jnguyen64

From my limited Amazon selling knowledge:

First paragraph sounds like you’re allowed to have multiple Amazon seller accounts tied to a listing. I think the dummy account was used as a way to prevent the main account from being banned if people reported the reviews. They also give estimates of how much the person sold. Based on a product’s ranking in a category (say a product is ranked #10 in massagers), you can guesstimate how often a product at rank #10 would sell every day in order to achieve that rank.

What the person did is when you sell a product on Amazon, you can choose between shipping the product to a customer yourself (so printing the shipping label, boxing the product, and ultimately sending it to a customer), or having Amazon do all of that for you, but for a fee (that process is called fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA).

For their dummy account, they would do the “shipping” themselves, but would not actually ship the product. If they knew the customer (and it sounds like they did), then that would mean they’re able to get very cheap reviews since they were giving 95% off these fake shipped products.

Hope that clears things up well enough for you!

Honestly, it sounds like you’re a great developer that works hard and cares about doing a good job. It sounds like you’re judging your abilities based on your ability to do LeetCode problems.

You’re not giving yourself enough credit for what you do. I think you’re a person that most companies would love to have.

If you’re looking to not do the LeetCode grind and start to find companies that care about more than how fast you can solve a LeetCode hard problem, I’d recommend taking a look at www.NoWhiteboard.org. There’s a bunch of companies on there not using LeetCode to find developers and the interviews are not limited to take-home only. There’s a good few that will do conversation-based interviews, and want to interview you in a way that will let you show off your strengths.

Please don’t judge your self-worth by your ability to get a new job, or by how much others are doing. I believe you can still have (and already do have) a very fulfilling career in tech. If you didn’t care, you would not have created this post.

Disclaimer: I made www.NoWhiteboard.org. Let me know if there are certain interview formats you’re interested in, and I can do my best to find companies that will align with your interests.

Hey! I run a job board at NoWhiteboard.org for companies not using whiteboard/LeetCode interviews in their interview process. I can add Neuralink’s roles to the website for free!

If you’re open to it, could you share the high level overview of the interview process?

Pretty interesting timing! I was on a plane ride to Barcelona around the same time you sent this, and I had also quit my job last week as well.

I’m planning on trying out the mini-retirement route. Not much more to add here, but I hope your travels go well!

Congrats on the launch! I run a job board for companies that don't do LeetCode interviews (www.nowhiteboard.org) and would love to add any companies that use your platform for free & see if we can partner up somehow!

I think a big reason (in addition to many others..) that companies still use LeetCode is the lack of interviewing platform alternatives, so I'm glad to see Litebulb is looking to fill that niche. I'll email you directly after work if I don't hear anything on here!

These are pretty awesome looking take-home interviews! I run a job board for companies that don’t do LeetCode interviews and would be interested in getting these companies and others added in. May end up emailing you to see if I can get more details!

I think that's a great approach - do you have any interest in sharing the overall interview process? I run a job board for companies that don't do LeetCode interviews and could get Aserto added to it!

Woah, that'd qualify as minimal to me! I've been seeing CS-related materials popping up a lot targeting elementary-school aged children and older, but never anything targeting babies.

Thanks for sharing your numbers as well, those are pretty impressive figures.

Appreciate the response! I kept it more limited to US companies in the short term just to limit scope, but I’ll expand it to the other companies at some point.

For some of the other companies, they use very unusual job application platforms, or made their own job platform. Ideally, I’m trying to avoid making an individual web scraper for each company, so I limited the scope to not pulling from those companies.

In addition to that, some companies have annoying platforms (“solve this problem in the web browser before we show you the job application”). I removed the companies that make it obtrusive to apply to them, and have no intention of adding those companies at any point.

As far as help, potentially? I’ve vaguely debated open-sourcing this, but I’m gonna need to think a lot more on whether that’s the direction I want to go. Right now, from a PoC perspective, I think the features are “ok”, so I’m focusing on different marketing strategies at this moment!

Interesting perspective! That reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which essentially states that people with low mastery will over-estimate their actual abilities. And then as you get more experienced, you get a better understanding of your abilities.

I think it's also a matter of perspective as well. In some ways, I enjoy feeling less mastery in hobbies because I am taking a pure learning/enjoying mindset with hobbies. For work, I'm looking to maximize on stress reduction, so feeling competent plays a larger role.