sharpy

Or different departments pushing responsibility to each other...

I had a break in. Thieves took my check books, and tried to cash one in at a payday loan place at a neighbouring city. The payday place called me, and of course, I told them not to.

I called my police department with additional information, and they told me to file a report in the neighbouring city instead... And of course, the other police department told me to file with my police department as the original crime did not take place in their city...

And oh, I also had airtags that were taken so I knew which building the thieves took my stuff to. But because it is a multi-tenant building, the police wouldn't do anything. I offered to trigger the sound to narrow it down, but they didn't allow that either... Eventually, the thieves found the airtags and threw them out.

Anyway, I contacted my representatives to give police more help to help in cases like mine, but crickets is what I heard back. Not even an acknowledgement.

When I was at AWS, towards later part of my tenure, DynamoDB was mandated for control plane. To be fair, it worked, and worked well, but there were times when I wished I could use something else instead.

Haha. We called those "promotion driven architecture". I mean if you just shove the whole thing into a monolith, no matter how appropriate, how is this going to serve as a technical artifact supporting promotion?

Haha.. As much as I disliked it, if someone offered me that much money to use it, sure, I would do so with a grin.

My employer has been achieving decent (around 15%) cost savings on most services we migrate to ARM on AWS. Not all though. Some of our services we had to revert to x64 because it didn't perform as well on ARM.

I had a break in at my house a few months ago, and one of the items they took was my passport wallet with an airtag in it. So I could see where they were. However, the address located was a multi-unit building, and the find my device was unable to pinpoint it to a single unit, and police apparently aren't allowed to get a search warrant for multiple units (understandable), but I wasn't allowed to trigger the sound to narrow it down further...

The air tag moved one morning, and it was found thrown over the fence...

I currently work for a non-FAANG company, and it's my second time doing so. Comp has been competitive in both cases. In fact, my current job pays more than is normal for FAANG (but only due to stock appreciation - 3x in the last 2 years), but they did match my Amazon pay and then some to get me onboard.

Yep. True. But amortized over the expected lifetime of the aircraft, it will still be orders of magnitude cheaper.

Because even USA doesn't have unlimited money. A B-21 can carry a lot of cheap precision weapons. Eg. JDAM costs like $25k each, compared to many millions each target would require with missiles.

I had a similiar experience. After what felt like a long journey, and then receiving an offer that was less than my then base pay, I refuse to talk to companies that won't give me a pay range.

As someone who has worked within AWS, and also used AWS as a customer at multiple companies, I totally understand that sentiment. But I wouldn't want to solve some of the problems myself, rather than using their services.

True. But while avoiding vendor lock in is a worthy goal, it does have its costs - as in you are now on the hook for duplicating various functionalities that may not work as well together.

For example, let's take a simple producer/consumer system with some sort of queue. That's an easy enough problem. But add in some additional requirements:

* Data encryption - both in transit/rest * Access control * Audit logs

And it becomes much more complicated. It is a trade off. But the productivity gains available by having a common consistent solutions to issues like this... shouldn't be underestimated.

It's the form 1040 that forces me to use TurboTax. In any given year, I have hundreds of entries...

I would love to use one of the free products. Unfortunately, for me, TurboTax is the only one I've tried that will import all of my brokerages... Seems small price to pay.

And they always get me with the "Audit defense"... I am not sure how useful it will be if I ever get audited (I err on the side of caution when doing taxes), but still some small extra amount of money for extra peace of mind...

Recently worked on migrating a number of services (largely CPU bound) to Graviton 2. It was a bit of hit and mess. For some services, it worked great. Very negligible hit to performance, and since equivalent Graviton2 instances cost 20% less, it was a no brainer. Others needed a little bit of rewrite. There were also a couple that just didn't see good performance on ARM (very branchy code)

True. Between continued pandemic, inflation, and Russia… well, call me an optimistic fool. One who still has a few decades to wait it out.

Yep. Companies make offers based on dollar figures. Typically the average price of first month is what is used to determine how many shares they will grant for RSU. So now is a good time to change jobs! Assuming things ever go back to normal… you will have a lot of upside. Just pick a company that you believe in.

Amazon's pay adjustment was long overdue, and not driven by inflation. The base pay has been capped for so long, and the comp model made an assumption (a historically generous one) about stock performance that hasn't held true for quite a while. That together with their vesting schedule, something had to be done, in order to compete for talent.

Got 9% bump in base, and RSU top ups - wasn't expecting any RSU, given our stock performance (yes, even with the market turmoil, it's up a lot since I joined).

Biggest effective raise I have gotten without leaving for another company, and I considered myself obscenely compensated to start with. Pretty content.

