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I was at the receiving end of this. Not at Amazon but at another similar Silicon Valley tech company. When I was hired I thought it was a great opportunity and moved my family to SV. First day I go in, I realized that just about couple of months before my hire date about half the team was laid off.

A few months in there were lots of red flags — 1. the director who is above my manager used to do code reviews and not my manager. He used to point out minor things (think linting or similar) such but was did not point out any major flaws in the code (I also reviewed others code) 2. Zero transparency- the director used to say he is going to give hints about professional development and used to ask random questions such as if I would be ok to move to another location etc - this was his prompting not mine. Hint based leadership leads to lots of water cooler talk among employees about what is going on.

About 8 months in, my entire team was laid off and my manager already about a month before that. It turns out I was only hired as a scapegoat to replace the negative morale in the team, people would start to leave because of previous layoffs so the director hired me so that he could tell others - ‘See, we are hiring right now’. In reality he had a 2 year plan of what he wanted to do.

I don’t mind layoffs I can find a job quickly but the biggest problems are for my family who I have had to relocate. After this I sweared I was never to work in SV again.

I now work on wall street, the team I work with is far more transparent and my manager is great.

Working with graphs, I realized its hard to generate dynamic ones and you inevitably end up with domain specific layouts. I guess thats the nature of graph drawing algorithms, its usually specific to the problem.

Thanks for the code, taking at look at that.

Thanks for that, will try out graphviz. I was doing some custom implementation for minimizing edge crossings and it seems to work fine for me but thats mostly for 2-layered graphs. If I am to expand to multi-layer graphs, its going to be fairly more complicated to figure out how to do that and I dont know if it will work well.

Graphviz seems to be great for getting you a mostly-useful auto layout majority of the time.

I have a requirement to be able to mix fixed-positioned nodes along with dynamically changing nodes, I havent used graphviz to know if it could do that. A library like cytoscape works ok or maybe d3 (I am still evaluating these)

Honestly coming into this, I thought graph drawing would be fairly easy and I could look up online for examples - but it seems to be quite opposite, its really complicated to get graphs that are both dynamically generated with the nodes positioned at the same place in case there are similar nodes

Can I ask - how did you find working with graphviz. Was this your first time working with it, how long did it take you to figure out how to place things and draw?

I am working with drawing graphs at the moment and evaluating what library to use, its coincidentally nice to see what you built but it also seems like it was thoughtfully laid out (less edge crossings etc). I am trying to do something more dynamic so it may not be as applicable for me.

I am looking at your code as well, thanks for providing that

I agree with your overall message but in this case I would like to point out one thing - a lot of fad diets were first adopted by people and then researched to see if they are helpful where as Fodmap has been specifically researched for the gut and only after it has been shown to be helpful, its now being recommended by doctors.

Obviously you should talk to your doctor before adopting the diet. It may not provide all of the nutrients that your body needs and its normally only recommended for 3 to ~6 months. Its may also not work well for some variants of IBS / IBD / other gut issues and may even be a detriment - so talk to your doctor.

Personally its been helpful for me. A lot of people also may not need to do fodmap and instead just do a elimination diet. For example you may not know it but may be suffering from lactose intolerance or gluten intolerance and so on. Probably easier to try that first as well.

I suffer from IBS as well and out of all the things that flares up my IBS, stress is a prominent one. Reading research papers, its been seen that gut biome changes based on stress - look up gut-brain connection, theres been a few books written about it as well.

Its a fairly new thing - from about 15 years back. Nowadays one of the treatments that a gastroenterologist could recommend if they have exhausted everything else is low dose anti-depressant.

Key is to identify what is causing stress and treat that

Thanks, yes I have been following fodmap for years now and reduced my gluten intake as well and that has helped a bit. Although its only recommended for 3 to 6 months.

I have also slowly been introducing foods I have been avoiding back and so far I have been able to tolerate them well

As someone with IBS, totally agree with you. I wish the research would trickle down into actual treatments. I have started following a lot of research about gut etc but very little of it leads to something that can mass consumed.

I spent thousands of dollars on trying out medications, tests, visiting a number of highly trained doctors etc, nothing came up in tests and at the end almost all doctors threw their hands up and categorized my gut issues as IBS which is just a catchAll term for which there is no specific treatment other than trying out a number of things.

Thanks for that. Gives a lot more perspective. Is it usually high maintenance to maintain the farm i.e. do you have people taking care of it - how hands on do you have to be for that.

I would expect GP to be a lot more involved and not less as the post title suggests but I was curious.

If you don't mind, what do you produce on your farm and how many do you hire. It seems like you would need a high output yield to generate millions or have a pretty large farm. Also how do you sell your produce/product? Direct to consumers? Through retail?

Also curious to know how you came to doing this. Did you see it as an opportunity or just went into it through family

Yes and FDA started restricted the amount anyone can buy because some people started abusing it to the extreme. Now to get a 16mg dose, you would probably need a prescription

Starting at 40mg - thats sounds really high. I wonder whats the effect on the gut. Doesnt the food get backed up a lot which leads really really bad constipation or is that not as pronounced.

Yea atleast from personal experience with n=1, I think it does affect cognition and honestly I am glad it works that way and I discovered it lol. On other days when IBS is in full effect, I dread doing any work and have zero focus.

