eysquared

My information is largely out of date, but Vega is aimed squarely at Fire devices. I expect LG devices largely use the web based Prime Video app that runs on most living room devices.

LG TVs capabilities and performance from an app developer perspective is... not great.

This is near and dear to my own lived experience, having dealt with what should have been a minor fix for Hunter Douglas blinds.

The cord that was attached to the clutch broke and got caught in the mechanism itself. When I disassembled the clutch to retrieve the cord, an internal spring came dislodged and twisted causing the clutch to never function correctly again.

Understanding exactly which part I needed replaced, I contacted Hunter Douglas, who told me to talk to a local rep. My local rep told me they couldn't repair this issue, and I would need to box up my entire window shade and sent it in. The cost was something around $200 for a repair.

I spent a lot of time scouring the internet and came across this site where I purchased the entire clutch for around $30. 5 minutes of swapping a good part for bad and I was back in action.

I think this is highly dependent on what your beliefs are pre-trip and how you define what makes you you. I've had many psychedelic experiences and while I often feel greater connection to living things around me, I've never been left with the feeling that my "soul" or anything I'd define as me will exist when I'm gone.

I’m a convert to physical buttons for this reason (though I’m not a swimmer).

A Garmin watch that allows for all interactions to be done via easy to find physical buttons and well thought out data screens was a huge improvement for my own use cases.

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team working on things they don’t believe in or that don’t actually move the needle and are scrapped.

In places like this the engineers and managers closest to the product and customers tend to have a better feel for what to work on, but in a large enough org it’s impossible to align those priorities across teams to get things done. This leads engineers to either POC ideas that aren’t possible in production yet or to focus on smaller features that don’t have dependencies.

The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership who often care more about org size than output.

I’m tired of the messaging around “lazy workers” pointing the finger where it doesn’t belong. Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It’s not the L5 engineer or the first line manager that’s holding any product back. These people tend to be the most invested in building something in my experience.

The scale of HR at Amazon is huge. One data point was that they hired over 800,000 people in a single month. I'm sure that number is out of date.

The idea was to build scalable solutions for HR to modernizing hiring, etc. and productize those. I'm not sure the external product piece ever panned out, but they were mainly focused on eliminated manual processes for HR inside of Amazon and migrating legacy systems to modern ones.

AWS has a ton of non-engineering staff. Ad-tech is also sales, marketing, and IMDb. Twitch has a ton on marketing and creator management roles.

Its not clear which roles will be eliminated, but I've worked in a few of those groups and I can assure you there is plenty of fat to be trimmed outside of engineering.

PXT is their tech team supporting HR for Amazon. It grew a ton of the last 5+ years, but from the outside looking in it appears to be mainly empire building. The major initiatives I was aware of from my time there never seem to have been completed.

Headline is a bit misleading, as this isn't all of Seattle and just one specific location. That location has been one of the worst spots in Seattle for as far back as I can remember, so it was always a bit odd they had an office there.

Still I'm sure Amazon will take any excuse it can get to reduce headcount in Seattle given the city council's feelings towards them. They've been shifting to Bellevue for a few years now, and most hiring in Seattle proper has slowed or stopped due to headcount caps.

Netflix used to be the one subscription I kept while adding and dropping others based on content.

With the limited catalog, a general disinterest in all but a few of their originals, and the raising prices I'm thinking it's time to cancel and wait until something of interest lands on their platform again.

As someone that has held that title at multiple FAANGS and done hundreds of interviews: please don't equate performance in the absurd interview process with ability to code.

Most of the best developers I know would fail a technical interview for their current job.

I was under this impression that this was already known. Looks like this is from 2016, so I guess I was correct :). Perhaps we can add (2016) to the title for clarity.

Initial designs, sure. When it comes to making trade-offs in features and functionality vs ship dates then that falls into the realm of a Product Manager.

I no longer work on Windows or at Microsoft. I expect most engineers don't care enough about Windows to lose their livelihood over it. However many of us did leave the organization after that release.

I worked on the Windows Core UX team. If you think this is an engineering led decision, you have had a different experience with large software organizations than I have.

Even with the Windows 8 UX changes, our most senior engineers were up in arms in open protest and they STILL went through with it.

This is a Product led decision.

Fans of this type of thing may enjoy listening to The Allusionist podcast: https://www.theallusionist.org/.

It came pre-installed on my family's shiny new Gateway computer. As a kid I loved customizing my house and adding custom icons for things like games in my 'bedroom.'

It never replaced the actual desktop, but it was fun to go into my own 'house' on the family computer customized to my liking in the days before profiles and separate logins.

I wanted to share a different perspective as a hiring manager that has worked at multiple FAANGs.

As you start looking to get into more mid/senior levels, the consulting work starts to hinder more than help. Typically when we are looking at candidates we want to see long term ownership of a product or project. This can include things like dealing with operational issues, shipping major versions, or leading large architectural changes. Most of these things are quite rare in the consulting case. Typically consultants don't have much ownership over the code or major decisions about the product, and that becomes increasingly limiting for the scope and ambiguity you are able to demonstrate.

