I like to think I'm halfway decent at my job, and I wouldn't work there once. During undergrad, my landlord working for AMZN on the opposite end of the country offered me an interview, but it was during final exam week.
I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams, and his arrogance really showed when not only did he refuse, but then insisted my exams are not don't even register on the same scale of importance as the opportunity to work for Amazon.
Somewhat related: a recruiter at Google cold-called me a couple months into my first job out of undergrad back in 2016 and was similarly condescending about "the chance" to work for Google compared to everything else. I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview.
I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs.
That job was great until I got put on a team with a guy who was a former middle manager at some IBM-like company and went from being surrounded by people lightyears ahead of me to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. The messed-up part was that it wasn't even punishment. I was rewarded after completing a project with my choice of which team I joined next, and I joined the wrong one. I assumed that joining a new team to utilize this newfangled "cloud computing" thing would be trailblazing, and I didn't do any diligence on who I would work with.
To this day, I still regret not rejoining the first team I worked for, otherwise I would still be at that company and happy about it. Then again, the boredom and discontent while being on that sucky team is the reason I started investing, and now I can buy a house in cash and fund myself to do whatever I want for at least a decade. Hard to complain about the way things turned out.
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun.
For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.
Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."
In the UK we have a heuristic that by the time a tech giant builds a big UK campus (an imitation of their SV HQ) then you know they are in the decline phase. Some of them decline so fast they don’t even get to fully complete the campus, yet others seems to have beaten this curse… so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
Epic Systems (healthcare, not gaming) has bucked this trend. They have the most amazing campus I've visited. With 10K+ employees on site.
They're also privately held, which makes a difference.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...
This is from 2022; they've built a number of new themed buildings since then, including Star Trek.
https://www.penick.net/digging/?p=82929
https://www.epic.com/visiting/
So is this where Oracle is headed with its new offices in Oxford and other locations in England?
https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/larry-ellison-invests-oxford-i...
https://www.oracle.com/uk/news/announcement/oracle-invest-fi...
Is Google's office in King's Cross even finished yet?
They have more than one building at King's Cross. One has been finished for ages but the new one I don't think is done. Not sure what happened to the fox on the roof. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229727)
You can't leave it on a cliffhanger like that. Why does he end up a driver? Or provide more details. This seems like an interesting story.
His TC/NW was sufficient enough for him to leave the toxicity behind and start living his life.
Being a driver is "living his life"?
Maybe. Was attempting to end this cliffhanger on a positive note without judgement.
He had the means so he paid off his mortgage, invested in another property, took care of college fund.
Decided he didn't want to spend rest of his days wringing his mind and drenching off energy into deciding and debating whether it is ok to call a lambda from another lambda (yes I have seen this in production and the more experienced engineer decided to do it because he had been there longer and decided that's what he wanted to do... don't ask me which company was this but it was a FAANG) or setup a step function to orchestrate the two lambda calls... or some such equivalent problem he might have come across in his SGI days.. and instead picked a job that required little amount of cognitive effort compared to what he would have done if he was still in the same line of work but still managed to support the rest of his life/needs/responsibilities.
Might as well have been an artist, construction worker or he might as well have done nothing, absolutely nothing, and it could have been everything that one would have thought it could have been.
I won't judge knowing what I know at my age. People do what they do.
Feel free to imagine what you would imagine this ex-SGI engineer's life to have been and make it negative if you want it to be. No one knows until OP throws in more details if they have any.
Driving a taxi may increase your IQ. It increases the size of your brain. Also taxi drivers have healthier brains (less Alzheimer's):
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-taxi-drivers...
Macguire's original study on taxi drivers:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10716738/
BTW it's Fall! So here's to memories - "Four Strong Winds" written by Ian Tyson, sung by Neil Young:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnylI_9rmcs
Maybe he enjoys driving and talking to people.
If his income was enough for the lifestyle he wanted given his level of savings, I imagine more than most corporate workers these days...
Ageism?
He might not have been an engineer.
One of the best stories I have ever heard in here to be really honest. Sounds like a joke but its packed with subtle meaning of how companies rise and fall so quickly.
