HN user
After 2 day delivery became 5 day delivery
Where do you live? I hear this repeated on HN a lot, but every person I know IRL doesn't have this problem (ie family spread across multiple states). Hell, in the last ~2 years, other than high-demand stuff in the pandemic like Clorox wipes, most of my orders have been _next_ day delivery, nevermind 5 days.
Amazon Basics are cheap and low quality, but they're at least curated. Amazon doesn't just slap their brand on any random shit, so you at least know that your phone charger will meet safety standards, for example.
I don't often intentionally look for cheap, low quality stuff to buy, but when I do, I'd buy an Amazon Basics item over a UEVYUF (or another <insert fake dropshipping brand here>) item every time.
back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace.
Amazon's work culture is toxic in a lot of ways and this RTO is idiotic, but saying this about the vesting schedule just shows that you don't actually have any idea how the Amazon compensation structure actually works. There's a lot of reasons to not want to work at Amazon, but the vesting backweighting isn't one of them.
Despite the impression that Amazon is a hellplace, it remains one of the most desired places in the world for software engineers to work, so being "worse than Amazon" isn't saying much.
Walmart's tech side of things is very highly regarded both for the work, as well for the pay. They pay $200-300k for people from 5-10/yrs experience, which despite being below FAANG level, still puts it squarely among the top paying companies for software development.
A good agile process will not have an ironclad upfront definition of what is to be delivered in a large project.
"what is to be delivered" does not have to be a rigid definition of "5,000 lines of code program with features 1, 2, and 3". A good agile contract will allow the possibility for changing project requirements but also still define how those changing requirements affect expectations and responsibilities of the consulting company.
The agile process itself can actually be a deliverable that you define in a contract, and it should spell out, for example, how new requirements are prioritized and the criteria you use for determining if it's something that the consulting company is responsible for. In my experience if you can't write out your agile requirements in a contract, then you don't have a good enough internal understanding of your own agile processes and should probably work on that, too.
Far too many people use "we're Agile" as an excuse for "we don't plan or document anything" and extend that to contracts, but that's absolutely not what good Agile actually is.
Nobody said anything about waterfall. A good agile process can and should have all of the things the parent commenter listed. If you eschew those things by using the "well we're agile, that means we don't plan ahead!" excuse, that's a sign of incompetence.
Some numbers to put this into perspective:
A $500 bonus for one month of full time 40/hr/week work comes out to ~$3.20/hr "raise" for the month of June. Amazon minimum pay is $15/hr, so this bonus is effectively a ~20% raise for one month.
Amazon Q1 profits were $2.5 billion, or ~$620 million averaged per month. Spending $500 million on this bonus is ~80% of "monthly" profits.
This is a situation where I suppose I do have to give props to Amazon for giving a bonus that's well above the status quo (a 20% raise and spending 80% of profits on pay raises is nothing to sneeze at), but at the same time, $500 still seems paltry.
An NDA is practically unenforceable in this situation, which is the entire point a noncompete is a thing. Who is going to snitch on them for revealing AWS secrets to Google and violating the NDA? Another Google exec?
Agreed. I'm generally uncomfortable with noncompetes and especially with Amazon's practice of making every employee sign one. Unless it's a really special case where a team is working on something truly groundbreaking and secret, I don't see what Amazon is really afraid of if some random developer leaves and goes to a competitor.
However, I do have to say that their argument as stated in this article does seem like a valid case for a noncompete. From the article:
“Virtually every day, Hall worked with Amazon’s most senior cloud executives to create and execute those plans. As a result, he was entrusted with an unusually broad view into Amazon’s cloud product plans; its priorities; and its competitive strategy.”
Yea, that's something else I forgot to mention. I chalk it up to OP possibly being inexperienced/naive (I think this was his first job out of college), but I have worked with a lot of companies and all of them require you to pay back at least part of your signing bonus if you quit within a year.
When I graduated college, all of my friend group discussed it and we all took out a small chunk of the bonus to go on a small group vacation, but the rest of the bonus got put into an investment account and not touched for at least a year. That way if we did decide to leave, the money was easily accessible to be paid back. I know not everyone has that flexibility, but it's probably the best way to approach signing bonuses if you're not 100% sure you will be at the company long term.
I fear OP may have misunderstood how the signing bonus works and it seems to have caused him undue stress.
I've interviewed at Amazon and had a lot of conversations about compensation. I don't know about the terms of the relocation bonus, but for the signing bonus, you don't pay it back if you are fired and even if you leave voluntarily, you only pay back a pro-rated amount. For example if your signing bonus is $20k, and you leave at the 6 months mark, you owe $10k back but you get to keep the other $10k.
I can't really comment on your interview experiences except to say: that sucks. I know firsthand (unemployed for a long time and had a really long personal struggle similar to yours) how shitty it can be. The unfortunate reality is that, no matter how much these companies say otherwise, a huge part of hiring comes down to luck. Luck of who you interview with, luck of what mood they are in before beginning the interview, luck of having technical problems, luck of a lot of things. To a certain point, you are in control of how you respond to unlucky, non-ideal situations, but you may still not come out ahead versus someone who didn't get so unlucky. Luck sucks. But one day, you might get lucky too, so keep your head up.
