throwaway6497

Had a lump in my throat by the time I got to the end.

The same guy who wasn't offered a job at Google because he didn't do well in the interview (or was it code in the interview?)

Do you feel, that you are unfairly discriminated because you are older? It feels terrible to hear such things. If you are a programmer, it seems like you either have to move to management as you grow older or change careers to survive. Best case scenario for a programmer, of course is to make a ton of money so that you don't ever have to depend on employment to pay your bills.

Why would Cisco not automatically opt-in for the grace period? Defies me. May be I am missing something.

Thanks for bringing this up. I want Amazon to take better care of employees precisely because I have money invested in them; because I believe in a knowledge economy, the greatest asset a company has is its people, and in the long-term this will matter. Amazon can be a lot more valuable, if employees can build long-term careers there and are better cared for.

I am rational. I want my money to work hard for my family. If I believe, I can provide a secure future for my family by investing in AMZN then I will do that. Through all the mutual/index funds, I am probably invested in a lot of companies whose practices I disagree with. Examples: Avoiding taxes (double irish with a dutch sandwich), super low minimum wages and expecting public to pay for their care (walmart and food stamps use of their employees), abysmal working conditions (foxconn deaths/suicides), shipping manufacturing jobs to China/Malaysia/Philippines and exploiting low-wage workers there, advertising and selling unhealthy/processed and getting kids hooked to high-{sugar,salt,bad fat} diet. We have practically proved that the best engine to create wealth is capitalism. The dichotomy you have provided is a false one. I love all the good properties of capitalism but I am also aware of its acute shortcomings, if there is no government or regulation. This doesn't mean that I will stop being a rational economic actor.

Things I mentioned are what I heard from current/ex Amazon employees. What I wrote about benefits are facts (else people would have refuted them right away). Only exaggeration was about Execs laughing their asses off; I was just making a point.

I heard few stories from friends/colleagues who worked there

- There was a production outage once at Amazon and my friend's manager and her team (including my friend) gave a post-mortem to a large audience. Port-mortem sessions are open for everyone to attend. He mentioned, it was a free-for-all. Execs were hurling F-bombs every sentence and the team was publicly humiliated. The manager was in tears and was later demoted. I could see how my friend was feeling for her as a person/human being.

- One employee asked about possibility of providing free food ala Google/FB in a org level all-hands. Exec pooh-poohed Google for being highly irresponsible and that they can never sustain themselves spending so much on free food. Lazlo Block says it is one of the best things at Google.

- Frugality - I heard you don't even free get pop at Amazon. No paternity leave. Maternity leaves are much shorter compared to what people take at Google/Facebook out of fear. Poor health benefits and 401K matching compared to Microsoft/Google/FB.

- Sweatshop - People are over worked and are working on weekends/holidays a good chunk of time. 70 hr weeks seem to be the norm. Get only one day-off for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Many Amazon execs are probably laughing their asses off looking at companies in the valley one-upping each other with great pay, quality free food, extending maternity/paternity leaves, generous health benefits and 401K contributions. "Look at these losers in the valley, and look at us, we pay employees pea-nuts, treat them like garbage, don't give a fuck about their well-being or families but still get a ton of shit done. Our stock is soaring! "

A good chunk of their engineers who are willing to take this kind of abuse are H1-Bs waiting for greencards. All new college grads wisen up after looking at their friends from Google/Facebook/Mircosoft, jump ship after a couple of years. Only people who stay there for a long time seem to be people who really like this kind of confrontational/psychopathic environment or incompetent engineers who rose into management, and cling onto their jobs.

Will appreciate if you can explain how this was reframed to ~1700 instructions/edge?

I was pointing out the irony that there was no political will to make Bharat Ratna (highest civilian award bestowed by Govt of India) APJ Abdul Kalam the President of India for a second term but get a dummy president instead. APJ is a gem of a person, an educationalist, an accomplished scientist and a person who can inspire generations of Indians.

When we are talking about his legacy as a President, it pains me that we didn't extend the Presidency platform to him for another term for the betterment of India.

