strgcmc

Yeah, that kind of pause + coming in with the answer, is also nice because it can serve a dual purpose. It allows you to be both bad cop and good cop, all in one: you created some leverage over your boss by publicly showing the execs that boss doesn't know what they're talking about but you do, and you also helped save them from further embarrassment.

Depending on future scenarios, you can play up either side of the interpretation. It's a nice quality of really useful political moves that they can flex and can be reused for multiple purposes (kind of like... good extensible/reusable software design).

Billions of people are on the internet now, vs 20 years ago. I dare say millions of lives have been saved (due to various things) in the past 20 years, due to the things built and deployed on the web.

We may have failed at some abstract notion of craftsmanship or performance efficiency. But we as an industry shipped. We shipped a lot, actually. A lot of it also sucked. But not enough to say the whole industry was a failure, IMHO.

When you add lanes to a highway, it generally does not improve congestion or travel times. Drivers adjust and fill up the new lanes, until travel times are roughly the same as before (but with slightly more throughput now).

So it is with hardware and software. I don't see any reason to correlate faster/better hardware with an expectation that software must also get better. It would be economically irrational for the software industry (whatever that means) to spend resources/energy on improving efficiency when the "gains" from hardware are essentially a free lunch to eat... Who would pay for lunch or spend time making their own, when hardware guys are giving you bigger portions for free?

That doesn't mean you have to like the outcome, but at least it should be perfectly predictable, given what we know about economics and game theory and incentives.

There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not).

We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.

Fanatics Betting and Gaming | Senior to Sr. Staff level SWE IC roles, and Senior Manager, w/in Data Platform and Integration | REMOTE (US/Canada) | https://jobs.lever.co/fanatics/15a574a3-4829-43b9-bfc2-ee84c... (example listing, for Senior Manager role only)

Fanatics Betting and Gaming (aka FBG, or BetFanatics) is a well-capitalized new venture, within the broad umbrella of Fanatics as a holding company, that is poised to disrupt the existing sportsbook and casino/iGaming markets. Specifically I lead the Data Platform and Integration teams, and we are just ramping up hiring to build the core foundations of our teams and systems, starting with some of our more senior ICs and 1 additional manager hire (with more future roles to come, including more entry-level and mid-career).

We plan to encompass all aspects of an end-to-end data platform, including data lake, data warehousing, analytics and visualization, enterprise reporting, regulatory and privacy compliance, as well as building out personalization (P13N) and other DS/ML platforms (e.g. supporting Risk/Trading functions in-house eventually). We also partner with other teams within Fanatics, collaborating on MarTech and general data activation, and not to mention all the other places where data is needed (Fraud/Trust, Ops, Customer Care, etc.). We don't buy into buzzwords, but we believe in many of the underlying principles and good ideas behind "modern data stack" and "data mesh architecture".

Seriously, just try out the existing options like DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, etc., and see for yourself how customer-unfriendly they are, how unwelcoming the first-time user experience is (especially for any total newcomers to sports-betting), how little personalization or customization there is, and how different it is from the kind of frictionless browsing/shopping/consumption experience you'd expect with modern customer-obsessed data-driven products like Audible or Amazon or Netflix or Robinhood (e.g. one analogy: we'd like to make sports-betting as approachable as Robinhood made buying stock). We deeply believe we can do better, and it all starts with data platforms from the ground up.

And personally, myself and many others within the company are also deeply passionate about what the industry terms "responsible gaming", i.e. building trust with players/bettors via data-driven features to empower players to make responsible decisions (rather than dark patterns focused on squeezing players, or taking advantage of whales, or enabling addictive behavior). We definitely think we can easily "raise the bar" here, compared to industry norms focusing on meeting the bare minimum legal/regulatory standards.

- Tech stack: primarily AWS based, with lots of flexibility in terms of adopting various SaaS offerings (e.g. currently evaluating Snowflake, Databricks, Fivetran, dbt, Tableau, and services like Amplitude, Graphyte, etc.); near-term focus is on building launch-ready MVP data platform, with plans for much more sophisticated features and capabilities over time

- Comp: competitive with FAANG/Big-N tech, with strong base salary, target bonus, private RSUs (for pre-IPO Fanatics stock), and potential for sign-on cash

- Some recent-ish press coverage of Fanatics as a whole: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/fanatics-raises-1-5b-at-a-... , and of Fanatics Betting and Gaming in particular: https://sportshandle.com/fanatics-planning-sports-wagering-e...

