jerglingu

This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.

True, and on reflection of your comment, it's naive to wonder how hard he'll bring the culture of Amazon, especially since it's proven to "deliver results." While I view my time at Amazon as especially formative and valuable, it's a place I'll never return to for what are now probably obvious reasons. May God have mercy on Flexport souls.

This is huge, and I wonder how much Amazon culture Dave is going to intentionally implement in Flexport. I heard the heavy recruitment of Amazonian people and practices was already jarring enough to tenured Flexport employees.

I felt the same reading this. Seems like everything analytics/data is like this these days. You have to read things multiple times over to either translate the abstractions and ball-hiding into plain English, or until you recognize that there is no point and it's mostly stream-of-thought rambling. See especially: anything data mesh.

I'm guessing the scorn is a reaction to the religious fervor that permeates the crypto space and that bleeds into the "mainstream" like the front page of HN and parts of Twitter. Based off the explosion of "told ya so" articles that have followed the Terra/UST scandal and sentiment among friends, anyway.

While I was in residual proximity of the whole thing (I ended up in the same company but different platoon, and I knew/worked with people in Tillman's platoon), I wasn't involved in it as I showed up about three years after the fact.

There definitely was no motivation to murder him, I'm convinced of it. Armed conflict inherently breeds a general cynicism, and lack of clear goals and guidance from leadership only exacerbates that. We all said out loud, "this is fucking bullshit," more than once when we would give full-throated efforts only to be frustrated by sideways shit like innocents or friends being maimed/killed, no clear mission or point to the killing and violence in general, a commander who seemed more eager to give a teary-eyed killed in action speech over a dead Ranger than to actually lay the hammer on insurgents, etc. All that to say that Tillman's misgivings about the war were especially normal. The real conspiracy was in the outright lying done about the whole thing, and in institutional leaderships' efforts to cover everything up.

Tillman was killed because of miscoordination/incompetence. The miscoordination at the macro level was from Hodne as I mentioned earlier, in his attempted orchestration of troop movement that introduced too much chaos. The incompetence came from a few variables of the people on the ground that I won't get too much into, except to say that it wasn't out of nefarious intent but instead from confusion and bad training. The SAW gunner who pumped rounds into Tillman had a reputation after he left of a bumbling, incompetent rock farmer. Note that I never met him personally, it was just his reputation around the company.

His death wasn't taboo internally. His named was invoked pretty regularly when it came to target selection and deciding if you had enough awareness of the assault forces' positions to pull the trigger into a room or general area; you never wanted to accidentally kill your buddy. A new Ranger would be liable to get smoked[1] until fluid leaked out of his ears because he "could kill another Ranger like Tillman, you fucking moron." Externally, we were ordered to divert all questions/comments about Tillman to the SOCOM Public Affairs Office.

[1]: "Getting smoked" in the Army (military?) is a euphemism for punishment through strenuous exercise/tasks, usually accompanied with humiliation and general hazing

His enlistment was glorified, but bear in mind it was during a time when the ugly truths and outright lies of the GWOT had not been uncovered entirely. The fake claims of of WMD's in Iraq had not been outright nullified yet, and the Afghanistan campaign had not yet devolved into the goalless, meandering, whack-a-mole presence it lazily morphed into in its later years. In hindsight, sure Tillman's enlistment was a bad decision. But as we generally understand/presume his motivations, his enlistment and willingness to fight and die was for what was thought to be a noble and just cause.

I happened to join the same Ranger Battalion Tillman was in after he was killed. The ground force commander at the time of Tillman's death (and perhaps whose decisions mostly attributed to Tillman's death), Major Hodne, later came back to 2nd Ranger Battalion as its commander when I was still active. He won no respect from any of us enlisted guys. Last I heard, he was a general in charge of general infantry training in Fort Benning. Fort Benning is the home of the infantry, where most basic and advanced infantry courses for the US Army are held. The irony is thick.

Not writing this to say you're necessarily wrong. The two major GWOT wars in Iraq/Afghanistan were bullshit, and Tillman along with thousands of others were killed for nothing worthwhile. There's just more nuance to the whole debacle that I think are worth pointing out. Or maybe I'm just insecure at how pointless all that shit was and I'm writing this to validate my/others' actions, hard to tell.

This is a sentiment and self indulgent bragpost straight out of the Blind app. To others on the outside looking in: while there are corners of Amazon where it's possible to coast, a huge amount of people are grinded to pieces and operate at such a level of anxiety that they feel it's necessary to commit code and manage tickets during nights and weekends to keep pace.