You have said that the driver worked because he had (enough money?) and he might have wanted to relax with the driving job but still, its an amazing story.
Relax by driving in the Bay Area? I wouldn’t yuck his yum, but damn…
Thank you. Someone else suggested that, but I never actually asked him why, felt awkward in the moment to probe when he left it at that, without sounding like putting down his driving job. I was also too busy thinking "Holy crap in ten years I might be a driver!"
I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.
I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s.
Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
>I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat.
I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.
One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.
Somewhere in the middle, I would think. Maybe not immediately deliberate, but it's a large enough organization that someone in the company would have realized that the originally inadvertent actions paid off, and would continue to pay off, and so they put in effort to not accidentally stop doing it. Knowledge of the discovered strategy stays limited to some management, but not the rank and file.
Remember when we used to make fun of people for typing full sentences in google search, while we used google-fu to type keywords in an order that'd lead to better results? Well, now typing full sentences is the best way to use google search, and google-fu is dead. So I don't think google is "worse" per se, it's just now optimized for full sentences.
Tiktok may show a lot of ads but they are all skippable the moment you realize they're ads.
Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...
"Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.
Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.
Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).
I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers.
I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.
>Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates
They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?
"The internet itself" isn't a vendor that one obtains specific services from.
Fair enough, and neither are users paying customers. It's all middleman at this point.
A middleman is a specific party that mediates the relationship between two other parties. An aggregated system that everyone is using but no one in particular is in control of is not a middleman in the sense applicable here.
> IBM
Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.
That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.
Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs.
Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share?
And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.
That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too.
For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail.
Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.
HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.
That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.
IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.
I feel the same way.
The question that arises is: How can you potentially spot which companies are about/likely to enter a 'golden era' when you interview there? What questions could surface some sort of likelihood? Is it possibly to identify them before they enter the 'golden era'?
It doesn't matter. Most jobs even at those companies were not in the interesting areas you heard about. For every one person at the cool jobs there were thousands elsewhere who had regular deadlines and a regular job. Odds are you wouldn't have had the cool job even if you were born in the right era.
Better advice: when interviewing ask questions when they ask if you have any! Find out what the job is really like.
Ask what hours they normally work - if they give exact times that means they are strict about the times. If they give a lot of hours that means you are expected to work a lot of hours. If they give a range that means they really have flexible times. If they talk about leaving early for their kids third grade events that means they support families.
Ask what they really wear - this is clue to what the dress code is like.
Ask about the perks you care about. I don't play ping-pong so won't mention that perk if I'm interviewing you, but if you ask I can tell you that there are regular tournaments and people do play games here and there, but the tables are empty in the middle of the afternoon: if you care about this perk ask, otherwise focus questions elsewhere.
There are a lot of great jobs. There are a lot of bad jobs. There are jobs that you would hate for reasons that the people who work there don't even care about. There are jobs you will think are great that others will hate.
Yeah, but I mean after decades of experience, you already know how to do those things, and they're fairly basic stuff to know and learn from.
Was thinking more "Imagine you have 30 years of experience and casually looking for the next Bell Labs, what to look out for when there are the company?"
If you have 30 years odds are your real worry is can you afford to retire. I'm not quite there but I'm looking at my accounts. I don't need a fun job - I hope not to be there long. maybe I'm worng, but I believe even the best job can't compare to working on my own projects. (Though they will also have bad days)
No, I'm already "retired" as in I don't have to work to survive. Right now I'm contracting on fun/interesting projects that gets passed to me and idly looking for the next Bell Labs to join for fun :)
The best way to predict the future is invent it.
If you're looking for the next Bell Labs, why not try to found it?
I don't think it's really possible for the average employee. You'll just do an interview, like the vibes, and get unbelievably lucky.
By the time their golden age is known outside of the company they are very likely near the decline phase; even if they aren't you are going to be competing with the best now.
For actual upper level leadership: they have the ability to make the golden age happen but studying the circumstances that allowed it to happen at other companies and being very selective about employee number 2-49. After that it's out of your hands.
> being very selective about employee number 2-49. After that it's out of your hands.
Indeed. There's an old saying that A-level people hire A-level people, but B-level people hire C-level people.