Feel free to connect or message me on LinkedIn (referencing this post): https://www.linkedin.com/in/ye-wang-368923a/

I agree about decentralization as anti-feature, but this is a poor analogy.

It's equivalent to saying, people do not want all their money to disappear because they chose to carry all their life savings in a briefcase on the subway and then they lost the briefcase. If you did that, no bank is going to reimburse you. The way to avoid this problem, is to keep your fiat savings in the bank (which means, as some number in some database they keep), instead of in physical bills on your person. It has nothing to do with fiat or TradFi being inherently better than crypto.

Likewise, the way to avoid this problem for crypto, is to not carry your private keys with you all the time (or at least, to only carry them on devices you can afford to lose, such as a hardware wallet that an attacker needs time to penetrate, giving you time to go home and restore/move your funds). Obviously self-custody is still hard and still a high barrier to entry, but from a financial risk perspective, you should only "carry" as much crypto on you as you would be willing to carry as cash in your wallet (which of course you can always lose, and losing it doesn't validate or invalidate the banking industry).

100% agreed. For an example of water management tech, "rooted in reality", but still clearly influenced/poisoned by political forces: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/susie-lee-congr... .

Speaking as an EM, from product partners, there is basically this switch that sometimes flips (depending on the PM, depending on their experience/career maturity, depending on the team/business context):

- Either the eng team is a tragedy of the commons, a place to graze whatever sheep you care to send their way, and sure why not let your friends and neighbors also come graze here too? After all, it's not like YOU own it, it belongs to the EM, right? And it's the EM's job to figure out to sustain 100 sheep on a 10 sq ft plot of grass, right? After all, that sounds like some cool engineering whiz shit (to invent hyper-efficient grazing), doesn't it?

- OR, the eng team is YOUR resource, and you don't want others to graze on your land for free...

IMHO, I don't even know that I'd call it a "high quality" vs low quality thing; I think of it like, making a choice about what you want your product <-> eng relationship to be like - do you want your eng team to be thoughtful and do "deep work", or do you want them to optimize for context-switching and multi-tasking? I know it sounds like "deep work" is always the right answer, but it might not be, in all contexts (... okay it probably is right, in 90% of contexts).

> "We're going with the times/job market, but at the same time if I got everyone involved in Problem X in a room together it would get solved in days not weeks".

I know you probably know this, but I hope your company leadership isn't falling victim to bias here, because a singular take like this implies that they think it's always better to get folks into a room... what if there is a person that, regardless of room, that your company never would've been able to hire in the first place, because you didn't support remote work?

Even if I accept a hypothetical ding to their effectiveness, I'd rather have a stellar hire working at 90% impact in a remote environment, vs not being able to hire that person at all... and of course, maybe that stellar hire actually creates 110% impact while remote, and 90% in-person, who knows?

Of course the obvious assumption is, that there are fewer stellar hires who are actively turned off by remote work, vs those that would be turned off/rejected by mandating RTO or banning remote work. That's a bet I'm willing to take, "going with the times."

I believe you would be mistaken about this, as per Recital 18 of GDPR: https://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/recital-18-GDPR.htm

> (18) This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity. Personal or household activities could include correspondence and the holding of addresses, or social networking and online activity undertaken within the context of such activities. However, this Regulation applies to controllers or processors which provide the means for processing personal data for such personal or household activities.

Reminder that, "articles" are the regulations themselves, and "recitals" are kind of supplementary FAQ-style clarifications about how/when to apply the articles.

IMHO, the "don't worry, nobody knows what they're doing" advice, has a sort of "Laffer curve"-esque quality to describe its relative danger (or inverse curve, for utility).

On the lower end of experience/expertise (I acknowledge they're not actually the same thing), it is minimally dangerous and highly useful advice -- in the sense that, it helps lower the barrier to entry for beginners into a field. Making something approachable, is generally worth it, even at the risk of giving beginners undue overconfidence or letting them make early mistakes. Just getting someone to even start (and making it easier for them to stick to something new, and not give up too early because it's hard), is more important than doing "the right thing" (pragmatism > perfectionism)... assuming guardrails exist to prevent beginners from doing fatal damage (not true in all domains).

