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enthalpyx

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Software developer living in Seattle.

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"stress"

Being the engineer on-call when the website/service/app is down and the company is losing $xMM/minute while you debug the problem is the very definition of stress.

Some companies like Google cordon this responsibility off to SREs. While Amazon has started developing a similar job family, the burden of supporting critical services still largely falls to software engineers.

While software engineering is certainly not the worst job from a stress perspective, my experience (particularly with operations at Amazon) is far from the zen-like state the author describes. It can also be pretty exciting.

"If you live in Cambridge and neighboring communities, you can order online and get any book delivered the same day by an eco-friendly Metroped “pedal-truck,” or a bicycle, as I like to call them. Beat that Amazon."

Here's how: any book, ever published, in 60 seconds or less. Kindle.

"We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions." -- says the guy writing for .... CNN.com

"so Google set up a honeypot – some made up words like [hiybbprqag] linking to random unrelated sites."

That's not my understanding of what Google did at all. Google fed back search results for keywords that didn't exist on the Internet -- period, and they started eventually showing up in Bing.

The Fallacy of Gray 16 years ago

If science gets credit for healing the sick, does it also take the blame for deaths caused by nuclear weapons? Blatant, public, and verifiable. Praise worthy? Not in my book.

Education Inflation 17 years ago

"As a side note, I am in no way bashing the cs program at UNCW... and the CS program is awesome."

At a top 10 CS school, your experience would probably have been very, very different.

The distribution of Amazon web sites seem to be heavily weighted towards those countries with the highest GDP. Maybe not a coincidence.

1. www.amazon.com 2. www.amazon.co.jp 3. www.joyo.com 4. www.amazon.de 5. www.amazon.fr 6. www.amazon.co.uk

On Elitism 17 years ago

Wouldn't it be great if we could get to the point where the opinion of others didn't matter so much?