brucehart

That's neat! You should add team winning percentage as another stat to see if it improves your results. It might reduce the occurrence of false positives for players like Lillard and Rondo.

I currently live near Dayton and grew up near Pittsburgh. If you don't have ties to either city, I would take job with better benefits and manager in Pittsburgh. Both are nice cities with a surprising number of tech jobs. Housing is a little cheaper in Dayton but not dramatically different. If family doesn't factor into your consideration then there are more lifestyle options and things to do in Pittsburgh.

Yes the "what's new" section is the first thing I looked for! Does anyone know if this new version supports HEVC/H.265 video? I would upgrade my existing Chromecast if more codecs were supported but I didn't see any information in the articles I read. 5 GHz Wi-Fi is not as important to me because the 2.4 GHz band is not very crowded in my neighborhood.

Did your friend share any reasons why the turnover is so high? I've heard Amazon pays well and it seems like there would be interesting work to do.

Is the environment bad or do people just find it easier to move up to better jobs at different companies once they have some experience with Amazon on their resume?

Your career is definitely not shot. I've known people who completely bailed on their first job out of college within a few weeks and bounced back on their feet almost immediately. I would contact the hiring manager (and maybe copy HR) and ask if you can defer your start date. Explain that you had some medical issues that prevented you from finishing your degree as expected. You don't have to provide a detailed explanation and they will likely not ask for one.

Say that you still want to work for them, but you are making up your remaining classes over the summer/fall and that you would be available to start at full capacity on X date. If you can start within a few months of your original date, they probably will be fine with that. If you can't start until next January or next spring, then they might tell you that it would depend on their needs at the time. Either way, I wouldn't leave school and then try to secretly get your degree on the side. Those kinds of decisions usually come back to bite people at some point in the future.

Some people work better with daily accountability and need help breaking up tasks so they don't get overwhelmed. I worked for a boss that managed this way and no one felt micromanaged. Having clear objectives and giving a 1-2 minute daily verbal update didn't seem like a "nightmare environment" at all.

We had some members on our team that were similar to those the poster is describing. For those the team lead was more explicit about setting tasks and for others he gave more autonomy. The daily standups were a chance to discover what's holding people back from making the progress needed to complete larger team goals on time. I was also skeptical of the process when I started the job, but it actually works very well.

Develop a process that adds more openness and accountability. Hold a 15 minute daily standup meeting where each developer shares what they accomplished the previous day and what they plan on accomplish that day. Spend some time creating very distinct tasks for each developer that are 2-4 hours long. Tell the developers which tasks you expect to get completed that day and not to get sidetracked. They are providing the engine power, but you are steering the boat.

Many developers get sidetracked because they are afraid to confront the fact that they don't know how to do something. Make it clear that it's okay not to know something but it's not okay to just avoid a task in front of them. Find roles for them where they can excel. Imagine being a coach of a basketball team. Some players are good shooters while others might be good at defense and rebounding. It's up to you to find these strengths and use them together. A fast developer may get excited about doing new development but hate doing things they consider grudge work. These slower developers might like doing work like testing and documentation (and actually be better at it).

I agree with this approach more than the common wisdom on this site that you should not name a number first. Pick a salary that you would be happy making given the desirability of the job, your current employment situation and the market. Quote that number and see if they accept. If they do--great! You have the job at the salary you want. If not, then consider their counter-offer and decide if that's something you want to accept.

The hiring managers for most jobs are not business owners. They are middle managers with multiple bosses. Most see the hiring process as an opportunity to show they are management material. If you give them a number that they know you will accept, they can pull whatever levels need to be pulled in the organization to get approval. What they don't want to happen is that they overbid for a candidate who then still rejects the offer. That makes them look incompetent in front of HR and upper management. Most managers would rather just give you a safe offer that you are more likely to reject than a politically risky one that might still get rejected.

I think Google's history of shutting down products would keep me from picking Google Cloud for a major project. If Google Cloud continues to lag behind the market, you have to think they will shut it down like Google Reader, Google Wave and a number of other products. Even if Amazon isn't perfect, I feel like AWS will be around for a long time.

I would start looking for a new job immediately, but stay in your current job until you have something lined up. It's much easier to find a new job when you are already employed. Relax and just focus on developing your skills and learning as much as you can while you are there. What's the worst that could happen, you get fired or laid off? You are considering leaving the job off of your resume anyway. You might as well collect a paycheck while you are looking.

Learn everything you can about Java/Spring even if you never intend to write another line of Java in your career. It's always helpful to be familiar with other languages. Be polite to your employer and (when you have a new job lined up) just say you are moving on to an opportunity that is better aligned with your goals.

I once worked on a project that required refactoring classic ASP code written by a company in India. The code was a rat's nest. The site had hundreds of pages and most of them had three or four copies of the code commented out (this was their "version control system"). At the time I hated it, but looking back I learned a lot about what not to do and how to be a better programmer. I used the opportunity to create automated tools to clean up the code and experiment with new technologies.