The main thing I want to say to you as this: I work for a FAANG, I know many people that work for FAANGs, and I know many people that have left FAANGs. It is not all it is cracked up to be. I would even venture to say that, in most cases, it isn't worth the hassle. You should not in any way feel like you are setting your sights "lower" by targeting non-FAANG companies, because you absolutely are not.
The FAANG hiring process measures whether or not you pass the FAANG hiring process. That sounds tautological, I know, but it's a not-very-well-kept-secret within my FAANG that the hiring process does not at all measure proficiency for the job, but it's something we keep doing because at this point the process itself is ingrained in the culture. It is not a measurement of how smart you are, how good at programming you are, or even how likable you are. The "hiring bar" is entirely built around whether or not you will be a good worker for that specific team's needs, which are not necessarily the characteristics of "smart, good at programming, likable". Sometimes it could be a specific niche skillset, or how well you will adapt to a weird or chaotic internal culture, or how well you will kiss ass. Sometimes people dumber than you will be hired because it just so happens that they applied at the right time when the company was in dire need of bodies.
I too know how much it sucks when your personal confidence starts to take a hit. It makes it so hard to apply to jobs when you already feel like you will fail before you even hit submit on the applications. But keep in mind all of the things that make you smart and all of the things that got you those FAANG interviews in the first place. If you failed out of FAANG hiring, it just means you aren't good at FAANG hiring. That's it. Period. It does not mean you are not good at your job, or that you are not smart, or that you can't pass hiring at another company. It doesn't even mean that you wouldn't succeed working at FAANG! It only means you didn't succeed at FAANG hiring.
If you really want a FAANG job, then keep at it. You are smart enough to get it, you just have to use those smarts to mold yourself to the very specific way that the FAANG hiring process looks for. If molding yourself in that way isn't something you want to do, that isn't a bad thing, and there are definitely other, just-as-good-if-not-better, companies that will value you.
It isn't all grim! His granddaughter is successful porn star Brandi Love.
When did you join the Austin office? I'm guessing things changed over time. When I visited there definitely was not a security person (not for the building nor for the Cloudflare suite in the building) and there were no badges. I was able to walk into the Cloudflare office through the unlocked door and walk around inside the office for at least a couple minutes before anyone paid any attention to me (and even that was only because I was trying to get someone's attention to tell me where to go).
Regarding the reception desk, it shouldn't matter if it's a shared building. Unless it's a small company (CF is not), even in shared buildings it's common to have at least one person sitting at a desk in the office suite to act as a gatekeeper and assist visitors, etc.
That’s good to hear! I edited my original comment to say that this was over a year ago and was still when the Austin office was relatively new so perhaps it was just the effects of adjusting to a new space, and hopefully things are different now. Still, glad that it’s taken seriously.
One of the folks I talked to while there was one of the senior security team members, and I mentioned it to him during the interview but felt like it was brushed off (honestly that’s not that uncommon, I’ve worked in security for years and while software people are always really critical on software security, they really don’t care about physical security). I’ve been back once and nothing had changed at that time, but that was over a year ago so hopefully in the past year things have improved.
It’s always nice reading about a company taking security seriously, and Cloudflare has some decent write ups for their hardware/software security, but I sure wish they would take other forms of security more seriously.
I visited Cloudflare’s Austin office. The door to the office is an old unlocked door with a glass pane and an old deadbolt. There is no reception desk or even anyone watching the door. I was able to walk in completely unnoticed and walk around for a couple minutes trying to get someone’s attention to figure out where I needed to go (not the best job interview experience, but that’s a different topic), while desks full of unattended and unlocked computers were fully available to me.
For a company that bills itself as an internet security company, it wasn’t very inspiring security.
edit to add: this was over a year ago so it’s possible things have improved since then. My understanding is that the Austin office is relatively new so maybe at the time they were still working out the kinks (still not great security but more understandable at least)
At a broader level, federally protected speech in the US isn't absolute; the Supreme Court has ruled a number of times that restrictions can be placed on organizing protests, such as you can't protest in the middle of a busy freeway at rush hour blocking traffic and use "my right to protest is federally protected" as an excuse. There's more info here [1] (PDF warning; go to page 9).
More specifically to unionizing, employees are allowed to discuss unions but employers are allowed to place some restrictions on when/where such discussions can take place. From the NLRB [2]:
Working time is for work, so your employer may maintain and enforce non-discriminatory rules limiting solicitation and distribution, except that your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about or soliciting for a union during non-work time, such as before or after work or during break times; or from distributing union literature during non-work time, in non-work areas, such as parking lots or break rooms.
1: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf
2: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...
Random speech doesn't become any less random just because it is federally protected. On the contrary, it actually becomes less federally protected if it is random, because federal protection of speech requires specific time, place, and manner.
