bethling

I don't know if that will happen. A lot of the cloud heavy offices moved to shared desks for engineers, so there's only a desk for 2 days/week, so they don't have enough space available for everyone to return full time.

It's still possible, but I don't think would be as easy as an annoucement.

My experience (at least in the US and UK) is the opposite. A pumpkin is a very particular (usually round and orange) type of squash. Squash is the generic term for most of the vegetables (both winter and summer variety) that are eaten.

I've really only seen "Pumpkin" used more commonly in Australia, where I was surprised to see someone refer to what I knew as a butternut squash as a pumpkin.

From my time with Amazon's payments team, they do. However they do like not depending on any one particular provider, and being able to spread the payments to different providers does give them leverage to negotiate rates from a stronger position.

But Pathfinder depends on the SRDs under the 1.0 OGL - these changes would require Paizo to accept the new terms to publish anything new for 2e (or create a 3e that doesn't build off the D20 SRDs)

I think also what happens is that some people feel that the comparison is between doing everything from scratch and taking a couple shortcuts. Sure - not using jarred garlic or some other timesaver won't taste as good as starting with the original ingredients.

But really, it's more often between taking shortcuts and not cooking at all. When I have time, I love doing everything myself. But after a long work day, I often don't have the energy. But if there's something like a meal kit that I know I can cook, that'll stop me from having dinner delivered.

At least for me, when I put in my address, it finds a similarly named, but incorrect address.

Makes it a little hard to use :-/

And France, which is a presidential system, is not a two party system, with a large number of parties represented in their legislature.

They have a different election system than the US.

I've been at only one company where "unlimited PTO" was really treated close to that way. There were offices in San Francisco and Paris, and the CEO was French (and based in the US).

The US office had untracked PTO, and from the get-go he would let the Americans know that the French office had around 7 weeks time off, and that they'd use it, so they should as well.

He took essentially the month of August off, which did help establish that 4 week vacations were "normal".

Interesting -- I got quite a bit up until 3 or 4 years ago, but it's essentially vanished for me. Not sure which cases they've cleaned up, and which ones they haven't I guess.

You also run into the situation where banks check your credit/banking history and may deny you an account based on that. My partner couldn't open a bank account for years because they forgot to stop an auto payment after they closed the account and moved.

Those payments bounced, leading to fees, which kept compounding and even after taking care of that, it took a long time to figure out how to clear the mark on the report (I don't know if we did, or it just eventually fell off due to time)

This makes me sad. When I was working on a startup with a hardware component, Fry’s was the place where I was able to wander and find pieces that would help me build what I needed.

And then I’d find something else that would help inspire a fun personal project. There was so much geekiness there that inspired me to experiment a lot and learn.

They tested Waymo out in Kirkland Washington for a bit. It doesn't have snow, but I'm sure they got a lot of data about wet conditions.

The thing that caught my attention and I found useful enough to really give SublimeText a chance was the mini-map. I see that in a lot of places now, but as far as I can recall, the first place I saw it was ST.

My experience at most tech companies (Amazon, Google, etc), to become a manager you need to demonstrate that you have the technical ability to perform at senior(ish) level IC before you become a manager. i.e. You go from L5 IC to L5 Manager. Not L3/L4 IC to L5 manager.

Having been a Senior IC and a Manager at a couple of big companies, I agree that that promotion is probably easier as a manager, but I worked with orgs/teams that had multiple senior staff/director-level ICs, but only 1 senior manager, director, etc. M1->M2 is possible managing a single team, but often M3 isn't. As long as the senior manager/director is there, you're not going to get promoted.

On the other hand, I've worked hard to get IC's on my teams promoted up and out of my team because good directors rely on their Sr. Staff/Prinicpal engineers so there's room for them to grow (even if it's difficult).

Take a look at what Deliveroo is doing with their "Editions" brand. They get some space, set up small takeout only kitchens and enable a restaurant to expand their delivery range (different neighborhoods or even cities).

https://foodscene.deliveroo.co.uk/promotions/deliveroo-editi...