Wow, cant imagine being in your situation. I would say try to ease yourself into lowering your dose slowly. I am not sure if its even possible with your situation but with IBS I try to control everything else including stress, food and sleep. I take loperamide if those dont work and it allows me to reset myself into being normal for sometime, that way I can retry. I try to go as long as I can without one and see if I can push myself. But I dont get too far due to work stress anyway.

Honestly the whole thing about people abusing it and FDA clamping down works against normal people who are genuinely using it.

BNF and Department of Health (England) don't describe addiction to loperamide, but do describe its use as an adjunctive treatment for people trying to come off opioids, which suggests it's not that problematic

As someone who suffers from IBS and takes loperamide regularly, while its not necessarily an addiction, I see forums of people (especially on /r/ibs) saying that it causes a dependency. I saw posts where people kept upping the dose until it got to a point where it doesnt work anymore and you would have to increasingly take larger amounts to have the same effect. Heck some take as many as 3 after every meal. I cant imagine doing that.

I try to avoid doing this and luckily I can get away with one every few days but I dread the day I have to be in that situation.

One thing I noticed is that - it gives me incredible mental boost a day after taking it. It just makes me feel normal and that to me is a 'boost'.

Could you suggest resources (books, articles, videos, moocs or others) to learn good database design. I am picking up skills about sql but want to better understand and learn about databases. As someone who doesnt have that background, a lot of the times I am just googling for stuff and just trying out bits and pieces.

As someone who only suffers from IBS, I have had good results from elimination and low fodmap diet. However stress and anxiety also have a pretty big and equal effect as diet. Both go together for me and even if one of them messes up it, I get a flare up kind of reaction.

Good point about dual intent. One thing though I think it’s bit easier to renew and you can also keep renewing it without any time limit.

Agree with you completely. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to come up with a Canadian or UK like points based system.

Thanks. With the way it’s phrased as ‘case by case‘ basis - I think even if it’s technically allowed, they may end up rejecting on broad terms.

Anyways I am already packing my bags and will be out of the country in a few days when I am able to find a flight.

It’s less than what you may think it is. It also highly depends on your lawyer, I know a couple of people who you may think may not qualify but their lawyers ended up writing a lot of stuff (not made up obviously, just lawyer like language that drags on) and they ended up getting the visa. Out of those one of them got an rfe but they still pursued on and qualified. EB1 on the other hand is far harder.

If they have a number or publications as you say, they may be eligible to apply for O-1 visa. I know a couple of people who received it and (in my opinion) got it for less than what you may think of as good technical merit

Does this apply to H1B ‘transfers’? I know that it’s not officially called a transfer so was wondering if that be counted as a new application and so will be rejected.

Only slightly related but a couple of years back I got an alexa as a gift. When you open the alexa app, they had the option to add list of todos as a reminder. The first thing I did is to say something like - Alexa, add a reminder to get milk and eggs and paper. The app literally added a single item like this - milkANDeggsANDpaper.

After that I facepalmed myself and turned it off.

I cant speak for other diets but I follow low fodmap diet as I suffer from IBS. I always assumed that I was prescribed that diet to influence the gut bacteria. I mean the bacteria ferment on high fodmap foods and bloat and distend your stomach.

Talking about low fodmap specifically I wouldnt call it fad as it has been and is being researched and has shown to be effective to help with IBS, maybe not so much for other conditions.

Personally I have found it helpful in reducing the symptoms that I have.

From my perspective as someone who suffers from IBS I understand why there is debate about seeing gastroenterologist & dietician vs a naturopath.

From what I have read, I think the reality is that gut based science including microbiome research is an emerging field with a lot of research in flux and it may be years before we fully understand everything. Because of this and just like deep learning you see a number of papers coming out almost everyday about diet, microbiome, brain-gut interaction, probiotics, prebiotics etc. Out of these a lot of the research needs to be backed up and there is just not enough yet to fully show a specific plan.

Unfortunately a number of gastroenterologists dont seem to keep up with research and I have even had one doctor tell me that everything is in my head. Things like these make you lose confidence in doctors and its understandable why some people turn to naturopaths even though a lot of it is quackery. I recommend working with a good gastroenterologist and a dietician to personalize your diet.

For IBS related personally I recommend following research coming out of Monash university.

I also recommend books Mind-Gut interaction by Emeran Mayer and The Good Gut by the Sonnenburgs

Yes there are not a lot of jobs because the airline sector doesn't have much growth in the US. Compare that with the the economies of developing countries, they are growing rapidly. Another example from India is Indigo (which is a major domestic airline) recently ordered close to 200 A320 airplanes which a massive bet on growth.

I would think the same thing will happen to the tech sector in the longer term where the demand and growth will go to Asia.

I actually think this will result in accelerating India's growth in the tech sector. There might be slight downturn in the shorter term for the services sector but this will be compensated by the product companies.

Once the above happens, I actually think it will have a net negative effect for the US tech sector. Yes you can still find the best engineers to come to the US, however once salaries start rising in the developing countries, people will not want to flock to the US.

A clear example is the aviation sector. Pilots from the developed countries flock to fly for the airlines in the Middle east and Asia. Look at Emirates, Etihad, Air Asia etc. Many of them are expat pilots.

Does anyone know if you could apply for permanent residency while on this visa?

One of the problems with the highest bidder approach its going to favor senior devs. This is good thing but you also have to look at graduates who have come to the US to study and may not be able to earn that much immediately but are just as likely to earn a lot more in a few years. If the ruling forces them to move them, then it will result in draining the talent.