In the middle range of experience, is where this advice becomes maximally dangerous and minimally useful -- it doesn't just give false confidence, but specifically to those in this range who "know just enough to be dangerous." The advice can become an impediment to learning, if someone comes to believe "I don't need to learn anything more, since no one else knows anything, and therefore nobody can teach me anything." People who get stuck here, are the most dangerous.

At the high end of experience/expertise, the advice actually becomes useful again. The expert can appreciate the dangers of ignorance, while also appreciating the need for them to manage/mentor/guide beginners in the field. Likewise, the expert generally re-learns a certain level of humility, because now that they "know everything there is to know", they also appreciate how little they actually know in the grand scheme of things (e.g. see cosmologists or particle physicists).

I seem to recall some kind of saying, something about how hard and precious/valuable it is, for an expert to be able to re-learn the ability to approach problems with a beginner's mindset, with naive curiosity and unburdened by years of accumulated fears or biases? So anyways, the "nobody knows" advice becomes useful again, and helps experts renew their perspective.

Outside of classroom-style dedicated instruction, this really does seem to be the best form of learning, i.e. a semi-active/not-fully-passive approach.

There is generally no "hack" that the student can use to avoid having to read a lot of stuff, in order to learn and especially to become an expert. What a student needs to read, isn't necessarily textbooks or the traditional orthodoxy of materials, but still there is undoubtedly a lot of reading that must be done, to "get good" as they say.

That being said, for a teacher to GUIDE that reading, to give some hints, pointers, themes, interconnections, sequencing (start with X, then read Y to deepen your knowledge of X), etc., is absolutely invaluable.

To me, this seems like the Pareto-optimal 80/20 breakdown, where 20% of the teacher's investment in time and energy can get you 80% of the benefit of having teaching at all (i.e. don't need a full curriculum or full-time commitment to dedicated instruction, but do need to spend some time/energy pointing the student in various directions and giving them some ideas to think about while reading).

Fanatics Betting and Gaming | Senior, Staff, and Sr. Staff roles w/in Data and Analytics | REMOTE (US/CA) | https://jobs.lever.co/fanatics/a0944ca4-1b92-4686-a024-3f677... (just an example listing for Staff role, w/ other roles to be opened soon)

Fanatics Betting and Gaming (aka FBG or BetFanatics) is a well-capitalized new venture (i.e. our hiring and growth plans are largely unaffected by recent market turmoil and macro factors), within the broad umbrella of Fanatics as a holding company, that is poised to disrupt the existing sportsbook and casino/iGaming markets. Specifically I lead the Data & Analytics engineering function, and we are just ramping up hiring to build the core foundations of our teams and systems, starting with Senior, Staff, and Sr. Staff-level roles (along with future openings for additional engineering managers). We plan to encompass all aspects of an end-to-end data platform, including data lake, data warehousing, analytics and visualization, enterprise reporting, regulatory and privacy compliance, as well as building out personalization (P13N) and ML platforms (which we anticipate being a unique competitive advantage, vs incumbents who barely personalize any part of their product). We also partner with other teams within Fanatics, collaborating on MarTech, customer segmentation, and data activation mechanisms.

Personally, I joined after 8 happy years at Audible (an Amazon subsidiary) where I was most recently leading the Data Platform and Data Capture/MarTech teams, and just judging from my long tenure, you can tell it took a strong confluence of factors to convince me to take this calculated and exciting gamble (sorry, pun intended). I believe strongly that we have the right leadership team, the right blend of technology and domain expertise, the right strategy (including dictating asymmetric battles that competitors are inherently unable to match), and an unusually high degree of financial upside potential (without the risks of being a totally new startup, given that we can leverage the strength of Fanatics).

Seriously, just try out the existing options like DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, etc., and see for yourself how customer-unfriendly they are, how unwelcoming the first-time user experience is (especially for any total newcomers to sports-betting), and how different it is from the kind of frictionless browsing/shopping/consumption experience you'd expect with modern customer-obsessed data-driven products like Audible/Amazon or Netflix or Robinhood (e.g. we'd like to make sports-betting as easy/approachable as Robinhood made buying a stock).