Obviously this is too simplistic: How do any B-level people get there in the first place? But there's still some truth to the idea that the overall talent level of a company tends to degrade as it gets larger unless very unusual structures are in place to work against that tendency.
The saying I’ve heard is about students, but similar enough and different enough o quote here:
“The A students work for the B students and the C students become federal judges.”
That's just a plain scaling issue, isn't it though? Eventually, the supply of A-level people dries up, no matter the compensation offered. If growth is to continue, B-level people must be hired.
Yes A-level people are rare and expensive. The mistake I see too often is companies not focusing on keeping their core revenue-generating team A-level. Put the B-level people in support roles. When you dilute the core revenue team with B- and C-level people, the As tend to leave and then you're in big trouble.
The quote is from Steve Jobs and is absolutely true. As soon as the first bozo infects your team, they will start hiring other bozos, and after a while your org has regressed to the mean. Therefore you should hold a ridiculously high bar for hiring. A temporarily empty seat is preferable to a non-A player.
> If growth is to continue
Maybe this is the crux of the issue.
For a small company, for one still trying to find its business model, growth is absolutely necessary. The alternative is lost investment, and everyone out of work.
> By the time their golden age is known outside of the company
Yeah, but that's the thing, when you're interviewing, you usually have some sort of access to talk to future potential colleagues, your boss and so on, and they're more open because you're not just "outside the company" but investigating if you'd like to join them. You'll get different answers compared to someone 100% outside the company.
I think the problem is false positives, not false negatives. The people you interact with during the interview process have all sorts of reasons to embellish the experience of working at their company.
> The people you interact with during the interview process have all sorts of reasons to embellish the experience of working at their company.
That's true, but you have to be kind of smart about it. If you just ask the question "Is working here fulfilling?", of course they'll say "Yes, super!". But you cannot take that at face value, your questions need to shaped in a way so you can infer if working there is fulfilling, by asking other questions that can give you clues into that answer.
I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer (household name, but I don't like to mention it in postings). One of the top-Quality manufacturers in the world. I worked as a peer with some of the top engineers and scientists in modern optics (and often wanted to strangle them).
I worked there for almost 27 years.
The pay was mediocre. The structure and process would drive a lot of folks here, into fits.
But they consistently and routinely produced stuff that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that people would stake their entire careers on. Stuff that some folks would assume was impossible to make. They have thousands and thousands of hard-core patents.
I felt pride for working there. My business card opened a lot of pretty amazing doors.
It's disappointing to see the stuff that folks here post, when I mention it. It almost seems as if people think I'm exaggerating or outright lying or boasting.
I'm not. There are places that foster greatness; simply by being a place that has a long culture of accomplishment. I was just someone that stood on the shoulders of giants, and I was lucky to have the experience.
That said, I think some of their managers made some big mistakes, and they took a drubbing, but I will bet that they are already getting back on their feet. They are really tough. They weathered being bombed in World War II, and multiple depressions and recessions.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience, I at least appreciate it!
With that said, if you were to try to figure out how someone from the outside could see that it was a great place to work, during an interview, what questions/topics do you think could have surfaced that as clearly as possible?
Hard to say, these days. Interviewing seems to be a pretty nasty, adversarial process. It wasn't, for me, back when. Not sure if any questions would have done it. I observed the place.
In my case, I was contacted by a recruiter (the old-fashioned kind, which no longer exists). It was quite low-key. When they first contacted me, I thought it was a joke.
I was flown out to a trade show in San Jose, for my initial interview, and to Long Island, for my follow-up. There were no coding tests. I started as an engineer, on a brand-new team of two. I became the manager of that team, after a few years.
I think observing the people there; seeing how they interact with each other, is important.
Of course, looking at their products is also key. Asking yourself "Do I want to help make this stuff?" is important.
In my case, I was intrigued by the culture of the Japanese. I was born overseas, and spent most of my formative years in a pretty heterogenous environment. I like to mix it up with strange (to me) people.
Considering Long Island, I'm guessing these were X-ray optics?
Nah. Cameras, microscopes, binoculars, etc. The headquarters is in Tokyo.
