HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

lochlan

54 karma · joined July 27, 2015

http://www.lochlanmcintosh.com/
submissionscomments
lochlan··on MAME Turns 25
Pay-to-continue is a concession to the reality that an arcade is designed to generate money. The balanced and high-intensity gameplay gets you interested, the continue feature just takes your money. The solution is to never continue! Try for a 1 credit clear.
lochlan··on We throw away our power as engineers working for other people
What exactly are you risking (or incurring) with regards to FANG culture? From my perspective it's all upside.
lochlan··on We throw away our power as engineers working for other people
Why should I incur the risk and time investment of founding a startup when I can enjoy comfort and success working at a FANG company? Startups _sound_ great, but death marching myself without compensation is a stressful proposition.

Sure, I have a handful of ideas that seem reasonable and dreams of startup success—and maybe I'll explore them in early retirement.

lochlan··on Fake Goods Sold by AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Wish
Counterfeit items, e.g. video games, are all over eBay. I’ve reported many auctions over the years as infringing and have never seen one taken down.
lochlan··on Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
I might consider Myst a “killer app,” especially for its time.
lochlan··on Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)
IMO the problem is that people want to buy Agile. They want to pay a consultant, or go to a class, implement a dozen scrum rituals, and call it “agile.”

Agile is not Scrum, Kanban, or even XP. It is the manifesto. It is shipping all the time at a sustainable development pace.

I have had great success implementing agile and I attribute this to continually reindexing on the manifesto and examining the impact of our process. Spoiler: removing processes is a solution as often as it is adding a process. No amount of stand-ups or sprint planning or retrospectives makes your software process a good one.

lochlan··on Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself
Most of it. Base salary caps out at $160k except for NY/SF where it caps out at $180k. Once you get into the higher levels most of your comp is stock, which historically has worked out very well for Amazon employees.
lochlan··on Why you're having trouble hiring
Software Engineers outside the US make less, full stop. Amazon has a COL adjustment for SF and NYC but it’s not as much as you might think. Not as sure about other companies but I believe Google is similar (they also have a small local office).

The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.

Source: live in PDX, work at Amazon.

lochlan··on Transitioning Google Cloud leadership after three great years
What’s the benefit of being “not connected to Amazon retail?” Serving a large customer that demands scale seems useful for driving the platform forward—what is the downside?
lochlan··on Ask HN: Did reading HN bring anything valuable into your life?
Two companies ago I posted in the “Who is Hiring” thread. I ended up only getting a couple responses (while other channels got much more activity) but I ended up hiring one of them. Though I’ve since left that company, my former employee has become a good friend and confidant, and ended up following me to every company I’ve jumped to.
lochlan··on An effort to bring computer science to all US high schools
What’s wrong with working at Amazon?
lochlan··on Amazon Workers Facing Firing Can Appeal to a Jury of Their Co-Workers
You’re talking about Amazon like it is a small company. It isn’t. None of the scenarios you described are possible with Pivot, Amazon works hard to make sure the “jury” is impartial and has not been tampered with. Pivot adds an important check to the PIP process and I’m glad it exists.

Source: I work at Amazon.

lochlan··on Ask HN: Those making over $300k/year, how did you achieve it?
Ignoring stock appreciation Sr. SDEs at Amazon have a total comp target of ~$250k-$350k. Same for L6 SDMs. It’s definitely “standard” for some levels/job families.
lochlan··on Unit Testing Doesn’t Affect Codebases the Way You Would Think
That strict definition of “unit” testing (advocating for isolationism and banning collaboration with dependencies) is too narrow for my taste. DI can make a lot of sense, but I don’t think that means you have to mock everything (inviting a maintenance cost) for the sake of purity.

Here’s Fowler’s take: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html

lochlan··on Why your developers are slow
Speaking as someone who has worked as a developer for multiple early-stage startups, the opposite is true.

Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:

1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.

2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.

lochlan··on Why your developers are slow
How was technical debt not one of the things mentioned? In my experience that’s by far the #1 reason for poor velocity.
lochlan··on A CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate from the Bay
My understanding is that you no longer have to pay back the signing bonus. Not sure about relocation bonuses.
lochlan··on Walmart banned alcohol and swearing from Jet's offices and it was a big mistake
Stifling an established company culture and the existing behavior patterns of employees can lead to talented people leaving out of frustration. Do the shareholders of WMT want to risk devaluing their acquisition?
lochlan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2017)
Amazon Delivery Experience | Front-End and Back-End Engineers | Portland, Oregon | Fulltime | ONSITE

My team at Amazon is hiring in Portland! We are looking for both front-end devs with 3+ years experience and back-end devs of all levels. Must have a strong CS background. Smart coworkers, awesome products, great compensation, and a fantastic culture forming here at the Portland office!

