
BTW it's Fall! So here's to memories - "Four Strong Winds" written by Ian Tyson, sung by Neil Young:
You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.
Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.
I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?
Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share?
And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail.
Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
The question that arises is: How can you potentially spot which companies are about/likely to enter a 'golden era' when you interview there? What questions could surface some sort of likelihood? Is it possibly to identify them before they enter the 'golden era'?
Better advice: when interviewing ask questions when they ask if you have any! Find out what the job is really like.
Ask what hours they normally work - if they give exact times that means they are strict about the times. If they give a lot of hours that means you are expected to work a lot of hours. If they give a range that means they really have flexible times. If they talk about leaving early for their kids third grade events that means they support families.
Ask what they really wear - this is clue to what the dress code is like.
Ask about the perks you care about. I don't play ping-pong so won't mention that perk if I'm interviewing you, but if you ask I can tell you that there are regular tournaments and people do play games here and there, but the tables are empty in the middle of the afternoon: if you care about this perk ask, otherwise focus questions elsewhere.
There are a lot of great jobs. There are a lot of bad jobs. There are jobs that you would hate for reasons that the people who work there don't even care about. There are jobs you will think are great that others will hate.
Was thinking more "Imagine you have 30 years of experience and casually looking for the next Bell Labs, what to look out for when there are the company?"
If you're looking for the next Bell Labs, why not try to found it?
By the time their golden age is known outside of the company they are very likely near the decline phase; even if they aren't you are going to be competing with the best now.
For actual upper level leadership: they have the ability to make the golden age happen but studying the circumstances that allowed it to happen at other companies and being very selective about employee number 2-49. After that it's out of your hands.
Indeed. There's an old saying that A-level people hire A-level people, but B-level people hire C-level people.
Obviously this is too simplistic: How do any B-level people get there in the first place? But there's still some truth to the idea that the overall talent level of a company tends to degrade as it gets larger unless very unusual structures are in place to work against that tendency.
“The A students work for the B students and the C students become federal judges.”
Maybe this is the crux of the issue.
Yeah, but that's the thing, when you're interviewing, you usually have some sort of access to talk to future potential colleagues, your boss and so on, and they're more open because you're not just "outside the company" but investigating if you'd like to join them. You'll get different answers compared to someone 100% outside the company.
That's true, but you have to be kind of smart about it. If you just ask the question "Is working here fulfilling?", of course they'll say "Yes, super!". But you cannot take that at face value, your questions need to shaped in a way so you can infer if working there is fulfilling, by asking other questions that can give you clues into that answer.
I worked there for almost 27 years.
The pay was mediocre. The structure and process would drive a lot of folks here, into fits.
But they consistently and routinely produced stuff that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that people would stake their entire careers on. Stuff that some folks would assume was impossible to make. They have thousands and thousands of hard-core patents.
I felt pride for working there. My business card opened a lot of pretty amazing doors.
It's disappointing to see the stuff that folks here post, when I mention it. It almost seems as if people think I'm exaggerating or outright lying or boasting.
I'm not. There are places that foster greatness; simply by being a place that has a long culture of accomplishment. I was just someone that stood on the shoulders of giants, and I was lucky to have the experience.
That said, I think some of their managers made some big mistakes, and they took a drubbing, but I will bet that they are already getting back on their feet. They are really tough. They weathered being bombed in World War II, and multiple depressions and recessions.
With that said, if you were to try to figure out how someone from the outside could see that it was a great place to work, during an interview, what questions/topics do you think could have surfaced that as clearly as possible?
In my case, I was contacted by a recruiter (the old-fashioned kind, which no longer exists). It was quite low-key. When they first contacted me, I thought it was a joke.
I was flown out to a trade show in San Jose, for my initial interview, and to Long Island, for my follow-up. There were no coding tests. I started as an engineer, on a brand-new team of two. I became the manager of that team, after a few years.
I think observing the people there; seeing how they interact with each other, is important.
Of course, looking at their products is also key. Asking yourself "Do I want to help make this stuff?" is important.
In my case, I was intrigued by the culture of the Japanese. I was born overseas, and spent most of my formative years in a pretty heterogenous environment. I like to mix it up with strange (to me) people.
It is interesting that it was interpreted as some kind of threat, requiring an insult, in response.
