lochlan

Pay-to-continue is a concession to the reality that an arcade is designed to generate money. The balanced and high-intensity gameplay gets you interested, the continue feature just takes your money. The solution is to never continue! Try for a 1 credit clear.

What exactly are you risking (or incurring) with regards to FANG culture? From my perspective it's all upside.

Why should I incur the risk and time investment of founding a startup when I can enjoy comfort and success working at a FANG company? Startups _sound_ great, but death marching myself without compensation is a stressful proposition.

Sure, I have a handful of ideas that seem reasonable and dreams of startup success—and maybe I'll explore them in early retirement.

Counterfeit items, e.g. video games, are all over eBay. I’ve reported many auctions over the years as infringing and have never seen one taken down.

I might consider Myst a “killer app,” especially for its time.

IMO the problem is that people want to buy Agile. They want to pay a consultant, or go to a class, implement a dozen scrum rituals, and call it “agile.”

Agile is not Scrum, Kanban, or even XP. It is the manifesto. It is shipping all the time at a sustainable development pace.

I have had great success implementing agile and I attribute this to continually reindexing on the manifesto and examining the impact of our process. Spoiler: removing processes is a solution as often as it is adding a process. No amount of stand-ups or sprint planning or retrospectives makes your software process a good one.

Most of it. Base salary caps out at $160k except for NY/SF where it caps out at $180k. Once you get into the higher levels most of your comp is stock, which historically has worked out very well for Amazon employees.

Software Engineers outside the US make less, full stop. Amazon has a COL adjustment for SF and NYC but it’s not as much as you might think. Not as sure about other companies but I believe Google is similar (they also have a small local office).

The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.

Source: live in PDX, work at Amazon.

What’s the benefit of being “not connected to Amazon retail?” Serving a large customer that demands scale seems useful for driving the platform forward—what is the downside?

Two companies ago I posted in the “Who is Hiring” thread. I ended up only getting a couple responses (while other channels got much more activity) but I ended up hiring one of them. Though I’ve since left that company, my former employee has become a good friend and confidant, and ended up following me to every company I’ve jumped to.

What’s wrong with working at Amazon?

You’re talking about Amazon like it is a small company. It isn’t. None of the scenarios you described are possible with Pivot, Amazon works hard to make sure the “jury” is impartial and has not been tampered with. Pivot adds an important check to the PIP process and I’m glad it exists.

Source: I work at Amazon.

Ignoring stock appreciation Sr. SDEs at Amazon have a total comp target of ~$250k-$350k. Same for L6 SDMs. It’s definitely “standard” for some levels/job families.

Speaking as someone who has worked as a developer for multiple early-stage startups, the opposite is true.

Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:

1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.

2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.