If you are interested or have questions, please reach out to me at lochlan@amazon.com (please note that I am not the hiring manager but would be happy to refer qualified candidates)

links:

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528376

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528377

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528378

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/539351

lochlan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)
Opal | Portland, OR | Front End Engineer, Mid-Level or Senior | Full-time, onsite | http://workwithopal.com/

Opal is hiring! We are a collaboration platform for omni-channel brand marketing teams. After recently doing a large raise we're expanding our team, and if you are a seasoned front-end web developer we would love to talk to you! We're currently migrating a Backbone application to React, along with some other interesting efforts—there are plenty of cool projects to go around as we scale our team and application!

Please e-mail your resume and a link to your github profile to lmcintosh@workwithopal.com and I will refer you to the relevant hiring manager! Thanks!

lochlan··on Review: The NES Classic Edition and all 30 games on it
Too pessimistic. Some people, such as myself, haven't stopped playing these games since the 80s. I can beat SMB easily within ten minutes, but I still get a lot of enjoyment every run. (To say nothing of the other fantastic titles!)

Plenty of people have moved on to better technology and more sophisticated games, but let's not assume every player would get bored of these true classics.

lochlan··on Companies Rethink Across-the-Board Pay Raises
I have never seen this be a serious consideration in this industry. IMO that is a fairly "old school" outlook. Anecdotally I have never had a job for more than two years and it hasn't been an issue for me yet.

An exception to this would be someone who has had a lot of contract work without a lot of FTE, that is definitely a red flag.

lochlan··on The New iPhone Might Shut Off Next Time You Try to Film the Police in Public
If this technology is rolled out, won't that just encourage people to buy Android devices instead?
lochlan··on You Can't Do Software Estimates at All
Reduction in scope and prototyping can help reduce risk in how wrong your estimate is, but I think it is misleading to suggest that these techniques inherently "might make a realistic estimate possible." I don't think I'm alone in that I've had tasks that were supposed to take less than a day take weeks. I'm not saying this is common, but there is no silver bullet, and assuming from the beginning that estimating is basically impossible can help bring everyone into reality.
lochlan··on Is Uber ripping off its drivers? The woman who beat Starbucks and FedEx says yes
Just because an agreement is consensual does not mean that there is no power differential. One party will almost always have some greater leverage over another. When the power differential is too great for consent to lead to a mutually-beneficial arrangement, regulation may be required.
lochlan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2016)
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Full Stack Engineer Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a full stack engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop features for our SaaS web application/platform.

Responsibilities:

- Build features on the platform

- Write tests for everything you build

- Collaborate with product stakeholders to shepherd products through development

- Participate and contribute in code reviews and design discussions

- Lead effort to build and deploy cool things

Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/borbyu/d92b23bfc4e929a45c93

lochlan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2015)
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Full Stack Engineer

Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a full stack engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop features for our SaaS web application/platform.

Responsibilities:

- Build features on the platform

- Write tests for everything you build

- Collaborate with product stakeholders to shepherd products through development

- Peer review code prior to merging/deployment

Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/Lochlan/3b47a28b7d921a03863e

lochlan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2015)
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Front End Engineer

Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a front end engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop front-end JavaScript for our SaaS web application/platform. Responsibilities:

- Write features within the platform's Backbone.js application

- Write unit tests and webdriver tests for everything you build

- Collaborate with designers and product stakeholders to shepherd products through development

- Test and fix bugs across multiple platforms and browsers (IE9+)

- Peer review code prior to merging/deployment

Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/Lochlan/a97296e04977ba2cc735

lochlan··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2015)
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Junior Front End Engineer

Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a front end engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop front-end JavaScript for our SaaS web application/platform.

Responsibilities:

- Write features within the platform's Backbone.js application

- Write unit tests and webdriver tests for everything you build

- Collaborate with designers and product stakeholders to shepherd products through development

- Test and fix bugs across multiple platforms and browsers (IE9+)

- Peer review code prior to merging/deployment

Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/Lochlan/8522bd96f641cd8c9b11

lochlan··on Ask HN: Canvas Drawing Library
I am a big fan of pixi.js (http://www.pixijs.com). I haven't explored its "erasing" capabilities, but it is a great library for performant 2d graphics programming in the browser.
Page 1 of 2Next →