And personally, myself and many others within the company are also deeply passionate about what the industry would call "responsible gaming", i.e. building trust with players/bettors via data-driven features to empower players to make responsible decisions (rather than dark patterns focused on squeezing players, or taking advantage of whales, or enabling addictive behavior). We definitely think we can easily "raise the bar" here, compared to industry norms focusing on meeting the bare minimum legal/regulatory standards.

- Tech stack: primarily AWS based, with lots of flexibility in terms of adopting various SaaS offerings (e.g. currently evaluating Databricks, Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, Tableau, and services like Amplitude, Graphyte, etc.); near-term focus is on building launch-ready MVP data platform, with plans for much more sophisticated features and capabilities over time

- Comp: competitive with FAANG/Big-N tech, with strong base salary, target bonus, RSUs (for pre-IPO Fanatics stock), and potential for sign-on cash

- Some recent-ish press coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/fanatics-raises-1-5b-at-a-...

Feel free to connect or message me on LinkedIn (referencing this post): https://www.linkedin.com/in/ye-wang-368923a/

Some infants, probably. On a widespread general basis, probably not (yet?).

Switching between different formulas for normal/healthy babies can be done (if a preferred brand is out of stock but something else is available), but it's not trivial.

Switching to a different formula for a baby with special dietary needs, special allergies, etc., can range from "difficult" to "impossible." For those parents, this is an acute crisis, and "going hungry" doesn't begin to describe the potential impact; stunted development in the newborn phase, has long-term knock-on effects. Newborns are very different from adults (or even just, older children); adults can skip a few days worth of meals or ration their calorie intake for weeks, without much adverse long-term impact... newborns cannot do this.

A semi-related source about what kinds of scenarios parents are facing: https://www.nytimes.com/article/formula-shortage-help.html

Except, well, cancelling transactions obviously does happen, sometimes: https://www.reuters.com/business/lme-suspends-nickel-trading...

Knight was probably too messy to rollback cleanly, but that just means it's a matter of cost/complexity/politics... if you're a big enough player, then the exchange will do you favors, like in the LME case.

Free markets, lol

This makes sense, to a degree. But at the extreme, the speaker should absolutely take care to avoid being overbearing, condescending, patronizing, etc. Many delusional people think, "I am saying/doing this for YOUR own good", so simply believing that you have the other person's interest is not enough.

Or rather, in order to TRULY have someone else's interest in mind, you have to incorporate things like condescension as in-scope requirements for your communication. Otherwise, even good advice delivered in a straightforward but condescending manner, won't get through (which means, the person won't benefit, which means you the speaker failed to achieve the thing that would help advance their interest due to your poor communication).

I think it's not really that ironic, if you consider that the mass exodus was anyways likely to happen, if Amazon had done nothing. So really the only thing that changed, is Amazon trying to make an attempt to stave off the default exodus (which was already being observed/starting); in that sense, by analogy: is pumping water on a fire ironic? The fire is a given, it's already happening, so the water is just a genuine attempt at firefighting (might work, might not).

I think your comment will likely be underappreciated, but this is really the most comprehensive take on understanding the ecosystem.

Conversely, the default state of things where ACX is effectively targeting the "leftovers" that nobody else thought was profitable enough, also represents an opportunity for product marketing. To those authors who have no other choice but ACX, ideally you'd want them to feel like this is a positive for them, a saving grace, a friend helping you out when nobody else would... rather than like say, a loan shark offering usurious terms and a threat to break your kneecaps after you've tried other banks and couldn't get a business loan. Picking an interpretation is really just about a point of view, so the PR/marketing folks better get out there and start spinning the other way (which to be fair, I think there IS a legitimate friendly take here, and IMO I don't think Audible is really the loan shark in this analogy).

For now, the net result is not dissimilar from Uber and its drivers. Uber PR will harp on flexibility and extra side income opportunities that wouldn't be possible without Uber, while detractors will harp on the low earnings potential factoring in vehicle maintenance or the ever present contractor vs employee debate. No matter which side you believe more, the net result is that drivers don't have much leverage and aren't getting a particularly generous deal by any means... So it goes for authors and narrators on ACX too, I think.