Don't want to bring politics here. I just could not believe why in the world why Congress/Sonia wouldn't give him second term and brought in Pratibha Patil who abused her privilege as a President ( In news for changing her portrait picture N times because she didn't liked how she looked, Taking her whole extended family > 30+ to all foreign trips, and making Rashtrapati Bhavan a guest house/extended vacation place for them). Abdul Kalam inspired the children and young people of India. He was an icon. She did zilch. How could they disgrace Adbul Kalam and India like this? What were they thinking?

For a 25-30 year time frame AMZN will beat S&P and Walmart by several X. AMZN, GOOG are companies which will have a huge impact on how we live. I have put some money into them. They are Berkshire Hathaways of our time.

Why does it matter? This is probably true for most VC backed companies. Founders have loins share of equity. Why is it unfortunate? This is how VC backed economics work or more generally how capitalism works. Risk takers reap most rewards.

This made my jaw drop: "Its Medallion fund, which now manages money for its employees only, was the most prolific user of basket options. The fund has earned an average annual return of more than 35 percent for two decades."

$25 billion is all employees money; Even if we exclude Simon's money ($14 billion) it is a ton. 35% avg annualized returns for 20 years. Simply stunning.

The skeptic in me makes me think - because VC's set the rules mostly as they are the one who provide capital; They do wan't to make sure they get the most out of their investment with best possible terms.

This is awesome news by itself. I hope all other US universities follow suit, if they are not doing this already. That will be several billion dollars divestment from bad actors; private prison corporations, in this case.

I think we tend to overuse the word visionary quite a bit these days in the industry. Have you read the book by other Twitter founder who was ousted? He paints a different picture of Jack. Jack is no slouch but a visionary? He is not in the same league as Elon Musk. Jack is a hipster in a suit; he is smart and has carefully crafted his public persona (probably inspired by Jobs and modeled his persona after his ideas). Simple ideas can be powerful and can touch millions of lives. That doesn't make the person who initially came up with idea or some variant of it a visionary. On that metric, Evan Spiegel is a visionary too.

We should collectively be critical about how loosely we tend to use superlatives and not base the stories spun by PR machinery to qualify a person or her work. Elon Musk has invested his money, ideas, energy into - Making solar one of largest sources of clean energy - An electric car which is not a joke and probably better than a BMW M5 to drive, self-driving cars? - Satellites to cover entire land on earth with wifi - A plan to go to Mars and setup a camp there - A plan for rapid transit through tubes. Opensourced design blue-prints. - SpaceX

He is not dead and he has long way to go. We should reserve the word visionary for people like him. Let us be honest.

wow!

Acqui-hiring cannot be a long term strategy to nurture and build a strong internal talent pool. Google simply has done an outstanding job at this. Most start-up founders/employees share YC startups' cultural ethos, and will get stifled under Apple. Many of them will get demotivated, lose steam and leave as soon as their golden handcuffs expire.

With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven't met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products.

Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora, other promising startups). Any software engineer who is in the valley for a while (and heard the inside horror stories of working for Apple) wouldn't want to work there. There is no way in hell, senior engineers from the new age tech companies (listed above) will go to Apple. Apple will have a hard-time poaching them. Based on this, I have to conclude that most good engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of more than 15 years and are aging. All, relatively new Apple employees are either left-overs in the talent-pool who couldn't make the cut to the above top firms/startups or really B-grade senior engineers. What is Apple's strategy of thriving in a knowledge economy, when the only asset you need are "great people" to succeed in the long term. They probably have great hardware engineers. It is a travesty that though they are the richest company in the world, they still couldn't build a compelling cloud services suite which is better and cheaper than what Dropbox, Google, Box, Microsoft can provide. This comment, will probably ruffle a few feathers. [updated for typos/grammar]

Isn't this the Nth PR article about Google hiring practices. To be honest, Google technical hiring bar is no different from FB, Twitter, MS, Amazon, LinkedIn, Dropbox etc but they are the only company consistently coming out with PR fluff about hiring the best. This is not only disingenuous but frankly (to put it crudely) makes Google appear as a attention mongering whore. I guess, Google PR machine has to keep this show going to keep the mind-share among potential recruits.

Imagine cracking this question in an a 45 min phone interview, if you have never heard about it.

Since this information is public, what are these companies names? It is too painful to scrape visadoor.com for this information.