nemtaro

I'm also surprised that many supposedly educated people on HackerNews don't seem to know these things.

Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent decades ago.

Read, you fools!

Bullshit.

Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions are racists, and their decision to put the lives of 800,000 people at risk is indeed racist.

You can call it "immigration policy" if it makes you feel better.

Have you been asleep this past week?

The courts already ruled to put a stop to this executive order. Who do you think is supposed to enforce the ruling of the courts?

I'm afraid that is likely an underestimated number of affected people/lives because it does not include the number of people with valid, legal visas who are refused boarding by airlines across the world. Those people never make it to the US to have their visas revoked.

About time for more people to stand up to Trump and his idiotic executive orders.

The YCs and large companies can easily move their investments and offices to Canada and hire the world's best and brightest there.

I'll give you the often conservative advice:

Tough luck? pull yourself up by your own boot straps! Go to school. Go back to school. Work hard, and interview with Google/Amazon/Microsoft again.

And stop perpetuating the idea that you are at a disadvantage because of immigrants and refugees. If you end up with a job at Apple or eBay or Expedia btw, remember that your livelihood was made possible because of the hard work of immigrants and refugees.

Perhaps this explains why:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-joint-res...

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperit...

> The intent of the H1-B visa law is clear: It is meant only for STEM workers when there is no American to fill the role. ___That's it. Period.___

Are you Sean Spicer? ;)

I'm sure he did say that ;) but consider that he was not entirely truthful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243

I appreciate your reply, and it's certainly true that not all teams or managers are bad at Amazon.

I'd suggest that you're on a lucky on-call rotation, and seem to have a good manager!

If I were still there, I'd say get on VPN, head over to tt.amazon.com and see the stats of other teams' on-call rotations, and estimate how many of their pages are outside business hours ;)

So, let's see...

1. You check your email aggressively during your time off.

2. You think that 50 hours a week is normal.

3. You think 1/8 weeks of _unpaid_ on-call is reasonable.

How many sev-2s and sev-3s do you get during your one week on-call? If more than 10/week, can you think about how many are outside of business hours?

Read cracking the coding interview and solve every single problem in it.

Then start with the leetcode.com problems and solve every single one.

Hen do 5 practice interviews with companies that you don't care about.

That's all. It's simple but it takes determination and time to do.

That's a very good question! I should have left after 3 years. I did not know any better. Specially when it came to compensation, I only knew about my promised stocks' grown value, and not what other companies would have offered me.

Year 1: learning, excitement, keen to prove myself, also economy had just crashed

Year 2: under pressure, but feeling ownership and hopeful that we would "fix our problems"

Year 3: jaded, but waiting for the growing stock to vest (Amazon's RSUs start vesting in the 3rd year)

Year 4: over-stressed, extremely unhappy

Year 5: detached, not really working, interviews, exit.

All of the friends whom I helped, and myself included have transferred from Amazon to Facebook/Google/Apple located in Seattle.

I went from ~$150 total comp to ~$260 after a couple of rounds of negotiations with the companies who gave me offers. This was a couple of years ago, and I was happy to see another friend who left Amazon for Google get offered over $300k recently at the same SDE II level.

If you've been at Amazon for 11 years, your stock has grown from $40 to $500. I can see why you stick around in addition to the other positives that you mentioned...

I've been at Google for a few years now in Seattle, and know of exactly 1 person who left Google to go back to Amazon for a title boost. In contrast, I know dozens of SDEs who have been coming from Amazon to Google.

Amazon does _not_ pay as well as Google/FB/Apple/Twitter/Netflix/LinkedIn/Salesforce/etc.

I'm so glad that this is getting more visibility. I spent 5 long years at Amazon Web Services from 2008 - 2013 as a Software Development Engineer, and was at some point promoted to SDE II ;)

It's a shark eat shark environment. I never cried, but I saw others (specially female colleagues) do. After 2 years of waking up in the middle of the night for bullshit on-call pages (wack-a-mole with production issues) and increasingly heavier deadlines, I developed stress related medical issues. That was a wake up call for me, and as soon as I realized the shit place that I was in, I started showing up at the office detached, practicing interview questions and doing phone screen interviews from work. I eventually got offers from Facebook/Google, and moved on. It was only then that I realize I was actually paid at the 50th percentile for my position's level and experience all along.

Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises.

I get Amazon recruiters contacting me all the time, and I'm always nice to them because I know the shit environment they're stuck in. Though in the back of my mind I'm thinking "there's no way in hell I'd ever go back"

Fuck Jeff, fuck Amazon, fuck AWS, and fuck their leadership principles.

Thanks for clarifying this.

As someone who actually worked at Amazon for a few long years, I'm always skeptical of such seemingly positive news, and often think "hmm, could this be another marketing trick to influence people's perception of Amazon rather than actually changing anything", and %90 of the time I'm right :)

Here's how their typical financial offer is structured for new software engineers:

1st year: signing bonus + relocation bonus + 5% of stock grant

2nd year: signing bonus + 15% stock grant

3rd year: 40% stock grant

4th year: 40% stock grant

If you quit within the first year, you have to give the relocation and signing bonus back. That's much much more than $1k. So there's a strong financial incentive / golden handcuffs to keep you there for at least 1-2 years, even if you are unhappy!

After the 2nd year, the financial incentive of staying is still there in form of the large stock grant (which has grown due to their stock price rising) that you've been promised and waiting on for a long time.

I can see someone rationally and happily taking the incentive after the third or fourth years and quit (i.e. after they've done damage to the work environment as an unhappy/unmotivated employee, and no longer have to give a fortune back to the company)... but before then, I doubt it'll change the behavior of any currently employed, overworked, over-paged, under-paid, under-appreciated software engineers.

Who this policy might affect though is future hires, and their perception of Amazon. People who have a choice between offers from MS and Amazon for example. They might consider this an interesting policy and assume that it would have improved employee morale at Amazon even though it's common knowledge that Amazon has terrible work life balance, etc.

I should also note that the Zappos policy makes a lot of sense to me, but this is very different from that, as is the employee culture of Zappos from Amazon.

BRAVO! I was just going to say the same thing...

My interest in Google+ is the same interest I had in facebook years ago: some site I upload and share my personal photos with people I choose.

Now, I see that: 1. my photos upload automatically from my android to Google+, so I never have to worry about accidentally losing them. (and yes, you can set FB up to do that too)

2. my photos look better on Google+ because it doesn't squeeze the quality out of them like FB does. (and yes, you can somehow get FB to improve that too, but I never even bothered to looked)

3. I can edit my photos right in the browser.

4. It shows me many different auto-awesome features, and allows me to stitch photos and clips into movies in seconds...

5. I don't have to worry about friends I add tomorrow, or next year, seeing photos I shared yesterday!!! If you've had multiple x-girlfriends, as I imagine most folks on HN have... that could be a constant problem.

Those features didn't all come up over night, but somewhere along the line I stopped using FB and started putting photos on Google+

Don't you have to use the "iTunes store" to install apps on iDevices remotely?

Also, as an example use case, how else do you put music on your iDevices? I'm under the impression that you have to use iTunes.

I'm not convinced. While most people might have spent enough money on their iOS apps to feel this way, I doubt that buying the same apps (if their free alternatives don't exist) on Android would rack up more than a few tens of dollars.

There are things that iPhone and Apple products still do better than their Android counterparts. For example, you still can't do screen mirroring from your android device to a Chromecast. Meanwhile, AppleTV works like a charm.

But, when it comes to SmartPhones independently, I'm of the opinion that marketing is the only thing keeping iPhone alive. The list of things you get for free with Android that you can't get with the iPhone even if you paid for them are growing longer and longer... Off the top of my head, here are things I've heard from friends who recently switched:

Woa, how did I ever go without Widgets!

Swyping is supported by default, _and_ I can change the default keyboard?!

I can charge my phone with any USB cable, _and_ upgrade my battery?!

You don't _have_ to use iTunes for everything?! ...