I am coming to this post kind of late, so not sure if others will see this, but actually this is something that Amazon policy has JUST changed on, effective as of Dec 31, 2021.

A few RSU related quality of life improvements:

- Before, the vesting policy only allowed for 2 weeks of gracetime if you took any form of leave of absence (and leaves being a wholly legally separate category from vacation or sick days); since parental leave was 6 weeks, that means that your vest schedule would delay by 4 weeks (which I can confirm, my vest dates went from May to June because of this)... From 2022 onwards, the gracetime has been extended to match the parental leave time, so there is no longer this weird 6-2=4 mismatch

- In the rare case an employee dies, their next 2 years worth of unvested RSUs, will automatically accelerate and vest immediately. These accelerated RSUs will vest to the deceased's estate, and the heirs of the estate will get them via the probate process (having a will massively simplifies this). The accelerated vesting cannot be transferred directly to a beneficiary, it has to go to the estate first.

- RSU vesting allows for a sell-to-cover option for tax withholding, but previously only whole numbers of shares could be sold (and the leftover after taxes, is paid to your paycheck direct deposit). Now going forward, you can sell fractional shares to cover tax withholding.

- (couple other minor QoL improvements, but those were the ones I could recall off the top of my head)

I doubt these policy changes were in any way tied to the reporting of these stories or the experiences of these employees, but the timing is somewhat ironic.

Whether or not Bitcoin is going to become the "currency of the future" is certainly highly debatable (debatable in the sense that, is it likely to happen, or is it even a good idea for society), but the argument against it, is not going to boil down to "digital beanie babies"... Retail and retail adoption is not going to shape the future of Bitcoin, not past this point in history.

Do you remember seeing institutional-grade analysts and advisers issuing guidance about beanie babies? Pointing out that corporate treasuries or sovereign nations might consider a small allocation to beanie babies as a hedge against future-whatever? This is hardly the only such report, though it's a recent one looking at 2021 trends in review: https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/articles/2021-trends-i...

I am not saying Bitcoin is destined to win or to make anyone rich, but clearly this has moved far beyond the realm of beanie baby speculation. I mean, good or bad, it's at least reached the level of institutional speculation (see exhibits: dot-com crash, 2008 financial crisis, etc.), and at least it should be taken proportionally as seriously as other institutional financial instruments (i.e. do you take bonds seriously? gold as a financial commodity to be traded? well Bitcoin is X% of those by marketcap, so maybe deserves X% of your attention).

It can be better, but it also can be just as chaotic sometimes. On balance overall, FAANGs are probably better at managing this "IC utilization" rate if you wanna call it that, vs just randomly expecting you to pick up and wear all the hats all the time or that hats are chaotically assigned, with no plan behind it. Certainly FAANGs aren't perfect, but at least it's easier to find "reference implementations" because there certainly are some very high-performing and well-managed teams, and if you're not on one yourself, then you can at least have the benefit of being able to see-and-compare, which then provides a potential for betterment and learning from others (which might be harder in non-FAANGs).

TBH, reading this as a manager, I have to admit I feel like asking my engineers to take on SOME of these beyond-just-the-code duties... is a good thing? Obviously there are a bunch of caveats, and nuances to whether you want an IC engineer to be 100% coding and 0% talking to customers or doing admin (this seems bad), or is it 90% vs 10% (maybe okay), or 80/20 (sweet spot?), 50/50 (concerning), 20/80 (bad again), etc.

That being said, if you are doing all of these things, and not being fairly compensated for it, then that's definitely a problem. A $50k/year web dev position at some random agency, doesn't deserve this level of work from you, esp. if you could instead take all these responsibilities, and do them at a serious technology company or start-up, for 2x-5x the comp.

I disagree with your writing off the whole thing with the single diagnosis of "organizational dysfunction." I'll explain why, but I'm not really trying to convince you, because I sense we are starting from perspectives that are too far apart to come to an agreement.

Some of the things the author observes, like having 56 different frameworks that roughly do the same thing, or so many business processes running in Excel, are really not about dysfunction, and are actually "by design", but in a nuanced way.

