tidepod12

By getting that shiny Chase sign up bonus, your are directly contributing to the firing of front line customer service workers.

That's not what "directly" means.

Lots of false equivalence here.

What cash back do you get on your credit card? 2.625%? High yield savings account? Money market fund? 4.6%?

None of these actions by me directly result in the loss of livelihood or uprooting of lives of other people.

If you told me that by moving my money to a high yield savings account, it would result in my friends or family members losing their jobs, you bet your ass I wouldn't do it, "personal profit" be damned, and that isn't a hard decision to make in the slightest.

Twitch's leader are making a conscious decision: profits over people.

Wow. After reading about the FB tracking I was wary about Backblaze but teetering on the edge of willing to give it a pass if they fixed it. But after reading brianwski's comments in that thread, the arrogance and unprofessionalism (especially in his last comment) just completely turned me off. That attitude goes beyond a technical fuckup or bad marketing move. I'm moving my backups out of Backblaze today and won't be looking back.

First year analysts at a bank like GS make more like $100-150k, including bonuses. That's a lot for a fresh grad, but is a far cry from $300k.

A link to the 11-slide deck: https://imgur.com/a/v0ckTUm

Some very serious survey results in there. It's apparently a very small sample size (13 first years), but life sounds like absolute hell for those 13.

Being a public utility or not has nothing to do with commoditization. You keep saying you're against commoditization but then make arguments in favor of it.

In fact, commoditization of healthcare is probably one of the best steps towards making it a public utility. So if that's what you want, then you probably do want healthcare to be commoditized.

There are definitely parts of healthcare that are unreasonable to expect to be commoditized. A heart transplant or brain surgery are probably things where centers specialized in those areas will be higher quality.

But for more common things like an annual wellness exam, or blood tests, mending a broken arm, treating the flu, or even doing surgery on a burst appendix, those are things that I think can reasonable be commoditized across any healthcare providers.

Exactly, which is why you want it to be a commodity, so that there isn't even the need to do something like shop around. If healthcare was a commodity, you just go to the nearest hospital and can rest assured that you're getting the same care you would get anywhere else.

I think you're misunderstanding the word "commodity". If healthcare were commoditized, then "what's the closest ER" would be the only thing that matters. You are actually advocating for commoditization.

Water, for example, is a commodity. It doesn't matter where you get it, because water from one tap is mostly indistinguishable to water from a different tap. When you need water, you simply just go to the closest tap and you can be happy that you're getting the same quality water as anywhere else. That's exactly what you want with healthcare, too.

I’m sure they know though and this is a deliberate obfuscation technique, a dark pattern by marketing people.

I don't think so. AWS is still very much in "we want to get as many people onto our platform as possible" mode, not "milk every cent possible out of existing customers" mode (yet). AWS account managers and solutions architects will go to great lengths to help you reduce your costs (and are actually incentivized to do so), because making you happy with AWS and recommend it to others is their top priority above all else. The docs may be confusing, but if you ever have any interaction with their enterprise account teams, you'll find that obfuscation could not be farther from their intentions.

The fact that S3 pricing isn't simple is just an unfortunate side effect of market segmentation taken to an extreme. And in some ways, it's a good thing. The current pricing structure allows people that have different use cases to only pay for what they need: someone using S3 for storage but not making a lot of requests will only pay for storage, while someone using S3 to store relatively little but accessing it often will only pay for accessing it, etc. If pricing were to be simplified, you would lose that ability to segment, which would be a huge loss.

I do think there is room for something like a Lightsail version of S3, where you just pay a flat fee per month for a certain GB and bandwidth allocation. But I think that should be a separate product or S3 storage class, not replace the current pricing.

This title is incorrect. ERCOT is not the same thing as the PUC, and the PUC Chairman is the person who is the focus of the article.

If at any point I see any evidence or warning that the products I purchase from Amazon cause any material amount of risk to my person or property, I'll reevaluate. In fact, there definitely are some things that I prefer to buy outside of Amazon for such reasons, like climbing gear or medicine.

But as for stuff like chargers, I've had more experience that the easily-frayed genuine Apple Lightning cables, or the classic exploding Samsung phones, are more of an electrical fire risk than anything I've bought from Amazon, counterfeit or not.

This is probably true, but such a laughably small number of people use Workmail that I doubt it has any material difference to AWS's reported numbers, so while they might not reflect the true AWS marketshare sans-Workmail, it's probably still in the same ballpark. The reason people bring it up in regards to Azure is because it does likely artificially inflate Azure's reported numbers a material amount and makes them harder to trust.

Like I said, if any of the chargers or cords I have received from Amazon are counterfeit, they're good enough counterfeits that I don't care. My iPhone, iPad, and MBP all charge just fine, still have perfectly fine working batteries, have never had any issues with the electronics, and nothing has caught on fire after years of use. The headphones I've bought from Amazon sound great and have given me no issues. The lightbulbs I bought from Amazon light up my room just fine and last a long time. The SSD I bought is blazing fast and has plenty of space (confirmed by multiple diagnostic checks). The clothes I have bought are comfortable and fit well... And if any of these things weren't true, I am confident it would take me extremely minimal effort to return the item to Amazon and buy a replacement.