How large is your company, in terms of number of people? I’m talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of managed identities/employees. OIM is typically the only IdM software capable of scaling that high (though it doesn’t come without its issues).
OIM certainly has much more features, and just by the virtue of being the largest/supported by the largest tech company, tends to have the most features and integrations of any IdM solution, which is another reason it’s favored by large companies that actually need that scale. Other companies with smaller numbers of people or less need for edge-case integrations typically go with something more user-friendly like SailPoint (and others are still stuck on IdM solutions of yesteryear like some of MS’s old offerings).
So I brought up OIM because I have some personal experience with it and similar software. It’s main selling point is that it is extremely performing and scalabale, and it is so big (and supported by such a large company) that it has ready-made integrations with most other enterprise apps (and can be extremely flexible if you have a custom apps). These are pretty attractive qualities to giant, global companies with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds/thousands of apps to manage.
Competitors like SailPoint are typically more user friendly, easier to implement (as long as your implementation only integrates with common apps and doesn’t require deep customization) and comes from a generally friendlier software company, but it isn’t able to keep up performance/stability wise once you start moving above 100k-ish managed users.
The performance landscape is changing slightly now that other IdM providers are taking advantage of clouds as well for better scaling, but it’s taking some time for them to rearchitect applications to fully do so.
In the security space I do have experience with many customers who are looking into greenfield implementations of stuff like Oracle Identity Manager.
From what I see at my consulting clients, the main areas where Oracle competes aren’t with Azure. The Oracle Cloud isn’t about spinning up VMs or web servers (though yes they do have those features), but about running enterprise apps where Oracle is still, much to the disappointment of many, the market leader. Some examples of this would be Oracle Identity Manager (which is absolutely awful but is still actually the only IdM solution really capable of scaling with massive enterprise companies) and of course ERP. Oracle ERP Cloud alone is a several billion dollar revenue source for them and is growing extremely rapidly.
Punchline? Oracle isn’t the biggest cloud provider but it’s naive to say they are a punchline. Oracle Cloud may not be used much amongst the startups or app/web dev crowd here on HN, but other parts of large enterprises are indeed eating up Oracle Cloud just as they ate up Oracle on-prem apps in past years.
FWIW I was excited about this in 6.0 but never actually got it to work with Hyper-V. It may be a hardware issue on my side (my CPU is ~6 years old and doesn’t support some VM features) but I’ve also seen a lot of other people say that 6.0 changed nothing for them in regards to Hyper-V compatibility.
Your original comment was responding to “create, manage virtual environments(using venv) apart from managing requirements file(Pipfile) and an npm like locking mechanism, dependency graphs, dev dependencies and more.” and saying that this is overly complicated. Yet every single one of the listed languages has package management tools that do all of these things.
If you think any of the listed examples have “simple” package management tools, I question how deeply you have used any of them. NPM has ~60 commands and hundreds of subcommands each with multiple option flags, and probably hundreds more config options. Gem/Bundle is similar, etc.
If anything, Python is trying to catch up in how complex it’s package managers can be.
Are there any other programming languages whose package-management comes close to this level of intricacy and complexity?
I think many do. Ruby, Node, Erlang/Elixir, Java, Go, Rust, dotnet, C... I’m having trouble thinking of a modern language that doesn’t have such package management mechanisms.
For many people doing anything more than writing one-off scripts, and especially for anyone who collaborates with others or shares their code, package management is so much more than just “this project needs package X”.
Indeed, this has always rubbed me the wrong way. As another commenter mentioned, there are supply & demand issues at play. However, even considering that, there is still a widely held attitude amongst companies that you should feel grateful that they are "letting you" work remote, and that it is a benefit, and that remote working is something that will be offered to you in lieu of the salary you are owed.
In fact, it should be the opposite. Companies are saving money by not having to spend money on office space and overhead. Why then should I not be getting a higher salary?
Most of the benefit to me is the lack of routine.
Wow, this is literally the exact reason I loathe remote working! I've been working remotely for almost 5 years now and I'm about to jump ship at my current job specifically so I can find a job that has a physical office to go to. I find that the lack of a routine causes a significant increase in stress in my life. It's an actual dream of mine to go back to a 'normal' job where I go into an office and sit at a normal desk with a normal work schedule, and then can just go home or to the gym at 6pm and enjoy my non-work life.
It isn't extremely common to do so, but the most basic example I can give is incidentals at a hotel. The hotel room and some incidentals are reimbursed by the company, but other incidentals are not (ie some consulting clients do not allow the reimbursement of alcohol). It's typically easier to just put it all on the corporate card and mark some of the transactions as reimbursable and some of them as personal than it is to finagle a way to settle the hotel bill with multiple credit cards.
There's also the one-off situation where I really needed a new pair of pants while traveling (my only clean pair of business-appropriate pants split down the middle) and for some reason the only card I had on me was my corporate card. Obviously extremely rare, but I've heard of similar situation (but with a belt) happening to another colleague.