Have a great day!
The process should not be adversarial, in my opinion. It's a contract. I do something; you do something. There may be adversity, but that's not required, and it's actually likely to cause problems, down the road. Like any contractural relationship, each party needs to respect and trust the other party to come through with their end.
If the way that you introduce your company to me, is by bullying me (and tests are not "bullying," but many of the other interview games are), then we won't be working together. I don't like bullies. I won't be one, and I won't work with them.
These folks kept me on for a long time. There was a reason for that. I can't speak for all Japanese companies, but this one did not suffer skaters. You delivered, and you were constantly held to account. I did well in that environment. I suspect that many, here, would not.
I don't argue that companies should not give tests. I had tests in other interviews, and did fine. This company chose not to. One reason, is that the folks interviewing me, fought fang, tooth, and claw, for the headcount. When I became a manager, I had to do the same. It was a crazy frugal company.
This meant that they dedicated all their attention to the interview process. This wasn't where they were handed my CV, five minutes before they spoke to me. I was around them all day. They watched me work with others, and they gauged me on my character, more than my tech abilities. The Japanese are really big on character. At least, this company was.
I mentioned that I had an "old-fashioned" recruiter. They don't seem to have those, any more, but part of his job, was to vet me, before putting me forward. They trusted him, and paid him well. I was working for GE, before I interviewed, and had a fairly substantial amount of background, in hardware. That was important to them (it was a hardware company).
I guess that I said the right things, and they gave me a chance. I appreciated it, and worked hard to reward their faith.
I know that my attitude is considered "quaint," in today's cutthroat tech world, but I always legitimately believed in personal Integrity, Honesty, and Loyalty. These qualities actually meant something to this company. I am quite aware that they elicit scorn, from today's tech bros, but they worked for me.
> “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
I suspect that when tech became a place to earn big salaries, is when the dodgy folks started showing up.
It's always been common for folks with little background in tech, or unrelated experience, to apply for jobs. In fact, as a manager, I often looked for that. I was fairly decent at finding "diamond in the rough" talent (I sort of had to, as my company didn't pay especially well).
But, apparently, these days, even fairly innocuous job postings are inundated with tons of totally unqualified (and a significant portion of the "qualified" ones are outright fabrications) CVs.
Also, you get people that are crooks, applying.
The other side (in my opinion), is that modern tech CEOs are behaving quite badly. They consider their workforce to be some kind of hostile, subhuman slurry, and they treat their workers as such.
In order to fix this, the C-Suite needs to "blink first." They need to do better at treating their workers and prospective workers, well. HR culture also needs to change. It's become outright hostile to employees. I saw that happen in my own company, which started off, quite friendly towards employees. By the time I left, it was pretty much openly hostile.
That's unlikely to materialize, in today's tech industry. Any company that does this, will be eaten alive by their competition.
If people are serious about improving things, then legislation needs to be introduced, to prevent companies that improve their employee relations, from being killed by their competitors, and to help companies to survive manifesting risks, when they take chances on employees.
I am not optimistic that this will happen. If it does happen, it’s unlikely that it will be done well. In fact, the chances are good, that it would make things worse.
Maxing out all 3 of those is incredibly rare, but I think once people reach some degree of financial stability, almost all of them go for a job that feels like it's meaningful.
When you're at a company at that stage that's doing well and has a lot of commercial runway ahead of it, the reality can often end up being that the golden age will last long enough for a very pleasant 4-6 year tenure if you so decide to stay at the company through its growth phase (which often takes it from a 50m-100m valuation to $1B+). Some of these companies will also make the leap from $1B+ to $10B+ or beyond (which makes the golden era at least as long as 6-10 years) and although nothing lasts forever, it can last long enough for you to find what you're looking for at least for a decently long period of time. This pertains to what other commenters have mentioned with regards to "making it golden" -- the golden era is what it is because everyone needs to make it golden and the company is too small for anyone who would dilute that for their own gain to do so without anyone noticing.
The challenge to this approach is that it requires being able to assess a company's commercial prospects as well as the quality of the company's founders, leadership and early team well enough to assess whether the company merely looks like a golden era company or whether it is actually the real deal -- something which even professional investors who target these kinds of companies struggle with. It is possible, but in my experience, it definitely took a couple of rounds of trial and error and getting burned a few times before my radar worked.