This is very true - at one point when I worked at Amazon, my manager told me that if I was already the next level, I'd easily be exceeding expectations. But the work I was doing wouldn't actually get me there.

It ran contrary to what I had been told - do the work of the next level, and you'll be promoted to that level. It was tough adjusting, and I ended up moving into management. I got lucky in that I enjoy it, but I do miss doing the hands on work from time-to-time.

This is very true. I left Amazon in 2014, by that time I had to explain why (at least twice a year) I had some services that could not feasibly be moved to AWS. At least in the org I was a part of, that they were not running on AWS stood out enough that it raised questions.

Without considering traffic it's not overly useful for me. When I put in my address, some of the places it tells me I could reach in an hour, I'd be lucky to reach in 2 most times of the day.

iOS has something similar - called 'Night Shift'. I think he's talking about having a theme that is a dark background rather than a light/white one, though.

It's still really important. There's a cost to training and getting an engineer to understand the problems and scale that Google faces (some might come in with that, but many do not). There's also domain/google specific knowledge that's expensive to replace as well.

Yes, if someone leaves after 4 years, it's possible to hire someone else of the same ability level, but you're going to spend time and effort to make them as effective as the person who just left.

To be fair, a lot of that can depend on your manager. Your manager (should) have a better perspective on what resonates with the committees, help you gather/frame the data, and polish the package.

Google managers might not be the ones doing the promotion, but a good one can help you get there

I actually find the opposite. :) Google Map's estimates tend to be close for my work commute (within 5-10 minutes).

Waze on the other hand will often give me an estimate that's 20 minutes faster than Google Maps, and with the traffic that eventually pop up on that route, take me 20 minutes longer than what Google Maps estimated.

That's not completely true. Amazon's offers/pay isn't tied to the cost of living of an area, but to the cost of labor in that area. When I had an engineer transfer from Seattle to San Francisco there was an adjustment.

I'm the same way. Until someone loaned me a copy of Effective C++, I simply hacked code. The best practices in that book opened my mind a great deal, and really started me down the path to developing software and building systems. Now I'm the one handing junior developers my copy of the book to read, and hopefully helping them in the same way.

Until I met my wife, I hadn't realized exactly the fortune I had with my family. My parents were teachers and really understood the value of education. We came from a modest background, but it was stable and they did push me to focus on school. I went to a really good school (yay need based financial aid), have a great job that pays me well.

On the other hand, we have my wife. She is smarter than me, but went 7 different schools as her family moved from place to place before she finally dropped out, worked retail as she essentially raised one of her sisters as she scraped by. In a more stable environment, she'd have almost certainly ended up in law or business school.

She now really tries to provide some sort of stability, and encourage focusing on schoolwork with her nieces and nephews, who are in danger of repeating the history of poverty.

Seeing that makes me realize how very lucky I was to be born into the family I was, and everything I took for granted really isn't just what "normal" is.

This is very true, it's something that I've never done well, and have always been really uncomfortable doing. When being a hiring manager, I always expect the candidate to make significant counter offers, but it's not something that I've ever been able to do effectively on my own behalf.

I don't know. When I made the decision to leave Amazon, my offers at Facebook and Apple were less than what I was making at Amazon. Google was only slightly more.

I worked for two companies in 2000-2002 that went belly up. I was lucky to not be unemployed too long during that time, but it just reinforced that I was lucky to even have a job. I didn't even think about negotiating an offer until recently. That mind set put me back so much that when I became a manager a few years ago, I saw that the company I was working for (one of the big tech companies) was paying fresh college graduates more than I was getting.

I also remember a few times where I was interviewing tech writers, and they would beg me for the job - they had been out of work for 2-3 years.

I don't think it will get that bad if the current cycle bursts. There's a lot more tech companies out there that are making money, and even if/when the VC money dries up there will be some jobs.

Amazon does not deploy changes during times that they feel can be customer impacting. For North America this means that deployments will be during the night.