This is honestly why I have stopped contributing to open source.
I was fine with my work being a gift for all of humanity equally, but I did not consent with it being a gift to a for-profit company that I'm not personally benefiting from, that wont even follow the spirit of the open source license.
If AI doesn't have to follow the GPL, then I'm not going to create GPL code.
There's been a lot of debate around Amazon's hiring practices, particularly given the conflicting data and statements from the company. A core issue seems to be that Amazon has alienated a significant portion of its domestic engineering talent pool. Many experienced engineers have left, and others seem unwilling to return, even when offered higher-level roles. I personally was an L7 engineer and turned down a boomerang offer.
In response, Amazon appears to be increasingly turning to H-1B workers - especially from countries where the company’s reputation hasn't soured as much.
While these engineers may be less experienced, they're often more willing to accept lower compensation, due in part to discrepancies in wage data reported by the Department of Labor. For example, the BLS wage data, which sets a $115k cap for certain wage codes, has led to a misalignment in what’s considered a "fair wage" enabling companies like Amazon to pay these workers below actual market rates.
This reliance on overseas talent seems to be more than just a cost-saving measure; it also reflects Amazon's ongoing struggle with high turnover among its U.S. engineering staff. The company’s well-documented high attrition rates, as highlighted in reports like this one from Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r... - shed light on the challenges Amazon faces in retaining domestic engineers.
The LinkedIn data also supports this trend.
Candidly, it seems that Amazon has burned too many bridges with U.S.-based engineers, forcing the company to increasingly rely on a less experienced labor pool from abroad in order to maintain its operations, despite being an American based, publicly traded company.
The Sky voice sounded nothing like Scarlet Johansson.
I'm worried that in the future somebody might try to create their own voice to regain it as an accessibility tool after a medical event, and they're going to have their voice literally stolen from them under the fact that it might sound like another famous person 90% of the time.
In the music industry it's actually a known thing that if somebody famous sounds like you, you basically have no real ability to become a star or sell your music without problems. Sure it happens, but it's honestly the same problem many actors that look alike go through but just with sound.
This is pure censorship/money grab, and to make it worse, the voices sounded nothing alike.
Remote: Yes. The last 5 years have been "remote only". I'm more productive WFH and will not consider having to buy a car I don't normally need and go back to wasting my time commuting.
Willing to relocate: Not unless you pay me 25MM upfront.
Technologies: I'm not limited by language, frameworks, or clouds, as I helped build several of them for current "bigtech" companies and can ramp up quickly due to my prior experience in contacting and consulting. My total experience spans over 25 years of in the trenches technology, while constantly being updated because its what I love. I used Java last at AMZN, C#/F#/Python/Rust/SQL at MSFT (and more recently with Ruby On Rails thrown in), with Go/Python for both a CLEC I gave MMS capability to as well as some more recent startups, if that helps. Most Current projects are in Rust, Go (Gin), Python (Django), C#, AWS (Lambda, etc)
Email: [email protected] - Yes this is me, its a relay and gets forwarded to an @duanefking.com email address I can reply from.
I only have experience leading engineering organizations with up to 200 engineers, so anything bigger would be new, but I'm up for it, and in that role they offered me the VP promotion I could not accept due to a relocation request that was part of the VP promotion, so I went back to MS and became a lead dev again working in the code when that ended. I have no problem working on smaller teams and honestly think my skills and experience are more valuable to them when I'm in the trenches with the rest of the team.
This is just corporate gaslighting at this point; There is no legitimate reason so many very profitable tech companies need to fire so many when we are not even in a recession according to the United States Government and the treasury and the banks, and its not like they are not making record profits.
They cant say "we are making record profits" and in the same breath say "we need to fire people to survive" that's not how that works. Pick one.
The sad fact is that we have enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs; The problem is that these companies don't want to meet the market demands of that labor pool by paying what that market is asking to keep that sustainable, so they want to import people who they can abuse to temporarily lower labor prices for them.
And the number of Americans I know who work in tech who are looking for work right now as H1B's post on LinkedIn and publicly make deals to keep Americans out of jobs proves this. Its all being done in public.
The thing is, the original H1B ideal is temporary; and so is they cant meet market demands sustainably that way, not if they are growing, and they should be growing or they are dying, and so such companies end up being dependent on offshore imports of H1B people and end up dying when they cant replace them or grow new roles without them, because they started to depend on them and then could not be sustainable outside of that bubble on the real market.
The dependency they have is on subsidized cheap labor from other countries that don't asked to be treated like humans, not a lack of skilled tech workers. They have more tech workers than they need, many with more skills and more years of experience at higher end tech roles, many who are looking for work right now in the holidays, and they are just not hiring them because they want to save a few pennies and hire a developer that they have legal ownership of as an indebted visa-slave.
And if your hiring software developers, I know many who are looking for work, who are American citizens, who would gladly take the job that an h1b is currently sitting in.
Technologies: Pick a language and I will have professional experience programming in it from being asked to do so on the job, and I wont get hung up on the language or framework. I might push back if I know a better tool, but I'm language and platform agnostic. More recently I'm doing more GoLang (Gin, AWS, Lambda) , JavaScript (Frontend & Backend), Python (Django, flask), but have a lot of experience with Java (8/11/+) and C#/F# (Core and Standard). I'm a full stack, full cycle, software developer/org lead as required. I also like the backend more than I do frontend.
Let's see what happens. I've been programming for a very long time as a professional high impact consultant and I'm looking to get out of contracting permanently in the best case. I have worked at MS Research as well as AMZN in the past, so I know I have skills that are valuable on the market, but I'm trying to find a FTE role over any kind of contract as I find contracts don't give me enough value because the faster I work the less I get paid, and I like to get stuff done. I typically work as an architect or as a principal/sr./lead engineer of some kind, mentoring the team, generally staying on the ground with them to help if my role allows it, and helping them learn to get their work done in the best way possible so the company has fewer surprises and issues and they can have the best career possible. I'm all about sustainability and also am a big fan of continuous integration and delivery, and am experienced in devops as well as purple team security roles from my prior experience in security/AEO focused roles. I'm a full stack, full lifecycle software development engineer, with prior leadership and infosec experience.
Infosys is long known to be incompetent as an organization among people who have experienced their brand of greed and labor fraud; I highly recommend you avoid them as much as possible.
The doctrine of first sale says I own the car, and I own the heated seats in it.
And once its ours, they do not have the right to charge us for something our car has the capability to do without them. And its unethical for them to try to add microtransactions on something we already physically own. This is a form of fraud, IMHO.
BMW is losing the trust of buyers; they will not last long if they continue this.
I was fine with my work being a gift for all of humanity equally, but I did not consent with it being a gift to a for-profit company that I'm not personally benefiting from, that wont even follow the spirit of the open source license.
If AI doesn't have to follow the GPL, then I'm not going to create GPL code.