I also was interviewing somewhere else and told the recruiter. His response was to be verbally abusive and say the other place "sounded boring", and then went off on how if I turned down an offer, Amazon would never talk to me again and I'd basically ruined my career. I decided I didn't want to work at a place with that sort of culture.
They reached out to me in 2013 for an interview and again in 2024.
You wouldn't be defrauding anybody if you're not getting paid. You could take a sabbatical for 6-9 months and tell better companies you were working for Amazon that whole time.
I'm more than happy to tell better companies I've received offers from Google and Amazon and declined them, though.
Honesty is generally the best policy, imo :)
I used to (rather rudely) tell them off but recruiter turnover there is just as bad as every other department so it never stuck.
Memorize Amazon’s insane company values and relate your resume experience to it. And that I mean every single bullet point.
Interviewers were all run by robotic people. Coding test had zero flexibility, you had to just write code in a special barebones text editor that had zero feedback besides pass/fail.
You’d have to solely care about Amazon RSUs to consider that job. They are self-selecting for the worst kinds of candidates.
The dumb thing is that it should be a job that doesn’t burn people out because they basically own the market and haven’t needed to do any sort of innovation. Amazon’s corporate culture just has a burnout fetish.
I got the job, and I think being natural helped. I've interviewed thousands of people at Amazon since, and too many people just say the buzz words with no meat, and it gets them nowhere i.e. I showed customer obsession when I.....(and then gives a bad example)
One entire experience story/project example per value, completely insane cult behavior. I felt like I was interviewing for Scientology.
I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.
Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.
Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.
But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.
I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
Sun did waste a lot of money in buying MySQL, $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock. Certainly a distraction, as well.
Sun never offered any way to inexpensively get onto the on-ramp of Sun hardware and software as they thought they could continue selling high-margin hardware forever; they had their $995 V100 which even included their much-loved LOM which was a remote-management device like iLO/DRAC/IPMI , then followed it up with: nothing.
info about the V100: https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...
- MySQL AB — $1.0B
- SeeBeyond Technology — $387M
Some more companies undisclosed and of course in 2000 Cobalt Networks for $2.0B.
But in general, just hanging around on SPARC far to long. Unfortunately the person put in charger of SPARC told Scott that he thought SPARC could be saved but it would need 4-5 years. And that's when they went into mulit-core, selling everybody on the whole 'threw-put computing' nonsense.
I surely would have liked to get one of those laptops, though.
I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.
Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.
[1] https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?
That's the sort of behaviour I'd sack the guy for if he worked for me.
The first thing is a regrettable quip of mine on Usenet (RIP) from October 29, 1996 -- just over 29 years ago (!!) as of this writing. As I have made clear several (many?) times over the years, I do very much regret it: I was young and it was stupid.[0]
But that's also not what this is REALLY about, because that decades-old quip on Usenet had itself been forgotten for over a decade when it was dug up in 2013 by people who newly discovered that they hated my guts. And they discovered they hated my guts because they vehemently disagreed with my handling of the the Noordhuis pronoun incident.[1] And on this, I have no regrets -- and will have no regrets.
Hopefully that clears up where the (seemingly limitless) venom is coming from -- with my apologies for dragging confused bystanders into decades-old internet beef!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-prono...
I would not work for you because you exhibit all the qualities of a bully. You've been exhibiting this behaviour for decades now. Every time I see you say that you needed to "teach the hardware guys a lesson", or you write a blog post that you would sack a non-employee, or you resort to invective when you could calmly address the issue without going full nuclear, then it confirms my opinion of you.
I'm not following you around HN, incidentally. You just happen to comment on posts that I'm also interested in. I know, however, that if I ever did work for you or worked in the same organisation as you, I'd likely become your target.
Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux.
Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM.
Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.
No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time.
Mocha -> LiveScript -> JavaScript -> EczemaScript or whatever
Technically true-ish, but deserves an important qualifier. The Javascript number format has a huge "safe space" of integers between
Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER => -9007199254740991 (-(2^53 - 1))
Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER => 9007199254740991 (2^53 – 1)
> ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language
I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all.
Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is.
For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.
Yeah, man, good times.
My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester.
I still giggle when I tell that story.
Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
I don't know; I'm not young enough to remember.
