JustLurking2022

Hate to say it but Amazon was hiring the folks getting laid off from major banks a few years ago. They abandoned hiring only the best a long time ago.

Sounds like you were a slacker almost certainly getting paid way above average, and got fired way later than you should have.

No sympathy.

It's not about them leaving the network, it's a matter of whether they could be coerced by an authoritarian government to alter transactions.

So they've discussed DoS?

Ahhh... They're trying to sell themselves as security experts.

I'd like to think that but, hiring for a couple open roles posted only internally at a FAANG, I definitely received emails from external individuals inquiring about the role - and found out there's a whole cottage industry around referrals for a fee.

I've worked in both sorts of companies. The constant questioning may work well at smaller scale but kills productivity at larger scales. Putting aside that it inevitably becomes a political exercise as much as a technical one (because the different technical solutions almost always reflect competing priorities), it also requires perfect sharing of information across the organization, which does not scale.

Especially in any sales driven organization, I've seen it cause issues with infra teams questioning the need for certain features. Meanwhile, the answer is that the features are necessary because someone is willing to pay $$$ for them.

At some point, the cargo cult are the promo reviewers and then the two become the same thing.

Depends on who you count as employees - Sergey? Larry?

Most also look like hobby projects more than professional, so I would imagine having a lot of free time is a prerequisite. I don't know anything about the guy but all of the things you listed are reimplementing something that already existed, which is faster given at least the requirements are very clear.

Downvote though you may, you misunderstand containers - they are not simulating a whole operating system (that would be a VM), they are using features built into Linux to isolate tasks running on the same OS kernel to be isolated from each other.

You appear to misunderstand containers.

The dogma generally becomes accepted because it outperforms other known strategies. In a game like Go, that could previously take a while because there are so many possible follow-ups that it takes time to accumulate enough data on whether a new strategy is actually decisively better, or just worse but over-performing because it's less known.

There's a big difference between those two and "the hacker ethos" will lead to a lot of the latter. However, now computers can simulate enough games to give a relatively high degree of confidence that a variation in strategy is truly better.

As a thought experiment, let's say Facebook did this.

The red team designs a new streamlined look with less click baity posts and fewer ads. Users flock to it, abandoning the existing platform. The new platform isn't monetized as effectively as the old one so revenue drops by billions per year - maybe an order of magnitude more than the new product brings in. Shareholders demand an answer as to what management are doing about it.

There might be some golden path, but that typically relies on finding a new market that doesn't interfere with the existing business (e.g. AWS and Amazon). However, the far easier options are a) shutdown the new service or b) increase its monetization, thereby starting the enshitification cycle.

The environment you describe is self-destructive, which is why it is rare throughout history.

Xerox PARC did it, and reaped almost none of the rewards for their innovation, so it perished. It only worked for Bell Labs because they had monopolistic control of telephony and could charge whatever they liked to subsidize their R&D. As soon as they lost the monopoly, it went down hill fast. Google is the closest thing to this in the past couple decades, and have seen all their investments in AI walk out the door to found competitors.

Bottom line, pouring enormous amounts of money into pure research without demanding commercialization results certainly benefits researchers (who can pick up and take their research elsewhere) but runs companies into the ground.

Having experience both inside and out, I find large tech to be uniquely bad in this regard, but for an unexpected reason. Whereas outside large tech, managers are typically part product manager, part tech lead, part project manager and part people manager, inside it those are all distinct people. It leaves the EM role stripped it down to solely people management which pushes away many people who would make great managers, leaving only those who can't get a more attractive TL job.