Amazon has a strong thesis about how organizations should function and how they should execute work / produce useful outputs, and part of that thesis is, to be incredibly and nigh-unbelievably averse to coordination costs. You can also think of this as, a consequence of the frugality mindset leading to an aversion against premature optimization. Yes, it is wasteful to some degree to have 56 different frameworks, but OTOH, the ROI of spending the effort to consolidate them, simply isn't there to justify fixing it... if it takes a team of 2-3 engineers 6 months to consolidate it, well guess what, in the same time, that same team of engineers could launch a $10M-$100M business opportunity (seriously). And trying to put a single central team in charge of maintaining a universal framework that can support all current and future needs forever, simply never works out (eliminating gatekeepers is a common refrain, in service of moving faster). Compared against the ROI of actually delivering value to customers, who cares about some extra frameworks?

Or put it another way: Amazon does not optimize for waste elimination, or "cleanliness" of organization, or unity of purpose; Amazon optimizes for deploying capital (in the form of launching software/services/products) as quickly as possible across as many opportunities as possible, and then rapidly evaluating and doubling down on winners. Is there waste? Absolutely (I mean, what VC has a 100% hit rate?)! Does it seem dysfunctional? Probably. Is this way of working effective (meaning, does it actually function at achieving the goals of the organization)? I think the growth of Amazon in the past 20+ years speaks for itself.

Does this way of working put people/employees first, or optimize for their happiness/well-being? No, not particularly, but neither do many industries (investment banks, public school teachers, or as you point out, the restaurant industry.). Should that be fixed or at least improved? Well, I'd like to think that's why I'm here, and also why post-retirement Bezos has pivoted to working on making Amazon "Earth's best employer" [1] (which is a significant shift from the original focus of being, "Earth's most customer centric company"). I realize those sound like platitudes, but it actually is a meaningful statement, showing a reallocation of energy/focus between customers vs employees.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeff-bezos-amazon-employee-care...

---

EDIT: One further thing I wanted to clarify: if I am arguing in favor of anything, it is that Amazon as a whole organism, is far from dysfunctional at the macro level. But if you zoom in to individual pockets, individual orgs or teams, then yes absolutely there are many, many bad leaders, bad managers, poorly planned roadmaps, over-burdened/over-allocated engineers, terrible on-call cycles, etc., like what the author of this post observed. You are always taking a risk when joining Amazon, that you might end up in one of these bad situations. How high is that risk? Without trying to be overly precise, I would venture that it's closer to 80% good and 20% bad, then vice versa (but you don't have to believe me).

Another curious thing I've learned to appreciate in my team here, is that there is practically no other company in the world, where you would get the opportunity to learn how to operate a culture like this, at this scale, with this level of effectiveness (imperfect though it may be). How valuable or translatable is that experience though, I'm not sure... it's not like I can feasibly take my knowledge, and start up an Amazon-killer, or really get the opportunity to exercise my knowledge of how to design a company culture like-this-but-better, at this type of scale. But it sure is fascinating to watch it tick, from the inside.

Well, it's definitely a distinction with a difference for the OP. If I were a hiring manager and came across his resume and the name rang a bell, and I dug up this blog post, I would have no qualms about re-hiring him at Amazon despite the short tenure (assuming I could earn the author's trust that my hypothetical new team isn't as chaotic/on-fire as what he experienced before). His ability to communicate with tact and perspective, speaks to his strong judgement and professionalism, and makes me more personally inclined to hire/re-hire him in the future (of course, he gets to decide if he's ever willing to take the plunge again).

As for whether this indicates deep flaws that it might not be the right place for just about anyone... well I think there is the existence proof that Amazon employs 10k's/100k's of people, and while it may have higher attrition than peers (does it? I don't actually know, but I'm willing to take that on faith), still at least a sizeable majority is relatively satisfied with their careers here (based on internal tech survey results). So, "not right for anyone" is definitely an over-exaggeration.

Not right for you, if you are the type of person who shares personality traits and career goals/preferences as the author? Sure, quite possibly.

The good practices I was referring to, were things like: his praise of the documentation culture, the obsession with data security (which I read as a good thing, on behalf of customers). Of course you are right that it was definitely a mixed bag.

Your paraphrase isn't wrong either, but I would suggest a modification to it: "it will suck you dry, if either (1) you don't fit in with the company culture, or (2) you are placed in a bad situation on a team with poor leadership and high attrition".