When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
Working with Suns and other workstations as a teen (so my perspective was limited), I caught the very tail end of software as a modest middle class professional wage for everyone doing it (right before the dotcom boom hit).
The people I worked with were really good at what they do, but not strutting like newcomers started doing pretty much the instant the dotcom boom started, and not rich. (Well, one guy did buy a used MR2, and get his private pilot license, but he also lived with his wife in a trailer on an undeveloped parcel. He was a very solid software engineer, working on important stuff.)
I might have inadvertently tried to preserve some of that modestly-paid excellence of the generation before me, but I don't recommend that. Cost-of-living in my area is determined by people making FAANG-like money (well, and real estate investors, and price-fixing), and you have to either play along with that, or move away.
But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.
Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry.
I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.
I've been given second hand accounts of similar situations. One was team consolidation, and the business was offering Boston-area engineers positions in San Jose. One of the folks who moved with his family was back in MA within 5 years. His salary was not adjusted as much as it should have been for the cost of living difference.
A question, though. Was software designed at Sun closely with hardware teams and vice versa, or were they mostly disjoint? Presumably many hardware companies that have succeeded have built good tooling around said hardware (like NVIDIA).
The low-level software work at Data General where I was prior to the analyst biz was certainly integrated to a certain degree--read Soul of a New Machine if you haven't. The software folks for the minis were also mostly in the same same location. As things migrated to Unix, most of that team was in RTP and it's probably fair to say that there was less integration though probably wasn't something I thought about a lot of the time. Hardware stayed in Massachusetts.
You might be asked to write something like fizz-buzz in an interview - but the point is there isn't a good answer to that. (there are a few possible solutions, but all of them have something you should not like - which makes it a simple yet real world like problem and thus something you should be able to figure out in less than an hour without study)
What you should prepare is figure out how they interview and thus what questions they might ask. (nobody will tell you what questions will be asked, but they may tell you the style) Practice the answers. Practice stories of how you worked in the past so you can twist the story to answer the question (the above is how you should prepare for the STARS interview my company does). If you were in prison or something then be prepared to talk about why they should believe you are reformed, but most people don't have such a thing in their past that they should find.
- everybody you meet is going to ask "so, tell me about yourself" so you better have a good answer. have a pitch that highlights relevant parts of your work history, discuss goals/interests, show a bit of personality.
- there's always going to be "do you have any questions for me?", so you need to have a couple of questions ready to go that make you seem interested/thoughtful AND help you extract good signal from the interviewer.
No, I really shouldn't. Especially if a company reaches out to me. If they are so flooded with fakers and coasters, they don't need to contact me.
Not after 25 years in the industry with easily verifiable companies and references.
part of preparing is learning what the company does. Most of us work for a company the majority reading this have never heard of. you want to know what the potential company does so you can ask intelligent questions.
I certainly am mentally prepared when I speak with a company and treat them professionally. I expect the same basically.
Prepare for an interview means look up the company. You often can figure out what style of interview they do and prepare to answer those questions. You often can figure out if there are concerns that you want to probe in your turn to ask them questions.
crazy how much time is wasted in US/VC tech.
Every large tech company or any tech company that pays decent money requires preparing for coding interviews *if you are trying to get hired as a developer*.
I personally didn’t do much prep for my Amazon loop accept practice answering behavioral questions in STAR format. But I also had to thread the needle of having experience to get into the Professional Services department as someone who knew cloud, how to talk to people, architecture and leading projects.
If I came out of college post 2012 instead of 1996 with path dependencies in 2012, you damn well better believe I would have been “grinding leetcode” to make BigTech money.
If you want to make $150K+ straight out of college and $259K+ a year three years into your career, you play the game. If you don’t want to play the game, accept the reduced amount of money from staying in enterprise dev.
At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any lathe company especially BigTech again and I’m definitely not going to chase after a job where I have to work in an office. But I know what I’ve been giving up for the last 2+ years by ignoring recruiters from GCP’s internal consulting division based on my stances.
But again, I’m also 51, I’ve done the build the big house in the burbs thing twice and I have grown (step)children that I’ve raised since they were 9 and 14 who don’t live with us
Ha, my interview for an Amazon internship was an hour after a 3-hour final exam :-)
But the job market right now is quite bad, and after hundreds upon hundreds of internship applications I would've been stupid to give up this chance. I would work for Amazon in a heart beat.