Are you also aware, that typically members of your generation criticize members of my generation for being soft and lazy, despite this new harsh period of adversarial interviews? It boggles my mind that you found a job at a nice company (to say the least) without a test (and that seems like a bad move on the part of the company ?)
I don't remember attacking, lecturing, or talking down to anyone. I was simply sharing my own life experience.
It is interesting that it was interpreted as some kind of threat, requiring an insult, in response.
Have a great day!
I liked your comment and was curious what you make of people who don't believe the process is adversarial, and whether companies should or shouldn't give out tests. When I said boggles my mind I meant in light of the situation today, not you personally
OK. I'll break my own rule. When I say "Have a great day!", it means we're done. I won't foul this place with fighting.
The process should not be adversarial, in my opinion. It's a contract. I do something; you do something. There may be adversity, but that's not required, and it's actually likely to cause problems, down the road. Like any contractural relationship, each party needs to respect and trust the other party to come through with their end.
If the way that you introduce your company to me, is by bullying me (and tests are not "bullying," but many of the other interview games are), then we won't be working together. I don't like bullies. I won't be one, and I won't work with them.
These folks kept me on for a long time. There was a reason for that. I can't speak for all Japanese companies, but this one did not suffer skaters. You delivered, and you were constantly held to account. I did well in that environment. I suspect that many, here, would not.
I don't argue that companies should not give tests. I had tests in other interviews, and did fine. This company chose not to. One reason, is that the folks interviewing me, fought fang, tooth, and claw, for the headcount. When I became a manager, I had to do the same. It was a crazy frugal company.
This meant that they dedicated all their attention to the interview process. This wasn't where they were handed my CV, five minutes before they spoke to me. I was around them all day. They watched me work with others, and they gauged me on my character, more than my tech abilities. The Japanese are really big on character. At least, this company was.
I mentioned that I had an "old-fashioned" recruiter. They don't seem to have those, any more, but part of his job, was to vet me, before putting me forward. They trusted him, and paid him well. I was working for GE, before I interviewed, and had a fairly substantial amount of background, in hardware. That was important to them (it was a hardware company).
I guess that I said the right things, and they gave me a chance. I appreciated it, and worked hard to reward their faith.
I know that my attitude is considered "quaint," in today's cutthroat tech world, but I always legitimately believed in personal Integrity, Honesty, and Loyalty. These qualities actually meant something to this company. I am quite aware that they elicit scorn, from today's tech bros, but they worked for me.
> “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
Thanks for the thorough response. I'd edit my comment if I could. I work for a similar company. I do agree that measuring a person's character and similar traits is a way to measure their potential. The next question would be, why have companies started hiring the way they typically do now?
Well, here, we're getting into "guesses and opinion," rather than "personal experience."
I suspect that when tech became a place to earn big salaries, is when the dodgy folks started showing up.
It's always been common for folks with little background in tech, or unrelated experience, to apply for jobs. In fact, as a manager, I often looked for that. I was fairly decent at finding "diamond in the rough" talent (I sort of had to, as my company didn't pay especially well).
But, apparently, these days, even fairly innocuous job postings are inundated with tons of totally unqualified (and a significant portion of the "qualified" ones are outright fabrications) CVs.
Also, you get people that are crooks, applying.
The other side (in my opinion), is that modern tech CEOs are behaving quite badly. They consider their workforce to be some kind of hostile, subhuman slurry, and they treat their workers as such.
In order to fix this, the C-Suite needs to "blink first." They need to do better at treating their workers and prospective workers, well. HR culture also needs to change. It's become outright hostile to employees. I saw that happen in my own company, which started off, quite friendly towards employees. By the time I left, it was pretty much openly hostile.
That's unlikely to materialize, in today's tech industry. Any company that does this, will be eaten alive by their competition.
If people are serious about improving things, then legislation needs to be introduced, to prevent companies that improve their employee relations, from being killed by their competitors, and to help companies to survive manifesting risks, when they take chances on employees.
I am not optimistic that this will happen. If it does happen, it’s unlikely that it will be done well. In fact, the chances are good, that it would make things worse.
Yep. There's a balance between doing enjoyable work, getting paid what you feel your work is worth, and feeling like what you're doing is of some sort of value to your community or the world as a whole.
