southphillyman

I resigned in July. So far things have been going well as I've concentrated on a combination of relaxation, studying, traveling, and exercise/yoga. Last week was my first week actively looking for new employment, so far that has been going well too as I have recruiter introduction calls booked for the next 3 weeks. Right now I'm not sure how to frame my period of unemployment so I've just been speaking as if I'm still employed.

Seems like this program will mostly reward those who can somehow survive the Amazon culture, similar to the way Amazon RSUs are back loaded for SWEs.

If the accounts of Amazon front line workers having to pee in cups and being PIP'd for taking lunch breaks is true how could a significant % of workers maintain that level of workload while attending university?

HBO Max performance seems to be platform/tv dependent. It works fine on my Ipad but is absolutely dreadful on my Samsung televisions. Super slow and crashes every single time when viewing content that is 30+ minutes.

I do a combination of Feynman technique, space repetition via Anki, and even katas if it's something I'm really struggling with.

Only entry level software jobs(because of the weird x years requirements) and FAANG jobs (because of the required DS&A prep) are hard to get. Standard run of the mill Fortune 500 SWE jobs paying 100-200k are relatively easy to get once you have any experience at all.

>You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.

Almost a decade in the industry and I have never worked with another black developer. One time I was on a team with a black project manager who use to be a developer but that's it. For all the pushback on diversity recruiting I appreciate events like Google sandbox that remind me that we do exist and present opportunities to network.

My take away from this is that the bar may have been lower in 2008 when the headcount was lower than it is now despite the headcount having exploded recently. You still get the in-depth system design questions and "tech trivia" that requires a review of the spec for whatever language/technology you interview on, but the algo questions are harder now. Finding the unique set and implementing a binary tree would be "lay up" questions now to most prepared candidates. At the very least those caliber of questions have limited ambiguity and don't require knowledge of any tricks to get optimal solutions.

This. I'm having some difficulty remembering details of systems I worked on and bugs/approaches I took at places I no longer work at. Going forward I'm going to document details about everything I do, a personal post mortem of sorts.

I was just wondering what happened to this guy since I rarely saw his comments anymore. Didn't realize he was well known outside of this forum

A handful of politicians have been trying to decouple health insurance from employment the last two election cycles but for whatever reason a significant portion of the country "likes their health insurance", whatever that means. Personally I've never loved any of my health plans and dread the yearly increases and frequent provider changes as I either jump between jobs or my job eliminates or adds new plans due to rising cost. As long as I can register with a competent physician and dentist and keep the cost low I could care less who administers my plan. It truly is a mystery but I suspect resistance is tied to a belief that a government implementation would some how be more inefficient than what we have and the general disdain people in the U.S have against taking "freebies" or public assistance due to the history of social/racial stratification in the country.

If it's really sealed this may be a scenario where you'd be better off not mentioning it. Similar thing happened to me when I went through a security clearance for a position. I mentioned that I was arrested once upon a time and the charges were expunged as part of an agreement. It didn't come up in their search but since I mentioned it they still wanted to know details. Details that were impossible to get since it was sealed/expunged. I essentially created a problem for myself by being honest.

This seems like an issue which is heavily skewed towards start ups and tech companies, which are ironically generally viewed as the most attractive companies for tech workers to work at.

The pay will be lower but there are opportunities out there where you can genuinely work towards helping people with technical solutions. Both the local research hospital and world class children hospital in my area always have data science openings and positions like that for instance

>I get a feeling that process as this somehow does not select for top performers that are already working on exciting stuff.

There are senior engineers who essentially work as tech leads making $500K+ at these companies. It's a tradeoff to prepare but if you can essentially double/triple your salary to do comparable work while also getting whatever benefit from brand awareness in your social circles....

On leetcode they are literally marked "Medium". Mostly questions that involve some sort of BFS or DFS on graphs, figuring out the next available time slot in a meeting calendar, figuring out the best time to buy and sell a stock given the daily price, stuff like that.