As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.
The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.
I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.
It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.
Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.
I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.
The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences.
Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way.
I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.
Followed by an interview process that is designed to get those that want to work there at any price.
Both times they asked me the exact same tricky question. First time didn't do so well, second time I knew the 'correct' answer. They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.
Most places will appreciate if you tell them before you work on the problem. That gives them a chance to give you a different problem instead. Likewise, they won't appreciate if you tell them afterwards since it makes it harder for them to judge any semblance of problem solving skill.
Is this a common Google practice? Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. On how many different levels does this insult work?!
I'm just very interested in this tidbit of information.
2nd edition of Kleppmann comes out in a few months... if I flunk a DE interview think I can request it?
If I were turned down for a job that involved writing FreeBSD kernel code and the hiring manager gave me a free book on FreeBSD kernel programming, I'd think they were cool people and try again in 18-24 months.
It's not the act of giving a a rejected candidate a textbook, the insult is that it was a supplemental text book for the very first CS class most undergrads take.
Going back to the interviewers, there are going to be jerks in any organization with more than 20 employees, but the fact that their culture sees this kind of patronizing behavior as "saving the world" and "making a difference" is a red flag for me.
Your interview lunch experience sounds like message: this is what it's going to be like, and we don't care if you join us.
I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).
I too had the pleasure of interning under some former Bell Labs employees, it really was a great experience.
I'm sorry to be a buzzkill, but I just can't get excited about privately-funded space rockets or Japanese girlfriend robots, not even if there were an 8 figure stock compensation package in it for me. To me, it's all just "do something grandiose for the venture capitalist bucks, and then maybe figure out how it helps people in 20 years."
"My sister killed her baby because she couldn't afford it and we're sending people to the moon.
September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time. Now he's doing horse. It's June.
Is it silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes And everyone still wants to fly
Some say a man ain't happy truly Til he truly dies
Sign o the times"
-Prince
That's great imagery and a good description of how it felt! I was lucky to work at two of those three and those were awesome years. Going to work with people who created Unix and had commands named after them and later at Sun with all the magic, those were the days.
Post-Sun I've only done startups and while that has been a lot of fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as special.
Although I doubt it was really their intention to be passive aggressive, I have to say: That was a Flawless Victory of passive aggression.
Thanks for this.
That's surprising. I've never seen any major tech company provide any sort of feedback, let alone handing you a book, even if it does feel condescending.
I feel the same, and especially about video games.
I would never work in the modern video game industry. It seems really miserable to be overworked and underpaid to work on some design-by-committee game that I don’t even care about.
But I hear stories of some Of the companies back in the 90s that seemed to magically muster the capital to sit down and put out effectively what was a passion project, but also commercialize it.
I worked at Amazon. Twice. In total about a decade as a Principal Engineer. I left voluntarily a few months ago.
I have zero regrets about my time at Amazon. I learned lots, worked with some incredible people, and had fun doing it.
And the culture? It was life changing for me, especially when I first joined. In all the best ways.
And Amazon today? All I’ll say is that at their size, maintaining solid culture is damn hard. The hiring spree peri-Covid definitely added unimaginable stress to maintaining the culture the company was built on.
They’re a big company, and thus a big target. It’s easy, cheap, and even lazy to kick them with stuff like this.
The truth is that while it’s changed a lot over time, anyone fortunate enough to work there should embrace it.
Before you reflexively jump to "Amazon is just not for everybody", it's only fair to warn you that a lot of people around here have heard this phrase and don't buy it. My former landlord said the same thing at least 9 times in the 8 times I've interacted with him face to face... right up until he got fired. Management conveniently put him on a PIP 4 months before a vesting cliff on his 2-year RSU vesting schedule.
Yeah, Amazon is not for everybody- just the kind of people who either perpetrate or fall victim to pyramid schemes.
To pre-empt hyperbolic responses: I live in Seattle. I personally know plenty of people who have worked at Amazon. I know plenty of local teachers. The teachers work as many hours for a tenth the pay and burn out just as fast.
I don't consider 60 hour work weeks a privilege to be coveted, especially if I'm capturing less than 1% of the value I produce. I'm sorry man, but white collar serfdom is still serfdom.