This is of course purely anecdotal and not all consulting roles are like this, but it is a trend I have encountered.

I don't know what your long term career goals are or what stage of your career you are in, but in the off chance you may look to return to a product focused org at a higher level you should be aware of the challenges that can come from long stints in consulting.

There seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments so far. Is this not the dream that is often touted on hacker news? Work at a FAANG and "retire" somewhere more affordable?

I'm personally doing just this. I was lucky enough to land a good job out of college, buy a house in a desired area, and see it appreciate in the last 10 years. This increase plus the birth of my kids left me wondering if there wasn't a better route than continuing to need a FAANG salary to afford a larger house and private schools.

Due to this we are taking advantage of the remote work opportunities that have opened up due to the pandemic and are moving to the place we spend all our time anyway: a small town in the mountains. We get to do the things we want to do, have more space for our kids to roam, and a better quality of life without the stress of constantly needing a good performance review.

I understand this is not for everyone and I understand the negative perception of 'outsiders' pushing the price up for locals, but at the end of the day I'm optimizing for my own quality of life. I can't think of a better use of the money I've earned doing what I love than to provide a great life for my family.

Typically you get a signing bonus that vests of a period of X years. Once those X years are done, you are relying on additional stock grants from past performance reviews or promotions to keep your comp at its previous value.

If you perform well or get promoted you should see your compensation increase, but without that you are left with your base salary and no additional stock grants and can take a pay cut as a result.

Its one way FAANG weeds out lower performing engineers.

Well there is at least one reason that release notes are bad: any mention of any new feature or specific fix seems to trigger more scrutiny from Apple reviewers.

The more information you provide, the more likely it is that your app will be held up in review or you will get additional questions from reviewers delaying your release.

I generally still try to err on the side of including information in my release notes, but I have been bitten by this enough times that I completely understand this practice and sympathize with other app developers.

I do tend to prefer to use markdown when I can, which is where OneNote is failing for me. A lot of our internal tools use markdown for things like interview feedback.

Do you have any example scripts you can share?

I disagree. While Facebook may have started that way, they actively took steps to "drive engagement" and get people hooked. They gamified social media for ad revenue and turned the platform into what it is today.

Had it stayed merely as a way for people to connect then I don't think they would be seeing nearly the same amount of backlash.

I worked on Windows 7 and 8 on the Core UX team when he took over and turned the Windows desktop into a touch friendly interface. The guy is a true believer and maybe he is right, but I certainly don't feel like my iPad gets much use anymore. Most headlines I hear seem to be about declining sales and I can't help but recall the overwhelmingly negative feedback from users about the Windows 8 changes.

I always felt like Apple did it right - take the phone and move towards the desktop. Otherwise you are just creating a system that is as bad at the new computing scenarios as it has now become for the old ones.

I worked there for a long time as a Senior Developer. I certainly wouldn't call it remote friendly unless you have a manager willing to fight for your ability to work remote.

Seattle is a city of neighborhoods. Move a few block away and the experience would be completely different.

With that said, you visited what I would consider some of the worst places in the city to spend time with kids.

Being forced onto a schedule dictated by your kids is a choice parents make, not a necessity.

I never said I didn't have a car when needed, just that my day to day is much more enriched by not needing one (and being forced to get out of the house).

I will always choose to spend my time exploring the mountains with my kids, but if they choose soccer/baseball/etc then its just medium walk or short bus ride away.

I live in Seattle with a 2 year old and one more on the way. I can't believe I ever considered leaving the city to have kids. I can walk to a coffee shop 3 blocks away without taking 15 minutes to strap my kid in a car seat and the amount of parks we have access to in a short walk in incredible. We take the bus to the zoo and aquarium and my son loves seeing all the people and looking out the window.

Being out and about means I feel a real sense of community and have really gotten to know my neighbors.

When we see our friends from the suburbs its amazing how cooped up they are, how unlikely they are to leave the house, and how unattached they feel from their surroundings. Its too easy for them to play in their basement or yard.

Staying in the city has given me and my family a much higher quality of life.

I do just that between a web front end I own and a RN app. We write as much pure JS as we can so we can re-use the logic.

For sharing presentation, I'm hopeful for solutions like react-native-web.

I love that development model for internal platforms, but it sounds like you are isolating yourself from the pain points that your customers often face.

My current company casts a weary eye at third party software so the import process is slow and involved. This means we only take major versions, and usually not very quickly. When those versions then introduce regressions in our own products and in dependent libraries it only serves to strengthen the voices calling to ditch the external solution entirely. It'd be a different story if a major version seemed to be of consistent quality to squat on for a while, but each new version brings its own challenges.

To be clear this is all involved in life as a dev in a large software company. For my own personal use I'd rather see RN move as fast as possible. I'm fighting the good fight to keep up (and increase) adoption at work so I just hope that FB and the RN team keeps these things in mind.

Thanks for the additional insight here.