Obviously counterfeiting is a problem and in an ideal world there would be no counterfeiting at all, but I remain unconvinced that it's something I have to worry about materially affecting my experience as a customer buying stuff from Amazon.

I see the commingling thing brought up in every thread like this, but I've never personally, nor has anyone I know IRL, received anything from Amazon that are even suspect of being counterfeit. If they are counterfeit, then they are such high quality counterfeits that I'm not sure I even care.

It's obviously a problem to some extent, but I can't help but think news articles like that blow it way out of proportion.

As for returns, I've notice the opposite: it takes me considerably less time and effort to return an Amazon purchase than, for example, a Target purchase. I actually did both this weekend: for Amazon, I walked into a UPS store, handed them the unpackaged product, they scanned a barcode from my Amazon app, and I walked out. The whole thing took no more than 30 seconds. At Target, I had to wait in a line for 20 minutes at the Returns counter, had to show them the receipt, also had to show them the card I used to purchase, and then the system wasn't refunding the correct amount so a manager had to be called over and re-do the entire process with some sort of override. The entire process took, at minimum, 30 minutes.

I hate Amazon's bullshit union tactics like in the OP, but they are still the undisputed king when it comes to overall shopping experience, IMO. And it's not necessarily because Amazon is actually great, it's more because the other companies are still really far behind.

There are legitimate use cases for technology like facial recognition, and I see nothing wrong with using it in that way. Of course society should be cautious about unwarranted uses of such technology. But decrying all uses of it, even legitimate ones, because of a hypothetical "what if someone in the future uses facial recognition to start another holocaust?" is just a slippery slope fallacy.

I don't really see how selling facial recognition tech is "rather creepy". Facial recognition has legitimate uses, and the CIA/FBI using it to track criminals seems to be a legitimate use case to me. The article you linked seems to be making a hypothetical leap to "well what if they choose to use it nefariously in the future??" And to their credit, Amazon at least seems to be interested in trying to limit its use to good causes: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-fa...

And of course, Microsoft, Google, and others have their own facial recognition software and they all have large contracts with government entities, too. This article mentions the CIA using AWS, but the CIA also has multi-billion dollar contracts with GCP, Azure, and even IBM and Oracle: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cia-awards-multib...

I have no idea who you're addressing. If it's me, that's quite a nice strawman you've built. Next time perhaps try to actually address the words written in my comment rather than inventing some boogeyman that nobody brought up except you.

Here, I'll demonstrate:

high-speed Internet access for the entire planet

Musk himself has said that only a tiny, tiny fraction of the world will ever be able to use Starlink. It is not anywhere close to "internet access for the entire planet", and certainly isn't providing any more internet access than is already provided by existing satellite internet providers.

or professional astronomers not being able to see into space as easily as they did 20 years ago?

In case you weren't aware, astronomy is responsible for some of the most significant scientific advancements since for literally millennia. If you really want an answer to your questions, it's this: professional astronomers being prevented from doing research is significantly more of a negative impact to humanity's advancement than the positive impact from 0.001% of the world having access to lower ping internet. It's not even close.

or... Or... OR... Launching massive powerful telescopes into space using SpaceX rockets for professional astronomers to use?

Even with something the size of Starship, it's physically impossible to launch anything even remotely close to the size of telescopes needed by professional astronomers.

It would only take blowing up one satellite to let the world know they're serious about it, at which point SpaceX would almost certainly be forced to comply with China's demands, if only because SpaceX would have to acknowledge that the debris from even a handful of destroyed satellites would cause serious danger to the operations of the rest of the constellation.

A couple points:

1) 1200 is a small percentage of the tens of thousands of satellites that the full system, plus the other similar systems will eventually consist of.

2) Being able to go outside and point out a satellite has absolutely no relevance on the satellite's impact on professional astronomy.

3) It did not "seem to have worked". SpaceX experimented with reducing the reflectivity of their satellites, but only some satellites have that reduced reflectivity, and astronomers found them to be only marginally better.

Yea, but I also think it's more complicated than that. I would think that if you already work for a FAANG or other well-respected tech company, that would de facto serve as your "professional certification" and help avoid these ridiculous interview processes. If you work at Google as a SWE, then you've already passed a pretty high bar to become a SWE and when you apply somewhere else, ideally they would see you can pass that bar and not ask you to leetcode your way over the bar again. But IME, that's not the case. I know some FAANGs that, even when doing an internal transfer within the company, still require you to go through the full leetcode interview process.

There seems to be some kind of inherent or cultural distrust amongst tech interviewing, where nobody trusts that anyone has tech skills unless they personally verify it. I don't think a professional exam/certification would solve this distrust.