If you're really going to keep begging this hard to be a serf on someone else's fiefdom, I'll tell you what: you can keep overworking yourself as serf on fiefdoms in which I might own shares, and increase the value of my portfolio for me, so I can draw even more passive income every month. I formally withdraw my protest to your "Protestant" work ethic.
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but I'm just hoping you take what I'm saying burns into your subconscious and something in you changes: that work into which you've placed so much of your self-esteem is just funding other peoples' passive income to either not work or live ostentatiously. If that's a great privilege to you, God bless you. I'm sure my wife would love it if I just retired- please make it happen, she would love me even more for it.
EDIT: P.S. Your "privilege" of working for Jeff Bezos' portfolio sounds a lot like a biblical curse. Specifically, 1 Samuel 8:10-18 and Psalm 105:44.
"He gave them the lands of the nations, that they might inherit the fruit of others’ labor"
You don't have the first idea what teachers do or what their jobs require.
If you really think all teachers have tenure and are supported by unions, you also have not the faintest, foggiest inkling of a clue about the job market or professional environment of most teaching in the US.
I think it's also worth pointing out that, even as you repeatedly label others "arrogant," your comments in this thread are themselves breathtaking in their arrogance. I rarely run across HN comments so condescending, dismissive, self-righteous, or self-congratulatory.
I never said I was opposed to it, either. Quite the contrary. In fact, I think public schoolteachers and firefighters have a great idea about unions, and software engineers should follow their example and unionize.
I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread, because you completely missed my point. I don't care who has it worse. I care about who is making it bad, and what we as software engineers are going to do to make it right.
> I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread
This isn't productive. It's belittling, snotty, and disrespectful. You're also clearly more than intelligent enough to recognize that you're putting in people's mouths claims they haven't made.
I'm definitely on point that most teachers in blue states have worker protections, job security, and lax hours that no software engineer has despite comparatively low pay. In Illinois, the top end of high school teacher salaries even crosses into six figures.
I can't recall one software engineering job with tenure, let alone tenure that vests after 5-7 years.
I also can't recall one software engineering job listing with a benefits package that has the same vacation as a child and civil servant-grade health insurance, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. If you find a job posting like that, let me know.
If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.
Private-school teachers receive none of the protections that public-school teachers receive, and not all teachers are primary or secondary-school teachers. At the university level, teaching is increasingly the work of non-tenured staff, who have no job protections or job security, beyond guarantees that cover at most the current academic year, and their benefits are a bare shadow of what tenure-track faculty receive.
Teachers work longer hours than software engineers. This isn't self-imposed. Those are what the demands of the job require. There is no way to fulfill the average teacher's responsibilities with 40 hours of work per week. Their hours are longer, by necessity, and the stress level is far higher.
I'm a software engineer with experience in teaching. My benefits package as an SWE is vastly better than anything I received at my teaching job(s) or any of the teaching jobs I interviewed for.
So I can only repeat what I've already said: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
> If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.
And this is odious.
No, and no. Your perception of modern labor markets is dated and disconnected from reality. Schools are constantly facing budget cuts and a huge chunk of teachers aren't even full time (instead getting things like a 60% time position - less pay, no security, but enough hours that good luck working a second job). Those that get full time positions still face the elimination of their positions.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. However, there's a fix for that: move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.
California is just as "blue" as Washington.
>move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.
There is no such state. Nearly every state is in budget crisis and cutting school funds, and a certain vocal segment of them are actively attacking the entire concept of education, banning books, prosecuting teachers who provide support to their students or talk about how the world works, and more.
It's not like I have family or friends with kids going to public school or anything in those states, what do I know?
They've criminalized such awful things as having libraries in the classroom with books not approved by dear leader: https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/florida-teachers-could-face-fe...
Texas is doing the same: https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-senate-bill-sb-4...
Definitely worth moving to a different state where just being a good teacher risks felony charges.
Yeah, I guarantee you that the guy who worked at Amazon as a Principal Engineer for 10 years has a bigger portfolio than you.
levels.fyi says $967k/yr average compensation at that level.
More importantly, the time I spent managing my portfolio taught me how to better manage my portfolio. If Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is richer than Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch, it does not change the fact that Warren Buffett and Peter Lynchs' path to success is much more reproducible and reliable with a much lower barrier to entry.