Maxing out all 3 of those is incredibly rare, but I think once people reach some degree of financial stability, almost all of them go for a job that feels like it's meaningful.
You're getting answers in child responses that while accurate are not necessarily answering the spirit of your question. In my personal opinion, you'll find what you're looking for by searching for a high growth Series A - B startup (I would recommend Seed but that's almost a different animal in terms of risk) with a technical product and strong technical founders + eng leadership.
When you're at a company at that stage that's doing well and has a lot of commercial runway ahead of it, the reality can often end up being that the golden age will last long enough for a very pleasant 4-6 year tenure if you so decide to stay at the company through its growth phase (which often takes it from a 50m-100m valuation to $1B+). Some of these companies will also make the leap from $1B+ to $10B+ or beyond (which makes the golden era at least as long as 6-10 years) and although nothing lasts forever, it can last long enough for you to find what you're looking for at least for a decently long period of time. This pertains to what other commenters have mentioned with regards to "making it golden" -- the golden era is what it is because everyone needs to make it golden and the company is too small for anyone who would dilute that for their own gain to do so without anyone noticing.
The challenge to this approach is that it requires being able to assess a company's commercial prospects as well as the quality of the company's founders, leadership and early team well enough to assess whether the company merely looks like a golden era company or whether it is actually the real deal -- something which even professional investors who target these kinds of companies struggle with. It is possible, but in my experience, it definitely took a couple of rounds of trial and error and getting burned a few times before my radar worked.
You have to be involved with making it golden: they don't have ride-alongs
Sure, that makes sense. But in order to know what places/communities/organizations are worth getting involved with, that has the right base conditions at least, how to identify those? Not every place has the same likelihood I'd wager, but based on what?
Yeah, see also: Digital Equipment Corp until the mid 90s (where I did my co-op). Lots of brilliant people there, coasting on their legacy until they fell hopelessly behind from mismanagement and bloat. I was lucky to catch a glimpse of it at the end.
I interviewed there and got an offer a number of years ago (in 2006 or 2007, for the then-nascent AWS team). In retrospect, it would have been a great career move.
I also was interviewing somewhere else and told the recruiter. His response was to be verbally abusive and say the other place "sounded boring", and then went off on how if I turned down an offer, Amazon would never talk to me again and I'd basically ruined my career. I decided I didn't want to work at a place with that sort of culture.
They reached out to me in 2013 for an interview and again in 2024.
What about just accepting the job, faking a medical problem that requires extended time away from work not to keep the paycheck, but just to officially remain on staff for the purposes of future background checks, and meanwhile apply to other companies. You could just take an unpaid extended medical leave for cancer treatment and bribe an MD to make a phony "sick note" similar to playing hookey back in grade school.
You wouldn't be defrauding anybody if you're not getting paid. You could take a sabbatical for 6-9 months and tell better companies you were working for Amazon that whole time.
In retrospect, that might have been a crafty idea. At the time, I was a naïve 25 year old, and dishonesty/conniving wasn't really part of my personality, or at least not when it came to work.
I'm more than happy to tell better companies I've received offers from Google and Amazon and declined them, though.
I think the solution you went for was better, you don't want to be accused of fraud, that would really look bad.
Honesty is generally the best policy, imo :)
Their recruiters still reach out to me at least annually despite me bailing on an interview midway through due to a similar experience to yours in 2014.
I used to (rather rudely) tell them off but recruiter turnover there is just as bad as every other department so it never stuck.
I have done a round one interview and I don’t see how it can be interpreted to do anything but turn away people with a brain.
Memorize Amazon’s insane company values and relate your resume experience to it. And that I mean every single bullet point.
Interviewers were all run by robotic people. Coding test had zero flexibility, you had to just write code in a special barebones text editor that had zero feedback besides pass/fail.
You’d have to solely care about Amazon RSUs to consider that job. They are self-selecting for the worst kinds of candidates.
The dumb thing is that it should be a job that doesn’t burn people out because they basically own the market and haven’t needed to do any sort of innovation. Amazon’s corporate culture just has a burnout fetish.