Yes. I had an old cellphone account that kept getting charged after my credit card expired. Had to go in person to cancel, as I have long since forgotten my online account password.

Sometimes, it works if you set your VPN to a server in California, because of a law requiring services to offer a means to cancel it online, if the customer signed up online. [1]

Also whenever I have the option to do so, I sign up for subscriptions with PayPal. It's super easy to cancel recurring subscriptions on PayPal.

[1] https://www.consumerprotectionreview.com/2021/11/california-....

My team is mostly in office, but we do have people in 2 other time zones. Communication happens mostly in slack (even for people in the office - because it would be too loud otherwise - open plan office, gggrr), but also to include people not in the office. I think having remote people in various time zones is fine, as long as we can "get together" once in a while. We do virtual board game night (well, afternoon for most of us) once a week, and of course, do sprint reviews and planning together.

When USSR fell in late 1991, yes, Ukraine did have 4th largest military in the world, and 3rd largest nuclear arsenal. But that is such a long time ago. Just look at what happened in 2014 when Crimea got annexed.

Afghanistan is also very different story than Ukraine. First there is the question of logistics. 75% of the terrain is mountainous and 50% of the country has elevation greater than 6500 ft [1]. This makes it quite the challenge for any would be invaders. Compare that to Ukraine where only 5% of the country is [2], and is also a lot closer to Russian center of power.

I do hope that with what support Ukraine is getting will enable them to give bloody enough nose to Russians that they decide it's not worth it. But given the thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons, I fear things will get worse, not better. And before someone says that Mr. Putin is not crazy enough to escalate that far, most people thought he wouldn't actually attack in the first place, and threatening with nuclear weapons can only be seen as an act of weakness, coming out of desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-moun... [2] https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine

Haha. At some companies, they made the interviews tougher for internal candidates... Amazon used to require full loop, but last time I changed jobs there (I no longer wok there), all it took was conversations with some senior engineers, and somebody reviewing my work sample.

And totally agree with the absurdity of the questions we ask in tech interviews. At least for my current employer, we use simplified versions of real problems we faced in the past, and place more emphasis on how they communicate, rather than just throwing some leetcode medium/hard problems, and let candidates self select based on how much prep work they put in.

I think we underestimate how much this matters to Russia. They might indeed feel there is an existential threat to them (the elites, not Russia the country), if they let the countries on their periphery join EU/NATO, and become democracies, what guarantees do they have that it won't happen in Russia, and that a day of reckoning won't come for them for looting the motherland?

And given the relative weakness demonstrated by the west in recent history (such as abandoning Afghanistan) they might judge that in the end, the rest of world won't have the stomach for any costly intervention.

Sending the weapons to Ukraine amounts to little, in the face of overwhelming Russian military advantage. Given the likely goal of establishing pro-Russian government in Ukraine, and the long history of association, Russian forces are being rather "gentle" compared to what they demonstrated elsewhere, but if it comes to it... Ukraine cannot win without real support (as in boots on the ground) from the west, and nobody wants to contemplate that.

Worked for a company that used Splunk... I was told to log less.

That was real strange coming from Amazon, where I was told to log anything and everything... And often, without the logs, it would have been impossible to determine root cause of some issues.

The difference was that logging was super cheap at Amazon, because we'd store all the data, but no indexing on the contents of logs.

If your service is small, or if you are only interested in logs for a specific hosts, you could download, and grep through it... Or run some sort of mapreduce jobs against it. But that was a long time ago. Surely they have better tooling now.

For me, it's the Olympus PEN-F. Not the most ergonomic camera, but there is something special about it.

As someone who has gone through the immigration process, I can affirm that once you are no longer beholden to your employer for work authorization, more opportunities are available, and that leads to significantly larger salaries.

I am sure a large part of it has to do with the fact that until certain points in the process, you cannot change your employer without restarting the process, so a lot of people just stay without making a fuss about it.

Edit. Regardless, as it stands, the current H1B is indeed a broken system ripe for exploitation.

A advantage to having standard interview questions. Plus the questions we ask lend themselves to extensions (also predefined) so you can still see how they reason about and solve those. And given that our interviewers are familiar with them, we can calibrate across many candidates. We also have a pool of people who maintain the standard interview questions.

Disclaimer: Former AWS engineer, never worked on IAM directly.

AWS is divided into multiple partitions. For the vast majority of users, there is one partition - the regular commercial - other partitions being China, GovCloud, etc.

Within each partition, there is a primary region that needs to be available for creation/mutation of credentials and policies. However, that data is replicated to other regions within the partition. That means the use of credentials that exist does NOT depend on the primary region being available. The replication is something that is closed monitored, and SLA breaches will result in pages.