Perhaps shockingly, not every team at Amazon is constantly quitting (e.g. my direct team in the last two years has had 1 person voluntarily leave for a better opportunity - and we wished them well, and 0 attrition otherwise), and also some people actually appreciate and gravitate towards some things like, what the author calls "team are fragile" culture (because it is in fact a kind of durability/resiliency that there is less reliance on special rockstars, irreplaceable dependencies, and that teams can be fluid but the product mostly works/lives-on).

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't?

I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he's wrong about a few things too), but overall it's less of a "Amazon == bad" piece and more of a "this is why it wasn't to my taste" reflection.

Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he's going to carry forward with him... isn't that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team/org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that's obviously a bad thing, but that's not his problem either.

Note: in case it wasn't clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah

I understand there are companies which treat Leetcode as a "representative field test", but IMHO (based on my 8+ yrs experience working across FANGM, w/ ~200 interviews conducted) any company that uses Leetcode this way, is doing it wrong.

The "right" way to use Leetcode, is to treat it similarly to how IBM does their weird IQ test screening, except Leetcode is strictly better than an IQ test. It is NOT a simulation of work. It is also NOT an "intelligence" test (thank god for that).

If anything, it is closer to how professional sports teams evaluate young athletes via a training combine or a set of individual drills/tests. Doing vertical jumps or sprinting really fast are not "representative field tests" of how well you actually play a sport (the whole sport, not just a single part of the sport), but they are good-enough filters for an athletic "interview".

However, in the same way that IQ tests are bad for a multitude of reasons including implicit demographic biases, so too are Leetcode tests flawed (including a heavy element of age-ism, as there is a strong anti-correlation between "years since college" and affinity for Leetcode-style tests).

Capital-intensive industrial-scale miners might go bankrupt, but the origin of Bitcoin (starting from the whitepaper) imagined an ecosystem powered by effectively spare CPU cycles, where the marginal cost of electricity wasn't a big factor.

The beauty of the design lies in the balance of the incentives -- if electricity is too expensive, then sure miners will drop out, which lowers the hashrate and thus the security of the ecosystem, but remember that if electricity is expensive for honest miners than it will also be expensive for attackers. And if somehow there is an asymmetry where attackers have access to cheaper electricity than other honest miners, well it's likely in their economic interest to simply become miners themselves rather than attackers...

Bitcoin can easily exist at a minimal survival level that is effectively outside the fiat system for all practical intents and purposes, by leeching off free or near-zero cost electricity (I mean, nobody cares about the electricity bill for "folding@home"). In that kind of mode, it may not have industrial scale and you might not want to transact trillions of fiat-dollars worth of value through it, but it can easily exist.

Not the person you replied to, but let's talk about "global supply chain improvements" for example... When Amazon launched 2-day shipping with Prime, it was truly a landmark milestone, in terms of technology and operational prowess. I certainly wouldn't argue with you about the great impact that something like that had.

But what came next? 1-day shipping? That's a 50% improvement, when the previous benchmark was 90+% improvement going from 4-6 weeks down to 2 days. That's exactly the kind of stagnation the author is describing.

And what else happened in the past 30-50 years of supply chain optimizations? A worrying lack of investment in resiliency, in durability. COVID-induced supply shocks went from transient to semi-permanent, because by design much of our supply chain infrastructure has very little "slack" (because extra unused capacity is waste, and waste is lost profit), and thus no good way to catch-up, no good way to quickly retool, readjust, to shift manufacturing from one region to another, etc. (because, fragility is actually specialization which equals profit).

I think the person you responded to sees more of the iceberg than you give them credit for. I think there's no reason to fall victim to lowered expectations, when pretending to be futurists/futurologists... why can't we have 1-/2-day shipping, "agile" supply chains, AND resiliency and durability and ability to recover from supply shocks? Why settle for just 1 aspect of remarkable changes, and stop there?

Perhaps the world needs a few shocks to realize how much it is undervaluing the value of resiliency? In the grand scheme of things it was probably healthy to pop the stock market bubble of 1929, of the 2000s dotcom boom, and the real estate bubble in 2008. Will COVID pop the supply-chain bubble that we've built for ourselves, where we've incorrectly assessed the value of (i.e. actually the cost of), fragile supply chains?