I interviewed in 2015. The recruiter told me to read the Amazon Leadership Principles, but I thought it was ridiculous to prep for something so specific to a single company, especially as I was interviewing at other companies too.
I got the job, and I think being natural helped. I've interviewed thousands of people at Amazon since, and too many people just say the buzz words with no meat, and it gets them nowhere i.e. I showed customer obsession when I.....(and then gives a bad example)
So which is true, your comment or the one above? Is it 'natural' to not prep, or to do what's expected of you, as described in the comment above?
I interviewed much later and there was definitely no getting around it, the interviewer refused to let me go on further without hitting every single value in the list and talking about a unique example of my experience for each value.
One entire experience story/project example per value, completely insane cult behavior. I felt like I was interviewing for Scientology.
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun.
I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.
Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today.
Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.
Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.
But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.
I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
There's a world where Sun did what you hoped (became a systems company) and created Joyent in-house. However, hyper-scaling means going fast and cheap before good comes along. Sun's habit was fast and good and that's an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome culturally. (By fast I mean growing a platform, not raw performance, FWIW).
Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.
Bryan,
I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
(not Bryan)
Sun did waste a lot of money in buying MySQL, $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock. Certainly a distraction, as well.
Sun never offered any way to inexpensively get onto the on-ramp of Sun hardware and software as they thought they could continue selling high-margin hardware forever; they had their $995 V100 which even included their much-loved LOM which was a remote-management device like iLO/DRAC/IPMI , then followed it up with: nothing.
info about the V100: https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...
Well, in stock market terms the MySQL deal paid for itself. It pushed the stock well up. However turning this in real money wasn't possible in the year they had till IBM and Oracle did their bidding.
That Solaris/Toshiba laptops deal was interesting, but if I recall correctly the price was a bit too much, and maybe it could have been considerd yet another distraction.
I surely would have liked to get one of those laptops, though.
I think the easiest thing would've been to basically ignore dotcom and thus only take a hit from the general financial downturn and not from basing your company around the stock bubble (tortoise vs hare type of deal) , but Platt is the only example I know of and he got kicked out of HP for doing that.
Honestly, it's because of what Sun's innovations in systems software that I look so fondly on their work.
I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.
Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.
[1] https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
[2] https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
“ Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.”
Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?
Awww.. a little hurt?
Why are you hurt? And why does it lead to comments such as above? I think you need to figure that out, because it wasn't a good wholesome comment by any measure.
Interesting. That was not my perception of Sun at all. “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. Java was a language developed for IoT/toasters, and then hard pivoted to a write once run anywhere weblet language (ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language that sounded like a skin condition, renamed to ride the crest of energy sun marketing money threw at things).
Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux.
Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM.
Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.
> “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign.
No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer
It's a small side point, but the skin-disease name came later:
Mocha -> LiveScript -> JavaScript -> EczemaScript or whatever
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript
> an integerless programming language
Technically true-ish, but deserves an important qualifier. The Javascript number format has a huge "safe space" of integers between
Also, the number format is a standard, not only used by JS, and given that it was supposed to be a minimal scripting language it is hard to argue against the initial design choice of choosing one all-encompassing big standard, and not burden the language with a complete set. Since he criticism was on the initial design:> ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language
I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all.
Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is.
For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.
The coolness peaked before the “the network is the computer” phase, IMO. Late 80s vs mid 90s.
This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was.
Yeah, man, good times.
My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester.
I still giggle when I tell that story.
> I still giggle when I tell that story.
Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
I'd note that a huge amount of the work at those companies was hardware (and a lot of theory in the case of Bell Labs)--though there was, of course important software as well, a lot of it related to Unix.
Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
Well I still think that software like DTrace, ZFS, NFS, IRIX and Solaris, IrisGL, and the like are cool, even if there was a lot of hardware engineering. I realize that there are disadvantages to it, but the variances in ISAs (MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, etc) seems like it could have posed challenges for software people.
I don't know; I'm not young enough to remember.
Sun did a lot of great software too and I know a lot of the folks involved. I just think many people look at the innovation through the lens of software (especially open source) hacking which a great deal of it wasn't.