Can you expand on this structured framework? I also went through a severe bitterness (and cynical) phase, on top of blindly throwing myself into everything without regard for my sanity. So I fear myself walking down the same path you were on. I quit a few months back and have done zero tech-related work with no intention to come back anytime soon. But I wonder that when I do, nothing will have changed and I'm going to not even want to open and read the text in any arbitrary email, let alone "deliver" anything.

On point 1: "That's not gonna happen in a large company."

This doesn't happen in small or mid companies, either. Or if it does happen, it happens begrudgingly. SWE's have too much to do.

I got same this feeling when reading the original white paper linked on the page[1]. It's filled with the kind of bloated abstract "consultant speak" chosen to mask relatively straightforward ideas. And then there is this casual claim at the end of the paper that IMO discredits everything preceding it[2]: "Luckily, building common infrastructure as a platform is a well understood and solved problem;"

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-monolith-to-mesh.html

[2]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-monolith-to-mesh.html...

Mine too. Maybe this is different for the especially early stages (sub-20 people) where people congregate around that shared mission. But for mid-to-late-stage startups, I find more bureaucracy propagators and responsibility shunners than BigCorps

No, and it's a source of strain for many people at Amazon. There are, however, two LP's that are understood to stand well above the rest of the others: "Deliver Results" and "Customer Obsession."

A big reason why Amazon's leadership principles (LP) are so ingrained into its culture is because it's a part of every single formal process in the company. If not officially (promo docs, interviews), then at the least implicitly (corrections of errors [COE]).

It seems (at least anecdotally) that there are a lot of people in tech who may not game anymore, but nonetheless have a history steeped in Blizzard games like the author. And with the recent Blizzard news, a lot of people are trying to untangle the dissonance expressed by the memories of their adolescence and early adulthood with the recent legal and cultural scrutiny Blizzard is under. The public penance is I think the author's way of wrestling with this dissonance.

Great: I trust Amazon to not arbitrarily deprecate services, the analytics services far surpass GCP (have yet to play with Azure), customer service is A+, the AWS blog is an incredible resource to learn new things, and as somebody mentioned the serverless design has been revolutionary

Bad: dumb service names, API’s are not at all easy to learn and much of the documentation is subpar (WorkDocs is the latest pain), feeling some unease with all the downed services this year

Can people not just take PTO whenever they want? Or does it breach some company policy at certain places? I don’t get why this person felt like he had to ask for time off when his wife had cancer.

edit: thanks for the responses. My question was not on PTO accrual or the optics around it, but on the practice of just scheduling time off and taking it versus asking for permission. Today I learned I am either very lucky to be working at the places I have been, or maybe my bosses have been too timid to tell me no

> IMO it’s a tad silly to say that the U.S. lost these wars. Can you really lose a war with a massive nuclear arsenal on your side? It’s crazy that this seems to never be mentioned.

An observation not lost to the ground forces. I was in the US infantry 10+ years ago. We were well trained and lethal. We had an overwhelming technological targeting advantage. We had the support of a sizeable amount of the local population that we generally stayed a few steps ahead of the lower and mid tier rungs of whatever insurgency we were fighting (Al Qaeda in Iraq [ISIS predecessor], the Taliban, whatever-local-Afghan-village-thugs-in-later-deployments). We understood the war wasn't purely militaristic in "kill counts" or territory sieged, and the lessons of irregular warfare (hearts and minds) were beaten in to us.

The biggest issue, at least for us that actually had to kill and be shot at, was that the progressively restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) defanged us, both from lethal and willpower standpoints. There were so many nested bullet points and gotchas and just a wide breadth of rules that no person that wasn't a lawyer could keep up with it. Arbitrary things like "if you are in a gunfight with insurgents and they fall back into a cave, no matter who the insurgent is or how many casualties they were lucky to have inflicted on your forces, you absolutely cannot roll grenades into the cave." Very specific, very arbitrary, very confusing. Furthermore, it was beat into us that the full weight of the law was to fall on our heads if we screwed these things up. Which makes sense from a humanitarian point of view, but that lingering legal guillotine built in a sizeable amount of self-doubt and apprehension in us where we weren't ever sure when or if we were allowed to be lethal.

I imagine a set of ROE was drafted, and enough bureaucrats scribbled in "small edits" that the overarching sense of direction was lost in the sea of Great Ideas by Smart People and nobody with both the political clout and common sense was able to get to these revisions before they were inflicted on us on the ground. Not dissimilar to scope creep you see in software, except parties involved couldn't just vote with their feet and leave. That, and those functioning as the wars' PM's weren't as much concerned with delivering results as they perhaps were with empire building and political posturing. Just a god damn mess

A more common experience with BI teams than people are willing to confess to, especially when the business the BI team is meant to be tracking and measuring is growing faster than the team can manage. In my experiences and and observations, this phenomenon where a BI teams' processes/products are unstable is usually because of a team's lack of depth in DBA skills. Not necessarily the lack of a DBA, but the lack of any engineer with any eye or attention given towards environmental stability, optimization, and the traditional "janitorial" clean up work that can tend to be neglected in the BI space.

