The culture changed. When I first worked there, I was encouraged to take calculated risks. When I did my second tour of duty, people were deathly afraid of bringing down services. It has been a while since my second tour of duty, but I don't think it's back to "Amazon is a place where builders can build".
Somewhat inevitable for any company as they get larger. Easy to move fast and break things when you have 1 user and no revenue. Very different story when much of US commerce runs you on.
For folks who came of age in the late 00's, seeing companies once thought of as disruptors and innovators become the old stalwarts post-pandemic/ZIRP has been quite an experience.
Maybe those who have been around longer have seen this before, but its the first time for me.
If you bring something down in a real way, you can forget about someone trusting you with a big project in the future. You basically need to switch orgs
Nah, I used to work for defense contractors, and worked with ex-military people, so...
Anyway, I actually loved my first time at AWS. Which is why I went back. My second stint wasn't too bad, but I probably wouldn't go back, unless they offered me a lot more than what I get paid, but that is unlikely.
I have seen one promo docket get rejected for doing work that is not complex enough... I thought the problem was challenging, and the simple solution brilliant, but the tech assessor disagreed. I mean once you see there is a simple solution to a problem, it looks like the problem is simple...
I had a job interview like this recently: "what's the most technically complex problem you've ever worked on?"
The stuff I'm proudest of solved a problem and made money but it wasn't complicated for the sake of being complicated. It's like asking a mechanical engineer "what's the thing you've designed with the most parts"
I think this could still be a very useful question for an interviewer. If I were hiring for a position working on a complex system, I would want to know what level of complexity a prospect was comfortable dealing with.
I was once very unpopular with a team of developers when I pointed out a complete solution to what they had decided was an "interesting" problem - my solution didn't involve any code being written.
I suppose it depends on what you are interviewing for but questions like that I assume are asked more to see how you answer than the specifics of what you say.
Most web jobs are not technically complex. They use standard software stacks in standard ways. If they didn't, average developers (or LLMs) would not be able to write code for them.
Yeah, I think this. I've asked this in interviews before, and it's less about who has done the most complicated thing and more about the candidate's ability to a) identify complexity, and b) avoid unnecessary complexity.
I.e. a complicated but required system is fine (I had to implement a consensus algorithm for a good reason).
A complicated but unrequired system is bad (I built a docs platform for us that requires a 30-step build process, but yeah, MkDocs would do the same thing.
I really like it when people can pick out hidden complexity, though. "DNS" or "network routing" or "Kubernetes" or etc are great answers to me, assuming they've done something meaningful with them. The value is self-evident, and they're almost certainly more complex than anything most of us have worked on. I think there's a lot of value to being able to pick out that a task was simple because of leveraging something complex.
As someone whose employer uses a broker that doesn't do cost basis correctly for RSUs, I was very surprised TurboTax was able to import the supplement and adjust it correctly for me.
Even without RSUs, I usually have hundreds of transactions across multiple brokers.
> whose employer uses a broker that doesn't do cost basis correctly for RSUs, I was very surprised TurboTax was able to import the supplement and adjust it correctly for me.
Approximately zero brokers do this, because RSU are still noncovered shares.
> Even without RSUs, I usually have hundreds of transactions across multiple brokers.
As a corollary, "hundreds of transactions" of covered shares collapsed into one summary line.
RSU is a pain though to enter. Technically you can enter a summary line and send in a 1099 to the IRS (last year was the first year that could be done electronically, so, fingers crossed it actually works correctly).
Reported to you, of reported to the IRS? As in if you just push through without a 8949 does the IRS come after you with a CP-2000 a few years later with a letter assuming 0 cost basis? Or does the IRS already have correct numbers?
Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...
> The next step the agency is considering is using fiberglass composite instead of aluminum to construct guard rails “to remove the value to the thieves.”
Near my home in the pacific northwest region of the US, I saw at a construction site a big spool (~1m diameter, 1+ meter tall) of cable with "Fiber, NOT copper" spray painted on its side. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be to have a project like that delayed because some junkies stole a few hundred pounds of fiber optic cable, just to discard it when they realized that it wasn't something they could easily fence.
Plenty of stories about yahoos hitching their pickup to a telephone repeater box around where I live to pull the copper cable only to find it's fibre. You can't beat stupid.
Worked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s. I worked on exactly one Ada project. The rest were C/C++. I presume the shift away from Ada has accelerated if anythinng.
Thank you for sharing this! I'd love to know more about what led them to develop their own CPU, and what the instruction set looks like. It looks like AdaCore actually merged their support for VISIUMCore into upstream GCC.
The slides state it features SEU detection/correction, which is pretty interesting.
One interesting project is Saab Gripen jet fighter, whose entire software stack (other than software that is treated as "black box" firmware of certain physical components) is written in Ada, and AFAIK every sale includes complete source code and SDK to make modifications.
The DOD mandate was very short-lived, and many projects sought and received exemptions to it. So it's not surprising that, at that time, you only saw one project.
100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.
I do trade using margin account, but I don't borrow. The primary reason I use margin account is to be able to trade with unsettled funds. Probably don't need it now that the settlement times are T+1, but when it was T+2, it was kinda annoying.
If you think the Catholic Church isn't a sharp institution with a pulse on humanity around the globe.
Sometimes institutions know that they are simple shells. That what is truly important is the people that they represent and how they can serve those people.
There are both theological and political implications to that view above.
Maybe serving those people can best be accomplished through humility and throwing a US pope, and their current papacy, under the bus.
That's an incredibly cynical view of Church politics. But then again my first bank account was a Catholic Credit Union and I still remember my days in Sunday School.
That's not an indictment of my upbringing. Nobody gets blamed for funkyness with tying finances to religion or lost accounts or any of that.
That's me saying regardless of what happens with the current pope, whether my views are too cynical or not cynical enough:
There will be no blame or anger for how I was raised and treated. I met beautiful family and friends through the church, and my parents found community.
This pope has consistently criticized Trump, though in fairly mild terms. This brings the Catholic church closer to the US since American Catholics love it, but it's still a choice that opposes Trump.
