Yeah, I was really hoping for Detroit. It's got a lot of really underutilized infrastructure at this point and could be really revitalized by a large tech company expanding its footprint there. Real estate prices would be relatively low, too.
I'm surprised to see a place like Boston on the list. Having lived there for ~15 years, I just can't imagine adding an additional 50,000 well paid tech workers and their families to that area. It's already densely populated and expensive.
Almost every account? You mean almost every account that NYT bothered to include in that article.
As a current employee at Amazon, that article might as well be fiction as far as I can tell. It describes nothing like what I or any of my co-workers have ever experienced here. We chuckle about it, occasionally, making jokes about crying at our desk, etc. But seriously, that article does not describe the place where I work.
When the article came out, Jeff sent a response to the company that has subsequently been published online. In it he said, paraphrased, "I would quit if my work environment was what the NYT article described, and I'm sure any of you would, too. If you're here, and you're work environment is anything like what the article describes, please _tell me_ so we can fix it."
You've mentioned elsewhere that Amazon has among the worst employee retention in the industry, but that's a fact that I'd also dispute. I've seen articles like http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turno..., but as far as I can tell they're using median tenure as a proxy for employee retention. That's going to skew the results in any company that is hiring at a high rate. Imagine a hypothetical company that has gone from 50 to 100 employees in the past 12 months. Median tenure is only going to be less than 1 year at that company, regardless of whether or not anybody has quit. Amazon also hire lots of seasonal workers to handle shipping, customer support etc, which also very likely skews the results.
The update from 1password indicated that there was application layer encryption happening in addition to the TLS encryption, so a breach of the TLS protection did not expose any sensitive data. Presumably other sites are in similar situations. But don't take my word for it, go change all your passwords.
It is an awesome time to be alive, but I do wish we'd start doing more interesting stuff with our technology than simply streamlining the ability to buy stuff. Convenience is wonderful, and I make use of lots of modern technological improvements in that regard, but I'm skeptical as to whether any of it has really made a measurable improvement on my standard of living.
https://medium.com/the-mission/silicon-valley-has-a-problem-... is largely what I mean.
I don't blame the tech industry, necessarily. It's society as a whole that seems to have developed such a warped set of values, and I have no idea what to do about it.
I used to work with a number of LISP machine believers at the MIT AI Lab/CSAIL. They all had more modern computers for day to day tasks, but used the lispm for most of their programming. This wasn't that long ago (I left in 2010), and I suspect that those machines will remain in active use for as long as people can keep them running.
They all believed that the loss of the lisp machine was a serious loss to society and were all very much saddened by it. I never used the system enough to come to my own conclusions in that regard, but it was interesting food for thought. As somebody for whom Linux/POSIX is very deeply entrenched, would I even recognize a truly superior system if it was dropped in my lap? More importantly, would society in general? The superior technology is rarely the "winner"
Typical tech hours. 40-50, maybe more during crunch time right before a new feature launch or something. Not really any worse than any other place I've worked. Hours were flexible, too; I'm the type who arrives at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and leaves after 6 PM, but I had co-workers who worked 7 to 4 or something.
At a conference (IIRC it was LISA in 2000) somebody had posted a joke to the bulletin board. It read: "Lost: one version control system, never used. If found, please return to Linus Torvalds"
Version control worked by posting your patches to the mailing list. Linus would apply your patches to his tree, which he'd occasionally tar up and upload to the mirrors.
> Re: Paternity leave, I was able to take as much as I needed - it depends on the team/org I guess.
Yeah, I'm sure the teams have some ability to be flexible, and if I'd pushed I could have gotten more time. Managers understand very well how difficult it can be to hire a new engineer, and they recognize the importance of keeping the ones they've got, but the company-wide policy literally is zero paid family leave for fathers. Regardless of available workarounds, I wanted to express my dissatisfaction with the policy.
Agreed, I noticed all those things as well. The article seemed to invent a lot of the new hire orientation stuff. Either that or it's changed quite a bit since I went through it a few years ago, which is certainly possible. And the "100% peculiar" thing really is just a game. It's a toy to add a little icon to your internal profile, and literally doesn't mean a thing. Other such awards are for things like having participated in broomball in 2002 or something silly like that.
I worked at Amazon for 3+ years, leaving just under a year ago. "It’s the greatest place I hate to work" pretty much sums up how I felt about the place. The crazy thing is, I kinda want to go back! The scope and scale of the engineering problems is simply unmatched, especially if you're like me and you don't want to work for a primarily advertising funded company.
I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site. It sounds like most of the people interviewed for the article were on the retail side. In AWS, I never felt any sort of competition with my peers, nor did I feel like people were trying to sabotage me with the anytime feedback tool. In fact, it really felt like there was a refreshing lack of office politics there. Everybody worked very hard and there was mutual respect among all my peers. The workloads are heavy, for sure, but never really unmanageable, and the work is almost always interesting.
Ultimately what finally ended it for me was the complete lack of paternity leave. Amazon offers, to the letter, the bare minimum family leave that they can legally get away with. If the company isn't interested in my health or that of my family, should I really be putting effort into helping them succeed? I think policies like that really run counter to their "hire and develop the best" principle. How exactly do they plan on doing that if they don't treat them with respect?
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Because facebook only has my pictures if I choose to post them there. This is easy to avoid. Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily. Avoiding sending email to gmail users is far more difficult. Avoiding receiving email from gmail users is even more difficult. Additionally, the cost (at least measured subjectively in terms of inconvenience) of avoiding all contact with gmail users is far greater than the cost of avoiding facebook.
So, to answer your question more directly, facebook doesn't "get a pass". Facebook simply doesn't get used.
Except that it does work like this on a regular basis. It's not just something that sounds nice in theory. Distros and other major software vendors regularly coordinate disclosure. Have there been failures of the process? Sure, but that's the nature of secret keeping. The advantages of coordinated release far outweigh the risk of occasional mistakes, since the latter simply leaves people in the same position as they'd have been without any coordination (i.e. the exact same position that the distros were in with heartbleed).