A significant portion of developers (and especially developers on this website) have experience with, or desire experience with, these FAANGs and SV companies, and these posts are relevant to them. If you feel like you aren't the target audience, then you are welcome to ignore the post and click on something else. But it's a bit absurd to condescend others just because they have different experiences than you.

And with that said, you too should care, because I guarantee it's only a matter of time before those "hum-drum industries" take a look at the way SV does things and says "hey, we should do that too". This is already happening in many places. Your company could be next. You should be interested, if only to learn to spot the warning signs and nip it in the bud when you can.

My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. Consulting interviews are almost all behavioral, and sometimes require a short case presentation, but even the case rarely requires days and days worth of preparation. Yes, there are some who do prepare endlessly (like "Cracking the Case Interview"), but I know far fewer people who go that route and even those that do still spend only a fraction of the time on it compared to leetcoders.

The mindset during consulting recruiting seems to be more of "we want to make sure you have a decent base level of knowledge and problem solving skills, but if you don't know how to code/make a PPT/whatever, that's fine, because we can teach you that stuff". Big tech recruiting seems to be the opposite: even when big tech companies claim "you don't need to know everything, because we'll teach you", they still require you to jump through these leetcode-style hoops to prove your skills.

And this is echoed beyond the hiring process too, in my experience. Consulting companies hire smart people and want to keep them for a long time, so they invest a lot of money into training those people and attempting to keep attrition down. FAANG on the other hand seems to care less about attrition (sometimes even embracing it, eg Amazon) and wants to hire people that require minimal training, and thus wants people that have immediately demonstrable knowledge so they can be immediately productive.

He promotes conspiracy theories, is transphobic, put all of his workers at risk by ignoring (and actively advocating against) COVID safety protocols at his factories, is notorious for promoting a hostile work environment and overworking employees for poor pay...

You can avoid having to deal with a fiat bank going insolvent by personally managing your money as cash stored under your mattress, too. But there are plenty of reasons you wouldn't want to do that.

Yea, because no Bitcoin exchange or online wallet service has ever gone bankrupt, been hacked, and/or had employees disappear with everyone's money, leaving all of their customers high and dry. Nope, that's never happened...

The latter feels like a coherent setup with projects and IAM. AWS always has a surprisingly amount of work around org accounts and IAM setups.

AWS Organizations is atrocious compared to GCP projects. I truly do not understand how/why AWS is doubling down on the awful user experience of Organizations, cross-account access, creating multiple accounts, etc. It's truly the antithesis of customer obsession and yet they show no signs of moving away from that model. And not only is the user experience bad, it also just feels hacky. AWS Organizations and Control Tower feel like poorly applied band-aids rather than real solutions.

I actually prefer AWS to GCP in most respects, but the AWS Organizations shitshow is something I can't personally get over.

Yea, if you search for a term that is related to people having poor experiences at Amazon, on a website that is primarily only used by people who are unhappy with their jobs, of course you're going to find posts from people having poor experiences at Amazon. Duh. If I search "microsoft sucks" on blind I get a bunch of posts about how working at Microsoft sucks. If I do a Google search for "working at Google sucks", what are all of the top results? It's a bunch of articles about how working at Google sucks. If you search for bad reviews about a company, you are going to find bad reviews about a company. That's how search works. It's confirmation bias.

I can't figure out why you're putting so much stock into that site. It's a random Google Sites page that looks like it took about an hour to set up. In the past 1.5 months, it's gotten a total of 5 submissions. 5 submissions from a company of over a million employees. And of those 5 submissions, 2-3 are from people who do not even work at the company. One of the submissions literally starts with "I've never worked at the company", and one of the others is a NIMBY upset that Amazon is building a warehouse in their town.

If you're telling me that in 1.5 months, a company of 1+ million people only generated two complaints from employees, then that does not at all support the point you are making that Amazon is terrible to work for. That is an astonishingly low complaint rate.

Does anything like the above exist for any other company? Not that I can find.

Have you never heard of glassdoor? Blind? There are plenty of sites that have literally hundreds of times more complaints against tech companies than what is shown in the site you linked.

The major Cloudflare products (namely the CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, DNS management, and even serverless workers) are already replicated in AWS, GCP, and Azure. AFAIK the main thing that draws people to Cloudflare instead is "it's easier to use than bloated AWS/etc." And while that might be a completely valid value proposition, I'm not sure if it's a long term winner, especially as more and more companies migrate to the big 3 cloud providers.

It reminds me a lot of Dropbox and the situation where for years Dropbox's value proposition was "yea OneDrive and iCloud provide the same service, but people like Dropbox because it is independent, unbloated, and simpler to use". But over time that's become less true, and as more and more companies move to using O365, they end up getting OneDrive as part of the deal anyway. And once you're already working in an environment with OneDrive, why continue using Dropbox?