guitarsteve

Depends on the location. It’s fine everywhere I’ve been. The locations near bigger cities have more pumps and the ones in smaller cities have fewer to scale with demand.

Sorry, I’m a bit thrown off. What degree are you referring to?

Masters is usually about 2 years, though it could be longer in some cases or if worked on part-time. PhD is often 4-6+.

What 3-4 year degree did you mean? Bachelors?

Probably thinking of Jimi Heselden who bought the Segway company and died driving a Segway

Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden

The Realm consumed a lot of my life as a child.

No, for taxes, married filing separately is a different category than single. Married filing separately results in a higher tax bill than married filing jointly for most couples.

Same

I’m pretty sure my sell-to-cover RSUs take a day or few to settle, resulting in a small but nonzero gain or loss.

The details may depend on the employer + brokerage.

My previous employer had a tender offer as part of a new funding round.

I was an ex-employee already and had exercised my options within the 90 day window of resigning. If I remember correctly, we used Carta for both exercising the options and the tender offer.

For the tender offer, the company set a deadline and a price per share. Current employees were limited to selling a certain % of their options/shares. The website enforced the same restriction for me, which seemed like a bug, but I didn’t plan on selling most of my shares anyway. I chose a number of shares in a web form, clicked a button, and got cash direct-deposited. I had a larger than usual tax bill but I paid it while handling my usual annual tax return. No penalty on the taxes due to the “safe harbor” rule.

It also provides a natural place to hide loading screens between levels! ;-)

Interesting!

I’ve never heard of that system. Is there somewhere we can read about it, or maybe you can explain a bit more?

Is the offer of the form “we accept you, so long as your grades satisfy the following requirements…”?

Is the interview performance pass/fail or if you do poorly do they give you a less agreeable offer? (higher grades required?)

The flying or the tracking?

True! I use Budget Fastbreak usually. Same experience.

Last time I interviewed for Amazon, I couldn’t understand one of the interviewers spoken English. Combination of bad audio (their side, I have a good headset) and accent. I kept asking him to repeat himself and eventually gave up, and tried to guess at what he asked.

I usually defend Amazon (used to work there and enjoyed it) but the last interview cycle was really unimpressive.

If a company offers a very low lower bound like $10k, job seekers won’t apply there and will go to competitors with a more reasonable lower bound.

Similarly, when a highly qualified applicant gets an offer way below the upper bound they’ll be upset and ask “why don’t I get paid near the top of your band?”

Unless all employers work together to make the bands useless, it’ll at least give some visibility into what employers are worth targeting as an applicant.

My employer has Colorado jobs and gives some wide ranges (ex: 130-300k) and more narrow ranges (ex: 200-240k). The wide ones probably cover 3-4 levels and the narrow ones are for a specific level. They’re all missing RSUs or bonuses, but they should give you a rough idea if it’s worth applying or starting a discussion with a recruiter/hiring manager.

Same! In case others feel bad reading this, I’m in the same boat. Every place I’ve worked has a multi step interview process and as far as I know referrals don’t get to skip it.

Maybe it’s different types of work (consulting?) or companies (earlier stage startups?).

I don’t think I’m particularly good or bad at networking but fully expect to have to do coding interviews and/or take homes. Or maybe I really do need to get a stronger network!

It doesn’t sound too far off from what I’ve seen. The details of the sprints may not be worked out, but a dev team might have several months of high priority project queued up and marketing might be deemed lower priority. So getting extra work done from another team can sometimes take a very long time.

I’ve often heard this (YAML is a superset of JSON) but never looked into the details.

According to https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/, YAML 1.2 (from 2009) is a strict superset of JSON. Earlier versions were an _almost_ superset. Hence the confusion in this thread. It depends on the version…

I had the same issue in an Amazon interview in 2020. Couldn’t understand the interviewer’s extremely strong accent so I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I never really understood the question he was asking. Not the best experience.

But, I did work for Amazon several years before and that was mostly a good experience. So, luck of the draw, depending on which manager/team you get assigned to.

Agree! At least in the US, this kind of total comp is possible at my employer (Datadog) and many other public companies, not just FAANG mega-corps. Typically you’d have to be “senior” or “staff” engineer, or get lucky and join during a period of stock growth. The pandemic really changed things to make remote work more viable. Previously many companies limited it to exceptional cases (long tenure in-person followed by the move to remote).

That’s partly why I’ve enjoyed working on “b2b” products in my career and have avoided working on “b2c”.

When your customers are using your product as part of their job, your incentive is (often) clear: make them more efficient at their job, which means make your product faster and easier to use. The vendor and the customer are aligned.

In the b2c world your goal is often “engagement”. Get the customer to spend as much time as possible in the app. Get them to use your app more than other apps. In a way you have to make your app less useful (to the customer) to make it more valuable to the vendor.

Good point. Some expensive competitors are: live in-person spin classes (can be $20-30 per class), or programs like CrossFit which can be $200/month. Compared to them Peloton is a bargain.

I’m a big fan of Peloton and pay for the expensive option. You’re right that if you’re on a budget, you can get a very similar experience for a lot less. But for many folks like software engineers a few hundred dollars a year (plus a few thousand up-front) is relatively insignificant. For me, I lost a lot more weight than any other fitness routine in the past. Could I have done it with a cheaper indoor cycle and the basic app? Maybe, but I’m willing to pay a bit extra to maximize something important like my health.

A lot of firefighters are volunteers

Docker on Mac spins up a Linux VM behind the scenes so it’s both virtualization and containerization. :-)

We have a 2011 Toyota without Bluetooth, for what it’s worth. Base trim models can skip features which are otherwise common.

In the Miami area after Hurricane Irma in 2017, we couldn’t find gas for our cars for about a week. I think the pumps for gas stations require electricity (which was also out) plus deliveries were disrupted by downed trees, traffic signal outages, etc.

Just an anecdote that gasoline is not always available during crises. We did have electricity at home but neighboring buildings and neighborhoods had outages for a week or more.

Build/CI systems for Mac and iOS apps, I would guess. Definitely not for running generic web apps.

I and many of my colleagues worried about non competes at Amazon. But mine wasn’t enforced and I’ve never heard of a “rank and file” individual contributor or non-exec manager having it enforced. My impression is it’s only worth it for VPs or other very high level employees. But the scare tactics evidently do work, in terms of scaring employees to stay or to jump through extra hoops (moving states even if they don’t want to) to avoid enforcement.

Has anyone here had a company try to enforce their non compete, and can share their insights?

Amazon has its shortcomings but it still has a lot of smart and qualified people (like you, I assume!)

Do you best, be aware of your worth, and if/when you find a better opportunity, grab it!

It’s not good to beat yourself up for “failing” to get into Google or some more desirable company. Anyone who is familiar with the process knows that these companies (including Amazon!) frequently reject qualified candidates. They’re tuned to avoid bad hires at all costs. Basically if any interviewer has a bad feeling about a candidate, they’ll get rejected.

Same here. It’s interesting that they won’t know who never bothered to apply. A more typical company which doesn’t make their salaries public would notice if candidates repeatedly drop out of the hiring pipeline due to inadequate pay.

On the other hand they seem to be doing well as a business so recruiting evidently hasn’t been a big problem for them.