If you made that kind of money working for Amazon, then good for you. I wish more members of the middle class would make FU money and save their money so they can hold greater leverage and take home a much larger portion of the value they add to society.
"The man who gives me employment, which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will."
-Henry George
P.S. FWIW, I don't need that much to be happy. Last March, I visited my wife (then fiancee) in Hiroshima and spent 3 weeks in a 250sqft weekly-rental apartment in sharing a twin bed, living off of Ogura toast and miso soup for breakfast, < $5 meals at Ramen and Udon shops, making Katsu curry together, and going on walks, and it was the best time in my entire life.
Pardon me if you thought I was trying to convince you I'm rich or humblebrag about it. Far from it, I'm just finally financially independent and happy about it. I never wanted to be rich, just rich enough to say "fuck you" to growing someone else's grapes and pressing someone else's wine so that someone else can wear fine silk.
I achieved my goal of no longer needing to be a software engineer to maintain a lower middle class life. That's all.
Is it fortunate? Working at a place that holds a high bar on hiring, pays extremely well, and provides extremes of learning and growth in tech? Yeah, that’s a pretty good spot to most rational people. Building systems for 20M request/second teaches you cool stuff. So yes, it’s fortunate.
Of course it’s not for everybody. I never said it was.
Nobody is going to take seriously a person that thinks working at Amazon is a pyramid scheme.
After you work at Amazon please report back your experience.
Do you know why? It's because most programmers don't like being told what to do, let alone by people who are not programmers. Most people around here DESPISE corporate HR, and Amazon has it in spades.
As for the pyramid scheme comment, my reasoning is not only sound; it's Puget sound...
Amazon entices new grad hires with RSUs on a backloaded vesting schedule and then fires them very shortly before the vesting cliff. If "they should have read the fine print" is Amazon values, I think you need a new set of values.
> anyone fortunate enough to work there
strikes me as an insane thing to say based on the people I do know who have worked there. Horrible work life balance, mobbing, being hired to be fired by a manager who wanted to keep their team but had to stack ranking. Every one of them has described the culture as a cult, and reading comments like this one makes me think even moreso that they're right.
But that company culture leaves me with a very low opinion of them and very little trust. Even Microsoft engineers are less brainwashed. I've had several that just told me the truth about services.
Maybe it depends on the country but it feels like this is just their culture.
However, I think the question is, what percentage of engineers can pass the amazon interview but not the Apple/Databricks/Uber/Google/Meta ones. Because no one is picking amazon over the aforementioned companies.
However, maybe there's an opening at Amazon and not the other companies, or maybe that's your only offer. I certainly think it might be worth it for a a few years.
Lol
Not saying it doesn't happen, but it's probably harder than if it was just suddenly getting a giant salary.
First worlders having to "just get by" with 11 thousand dollars every month. What even is this world
But to honestly answer the question, by either not living in large cities and commuting in, sharing those 3BRs, or staying home with parents. Shaving that 48k/year (post-tax) rent down to ~12k/year frees up a lot of money.
(Also if you're young, staying with your parents and saving ~100-200k in rent for a downpayment over 10 years just seems like a smart idea to me).
FAANG has a huge footprint in the town, you're going to have a hard time hiring people when you're paying less than half what they are.
I was single and not a lavish spender so I didn't feel external pressure to try all that hard beyond having a low six figures job.
There are plenty of low prestige, mismanaged small companies that will pay low six figures and overwork people.
There's a lot wrong with AWS (and it's got a lot worse in the last 3 years), but there's also a lot right, and there are some really, really smart people there, several of which have boomeranged (people who left and came back).
The stories I hear there is just not the style of work I'm interested in
FAANG companies do not care about their employees at all and it's clearly just getting worse over time.
Also, I will never work in an office again, and I don't trust FAANG companies to allow me to have that luxury, even if it's in place when they hire me. Money turns groups of people — like boards and shareholders — into sociopaths.
No thank you. I'd rather work at a University or a small company. Less money, but a lot less stress, a lot more stability, and having experience makes me feel useful instead of feeling like a bullseye with a dollar sign in the middle.
"Lord, I apologize." -Dan Whitney
MBAs usually wind up eating the seed corn at some point.