You are burnt out and stressed, so I completely understand the general despair/malaise that drips through from your posts.

However, you are getting in the way of your own success. What's the alternative? Being 39 with no degree? Delaying the degree even further, so that you're 45 with a degree and 24 years of experience, and still competing with 22 year olds? Starting now, is better than not starting. If you're going through hell now, keeping going and don't stop moving forward (otherwise you'll be stuck in hell forever).

You can do this. You can make positive changes to your life and your career. It will not be easy (in fact, it will absolutely suck over the next 1-3 years, but even this you can try to mitigate somewhat). It will not be the ideal course you might've wanted for your life. You may not out-compete all the 22 year olds. But that's okay. Life is not a schedule, and whether some 22 year olds are better or worse off than you, doesn't affect the quality or enjoyment of YOUR life (or at least, it shouldn't, unless you allow it to mentally and emotionally affect you).

Being burnt out or depressed or whatnot, tends to give anyone a very negative outlook on the world, which is insidious in 2 ways: (1) it robs you of the ability to feel joy from even small wins (and even robs you of the ability to recognize what is a win, like signing up for college, passing a tough exam, or cleaning out your attic, or whatever); (2) it makes you think that there is no hope, no possibility of improvement (which is simply not true, if only you could interrupt your own thought patterns enough to see it).

Being on HN is kind of a double-edged sword for lots of folks like you who may be struggling in their careers (and when I say "struggle", I don't mean underperforming or being bad at their work, though that is also an issue for others but not in your case I think), where on the positive side, you can try to draw inspiration from the "can-do" attitude that naturally goes hand-in-hand with "hacker" mentality, with startups disrupting industries, with believing that it is possible to move mountains and upend institutions through innovation and hard work. On the negative side though, you are also inevitably going to see yourself as being compared to 22 year old founders and millionaires, or new college grads getting entry-level FAANG jobs for ~$200k+, and of course it can steal away joy or contentment from your own life or your own trials and tribulations (and successes!).

You need to try and draw out the positives while staying away from the negative comparisions, to feel inspired by the "can-do" energy of all the different types of "hackers" launching anything from personal projects to unicorn startups, and then translate that into your own life, so that you start to see how you can creatively problem-solve for your own situation.

Start with problem #1, working 60hrs/week with no end in sight... Can you simply refuse? Is your overtime mandatory? You shouldn't care about performance reviews or making a good impressions, because you don't want this job at this company in the long-run anyways. You just need to do barely enough work to not get fired, so that you have income while earning your degree and preparing your exit strategy. Or OTOH: could you actually quit? Another poster mentioned actually taking that job at McDonald's, which I think could make perfect sense, IF it actually affords you the chance to focus on and accelerate your degree, and IF it actually reduces your hours and your stress.

The point is, all of these are just random suggestions, but you're paralyzed by your burnout/depression, and not able to problem-solve effectively. If you can fix that, and start to think about it as creating a flywheel of positive changes in your life, then each individual change may be small, but they can accumulate and it will get easier and easier over time, for you to move your life in the direction that you want.

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EDIT to add: I just poked around your personal blog a bit, and I saw this entry from you, back in July 2021. I think this is a really amazing and very healthy perspective you shared there, and I would encourage you to think about your life in relation to this sort of cohort that you are learning together with, which is much more realistic, much more grounded, vs comparing yourself to some hypothetical 22 year olds. Think about your classmates in their 60s, the recovering addicts, the former prison inmate who's trying to improve their life. If they can do this, then so can you... keep pushing! You wrote these words yourself. You have the seeds for your own success.

> The group you gather with, if it is anything like mine, is likely to contain quite a variety of people. My gathering contains 2 immigrants, a Canadian couple, people ranging in age from 20s to 60s, 2 individuals that are converts to the Church within the past year and a half, blue and white-collar workers, 2 recovered addicts, and even someone improving their life via education after having served time in prison, and we have 3 native languages represented with no communication difficulties in our group. It’s a truly diverse group and I’ve definitely been inspired by, and learned from, the unique experiences of my gathering-mates and I would suspect my unique experiences have also helped some of them. I definitely feel like I have a much more diverse group of people here than I would in a traditional brick-and-mortar college program where I live.

https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2021/7/23/reflectio...