ex_amazon_sde

> How well this does this work for Amazon?

Not so well. Some teams have a high threshold for hiring, some don't, but overall it's been going down because it becomes more and more difficult to find new employees.

Private companies and banks see coops as the devil [for very obvious reasons] and fight them using regulatory capture and not engaging in business with them. It's pretty well-known in the coop world.

Coops sometimes mitigate this disadvantages by networking with each other.

> graduating without programming skills is impossible

I interviewed a lot of people and quite a few could not implement fizzbuzz.

Amazon.

It uses an internal tool but the implementation is not important. Applications and libraries and packaged independently just like any Linux distribution.

> APT shuts down daemons and keeps them down for an unreasonably long

Are you doing live upgrades on production servers? Don't.

If you are doing updates anywhere else a couple of seconds of downtime is negligible.

Ex Amazon here.

I've been in companies that owned their datacenters and it was much, much cheaper than using any cloud service.

Poorly managed datacenters exist but that's an organization problem. Remove the datacenter and you'll have poorly managed cloud instances and services costing millions.

Matrix always felt like an unnecessary company-driven reinvention of XMPP.

Now I start to see why.

It's standard practice in many large companies.

> who ... understand the OS internals? ... How about write a library for their fav language? How about actually troubleshoot a misbehaving *nix process?

Ex-Amazon here. You are describing standard skills required to pass an interview for a SDE 2 in the teams I've been in at Amazon.

Some candidates know all the popular tools and frameworks of the month but do not understand what an OS does, or how a CPU works or networking and do not get hired because they would struggle to write or debug internal software written from scratch.

[added later] This was many years ago when the bar raiser thing was in full swing and in teams working on critical infrastructure.

I cannot generalize for the whole company. When writing jobspecs in my team we never made lists of the "popular frameworks of the month".

> and that's unthinkable

Google seems to be better in some ways, but I met plenty of ex-Googlers complaining about the stress and the competitive environment.

Ex-Amazon here: burnout due to stressful work and on-call duties is the n. 1 reason for attrition.

It's very well known that people leave FAANGs in general due to stress.

> So I can't fault people for trying to avoid this mess.

Ex-Amazon here. Being deeply familiar with OS fundamentals and internals, "low level" tools, and so on is crucial.

A lot of candidates show to interviews with CVs filled with names of popular frameworks and fancy devops tools and often don't understand what really happens behind the curtain.

People are becoming less familiar with the basics and tend to reinvent the wheel. In many teams this does not get you hired.