HN user
http://www.lochlanmcintosh.com/
Pay-to-continue is a concession to the reality that an arcade is designed to generate money. The balanced and high-intensity gameplay gets you interested, the continue feature just takes your money. The solution is to never continue! Try for a 1 credit clear.
What exactly are you risking (or incurring) with regards to FANG culture? From my perspective it's all upside.
Why should I incur the risk and time investment of founding a startup when I can enjoy comfort and success working at a FANG company? Startups _sound_ great, but death marching myself without compensation is a stressful proposition.
Sure, I have a handful of ideas that seem reasonable and dreams of startup success—and maybe I'll explore them in early retirement.
Counterfeit items, e.g. video games, are all over eBay. I’ve reported many auctions over the years as infringing and have never seen one taken down.
I might consider Myst a “killer app,” especially for its time.
IMO the problem is that people want to buy Agile. They want to pay a consultant, or go to a class, implement a dozen scrum rituals, and call it “agile.”
Agile is not Scrum, Kanban, or even XP. It is the manifesto. It is shipping all the time at a sustainable development pace.
I have had great success implementing agile and I attribute this to continually reindexing on the manifesto and examining the impact of our process. Spoiler: removing processes is a solution as often as it is adding a process. No amount of stand-ups or sprint planning or retrospectives makes your software process a good one.
Most of it. Base salary caps out at $160k except for NY/SF where it caps out at $180k. Once you get into the higher levels most of your comp is stock, which historically has worked out very well for Amazon employees.
Software Engineers outside the US make less, full stop. Amazon has a COL adjustment for SF and NYC but it’s not as much as you might think. Not as sure about other companies but I believe Google is similar (they also have a small local office).
The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.
Source: live in PDX, work at Amazon.
What’s the benefit of being “not connected to Amazon retail?” Serving a large customer that demands scale seems useful for driving the platform forward—what is the downside?
Two companies ago I posted in the “Who is Hiring” thread. I ended up only getting a couple responses (while other channels got much more activity) but I ended up hiring one of them. Though I’ve since left that company, my former employee has become a good friend and confidant, and ended up following me to every company I’ve jumped to.
What’s wrong with working at Amazon?
You’re talking about Amazon like it is a small company. It isn’t. None of the scenarios you described are possible with Pivot, Amazon works hard to make sure the “jury” is impartial and has not been tampered with. Pivot adds an important check to the PIP process and I’m glad it exists.
Source: I work at Amazon.
Ignoring stock appreciation Sr. SDEs at Amazon have a total comp target of ~$250k-$350k. Same for L6 SDMs. It’s definitely “standard” for some levels/job families.
That strict definition of “unit” testing (advocating for isolationism and banning collaboration with dependencies) is too narrow for my taste. DI can make a lot of sense, but I don’t think that means you have to mock everything (inviting a maintenance cost) for the sake of purity.
Here’s Fowler’s take: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html
Speaking as someone who has worked as a developer for multiple early-stage startups, the opposite is true.
Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:
1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.
2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.
How was technical debt not one of the things mentioned? In my experience that’s by far the #1 reason for poor velocity.
My understanding is that you no longer have to pay back the signing bonus. Not sure about relocation bonuses.
Stifling an established company culture and the existing behavior patterns of employees can lead to talented people leaving out of frustration. Do the shareholders of WMT want to risk devaluing their acquisition?
Amazon Delivery Experience | Front-End and Back-End Engineers | Portland, Oregon | Fulltime | ONSITE
My team at Amazon is hiring in Portland! We are looking for both front-end devs with 3+ years experience and back-end devs of all levels. Must have a strong CS background. Smart coworkers, awesome products, great compensation, and a fantastic culture forming here at the Portland office!
If you are interested or have questions, please reach out to me at lochlan@amazon.com (please note that I am not the hiring manager but would be happy to refer qualified candidates)
links:
https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528376
https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528377
Opal | Portland, OR | Front End Engineer, Mid-Level or Senior | Full-time, onsite | http://workwithopal.com/
Opal is hiring! We are a collaboration platform for omni-channel brand marketing teams. After recently doing a large raise we're expanding our team, and if you are a seasoned front-end web developer we would love to talk to you! We're currently migrating a Backbone application to React, along with some other interesting efforts—there are plenty of cool projects to go around as we scale our team and application!
Please e-mail your resume and a link to your github profile to lmcintosh@workwithopal.com and I will refer you to the relevant hiring manager! Thanks!
Too pessimistic. Some people, such as myself, haven't stopped playing these games since the 80s. I can beat SMB easily within ten minutes, but I still get a lot of enjoyment every run. (To say nothing of the other fantastic titles!)
Plenty of people have moved on to better technology and more sophisticated games, but let's not assume every player would get bored of these true classics.
I have never seen this be a serious consideration in this industry. IMO that is a fairly "old school" outlook. Anecdotally I have never had a job for more than two years and it hasn't been an issue for me yet.
An exception to this would be someone who has had a lot of contract work without a lot of FTE, that is definitely a red flag.
If this technology is rolled out, won't that just encourage people to buy Android devices instead?
Reduction in scope and prototyping can help reduce risk in how wrong your estimate is, but I think it is misleading to suggest that these techniques inherently "might make a realistic estimate possible." I don't think I'm alone in that I've had tasks that were supposed to take less than a day take weeks. I'm not saying this is common, but there is no silver bullet, and assuming from the beginning that estimating is basically impossible can help bring everyone into reality.
Just because an agreement is consensual does not mean that there is no power differential. One party will almost always have some greater leverage over another. When the power differential is too great for consent to lead to a mutually-beneficial arrangement, regulation may be required.
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Full Stack Engineer Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a full stack engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop features for our SaaS web application/platform.
Responsibilities:
- Build features on the platform
- Write tests for everything you build
- Collaborate with product stakeholders to shepherd products through development
- Participate and contribute in code reviews and design discussions
- Lead effort to build and deploy cool things
Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/borbyu/d92b23bfc4e929a45c93
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Full Stack Engineer
Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a full stack engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop features for our SaaS web application/platform.
Responsibilities:
- Build features on the platform
- Write tests for everything you build
- Collaborate with product stakeholders to shepherd products through development
- Peer review code prior to merging/deployment
Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/Lochlan/3b47a28b7d921a03863e
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Front End Engineer
Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a front end engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop front-end JavaScript for our SaaS web application/platform. Responsibilities:
- Write features within the platform's Backbone.js application
- Write unit tests and webdriver tests for everything you build
- Collaborate with designers and product stakeholders to shepherd products through development
- Test and fix bugs across multiple platforms and browsers (IE9+)
- Peer review code prior to merging/deployment
Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/Lochlan/a97296e04977ba2cc735
ImpactFlow — Portland, OR. Onsite — Junior Front End Engineer
Nonprofit-giving startup seeks a front end engineer to join our product development team. You will work with a small cross-functional group of engineers to develop front-end JavaScript for our SaaS web application/platform.
Responsibilities:
- Write features within the platform's Backbone.js application
- Write unit tests and webdriver tests for everything you build
- Collaborate with designers and product stakeholders to shepherd products through development
- Test and fix bugs across multiple platforms and browsers (IE9+)
- Peer review code prior to merging/deployment
Learn more about the position and how to apply: https://gist.github.com/Lochlan/8522bd96f641cd8c9b11
I am a big fan of pixi.js (http://www.pixijs.com). I haven't explored its "erasing" capabilities, but it is a great library for performant 2d graphics programming in the browser.