The nuance this article, and perhaps many commenters on HN, is missing is the latent nihilism powering much of the WSB-GME phenomenon. The same way some stubborn older people can't grasp that a minimum wage job can reliably pay rent and monthly bills, outside observers can't understand that a not insignificant number of these Redditors are willing to financially self immolate to just be given the chance to help pound billion-dollar firms to dust. Take a tour of these WSB threads, and underneath the party atmosphere of self-deprecating humor/memes/irrational hope, is a thick sense of contempt and vengeance at hedge funds and big players of the financial market. Some of the hate is brought to the surface, for example in the recollections of the collapse of '08 and how peoples' families and futures were reduced to near nothing.

Yes! Window functions and decent demonstration of datasets with varying granularity on top of the basic join/aggregation assessment is all that is needed in the SQL for interviews. And if you're an engineer, attention to redefining the query plan through appropriate use of temp tables. Anything else is a poor use of precious interview time for both parties, in my opinion

As many others have stated, geocities/angelfire/tripod and those raw, personal and ugly websites. But also www.insidetheweb.com , one of the more popular forum (they were called "message boards" back in the day) hosts of the late 90's. It was my first exposure to active, online communities and the peculiarities of Internet community culture (flame wars, online "e-relationships," memes before they were called memes), and I'll remember them and many of the usernames forever. They were all shut down abruptly around the turn of the millennium. Every now and then I wonder what happened to all those people and how they're doing.

Materialized views, the upcoming ability to query directly from an RDS transactional DB through Redshift, and finally true separation of compute vs storage with RA nodes IMO make Redshift the market leader by a huge margin now. I haven't actually tested RA nodes yet, but if performance is even just a fraction of legacy nodes then the competition is already dead. Redshift already is one of the best engines to optimize a query

Amen. I play and watch Pokemon with my son these days, and can't help but frequently be taken back in time to the mid-late 90's when websites were raw and so many pockets of the internet didn't have a lick of even bare bones CSS. Memorials like this incapacitate me with nostalgia.

> More than anything Northern Virginia should withdraw their proposal, Amazon wants the Government cloud business so bad that Virginia has Amazon over a barrel.

Don't they already have this essentially locked in?

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEc6kVAXSs8&feature=youtu.be...

Second link has the CIO of the CIA talking about it

I'm wondering if anybody lives in the hypothetical perfect world scenario the author writes about. I'm at one of the larger tech companies and it's inconceivable that something like this could exist (though the churn here is extremely high - a mature shop with longstanding membership could implement the hypothetical in some form). Everything sounds nice when dreaming it up in one's head, but discounts the reality of things. You can only lead a horse to water so many times before recognizing that they just will not drink the water themselves - some people actively refuse to implement solutions, no matter how convenient the building process might be. And then the more you burden them with things like SLAs, performance, etc., the more of shit show things become.

There are some forward-moving, solid "soft skill" analysts/data scientists that can make this happen. But by and large they shouldn't all be held to this standard. Maybe my standards/expectations have been soured too much and I'm too pessimistic, but as a whole they're just not cut out for this kind of stuff. Which is fine - being a "doer" is easy to begin with, and over time the more that you're able to automate as a data engineer, the more trivially easy ETL/everything else becomes.

Is your talk online anywhere? I'm in the middle of LikeWar and it's the first I've really dug into mass influence/propaganda. It's infinitely interesting

The incredulity lays here:

> tells me I'm being deceptive and obviously support jihadi terrorism. This as I'm getting ready to leave on my 12th deployment.

I agree 100% that complexity theory is the most important thing you learn that doesn't come intuitively. Unfortunately, a lot of us idiots, I suspect maybe the majority, have to have scalability completely beat down into us until it's internalized and fully respected. It's similar to the hot stove lesson where you know conceptually that it COULD and probably WILL hurt, but a lethal mix of naivete, optimism and some arrogance convinces you to push that shitty 1.5-seconds-a-transaction piece of code anyway and then - oh wow! - it scorches you. If you're in a shop with no existing or only surface-level code reviews, then you learn the lesson in production, and it brands you for life. In an instant, all that big O theory and combinatorics you did in college makes complete sense. This is the single most common lesson every shop with junior developers learns at every place I've ever been at.