When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
> which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
Working with Suns and other workstations as a teen (so my perspective was limited), I caught the very tail end of software as a modest middle class professional wage for everyone doing it (right before the dotcom boom hit).
The people I worked with were really good at what they do, but not strutting like newcomers started doing pretty much the instant the dotcom boom started, and not rich. (Well, one guy did buy a used MR2, and get his private pilot license, but he also lived with his wife in a trailer on an undeveloped parcel. He was a very solid software engineer, working on important stuff.)
I might have inadvertently tried to preserve some of that modestly-paid excellence of the generation before me, but I don't recommend that. Cost-of-living in my area is determined by people making FAANG-like money (well, and real estate investors, and price-fixing), and you have to either play along with that, or move away.
Mind you, California cost of living was on the high side even in the nineties even relative to at least modestly expensive areas like the Boston area suburbs--there was really very little tech in Boston proper at that time.
But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.
Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry.
I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.
> But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.
I've been given second hand accounts of similar situations. One was team consolidation, and the business was offering Boston-area engineers positions in San Jose. One of the folks who moved with his family was back in MA within 5 years. His salary was not adjusted as much as it should have been for the cost of living difference.
If it meant that people who didn't want to do software didn't ans people who wanted to do software did software, then it sounds nice. I was never interested in making a lot of money in software.
A question, though. Was software designed at Sun closely with hardware teams and vice versa, or were they mostly disjoint? Presumably many hardware companies that have succeeded have built good tooling around said hardware (like NVIDIA).
I didn't actually work there; I knew a lot of the folks from the perspective of an IT industry analyst both during and after a lot of the work there. I certainly saw some level of integration with things like Dtrace (how couldn't you) but when you were a systems company, it's probably the case that software folks couldn't really just divorce themselves from hardware.
The low-level software work at Data General where I was prior to the analyst biz was certainly integrated to a certain degree--read Soul of a New Machine if you haven't. The software folks for the minis were also mostly in the same same location. As things migrated to Unix, most of that team was in RTP and it's probably fair to say that there was less integration though probably wasn't something I thought about a lot of the time. Hardware stayed in Massachusetts.
I interviewed with Amazon a few years back. The whole thing turned me off. A recruiter reached out and I was interested (it was late 2020 and the money was tempting). But before the first phone screen I had to have a call with the recruiter again, where she gave me a list of things I needed to "study" and was told that "successfully candidates usually spend 5-10 hours preparing for the interview". The study list was the usual list of CS101 topics. I didn't bother preparing and it was a good thing because on the phone screen the guy just asked me some a fairly mundane coding question and then some more general stuff (it was actually a very reasonable interview). Based on that they wanted to proceed to a final interview which was an all-day affair (on zoom of course because this was during the pandemic). But first I had to do ANOTHER 1h call with the recruiter where she gave me ANOTHER list of things I needed to "study" and reminded me that I should spend 5-10h preparing. That was too much for me and I politely declined the opportunity.
I refuse on principle any interviews that expect you to study or "prepare" for an interview. I'm sure I've missed out on some money, but they've also missed out on a pretty good engineer and teammate :-)
You should prepare for an interview. However 5 hours seems like a lot and I question if CS101 is worth preparing for. (If I know you will ask about a red-black tree I can look it up - but like most engineers I never think about it because my standard library has it implemented for me - unless the job is implementing the standard library I would not expect you to ask that question)
You might be asked to write something like fizz-buzz in an interview - but the point is there isn't a good answer to that. (there are a few possible solutions, but all of them have something you should not like - which makes it a simple yet real world like problem and thus something you should be able to figure out in less than an hour without study)
What you should prepare is figure out how they interview and thus what questions they might ask. (nobody will tell you what questions will be asked, but they may tell you the style) Practice the answers. Practice stories of how you worked in the past so you can twist the story to answer the question (the above is how you should prepare for the STARS interview my company does). If you were in prison or something then be prepared to talk about why they should believe you are reformed, but most people don't have such a thing in their past that they should find.
yeah, you should put your prep time into the non-technical parts of the interview.
- everybody you meet is going to ask "so, tell me about yourself" so you better have a good answer. have a pitch that highlights relevant parts of your work history, discuss goals/interests, show a bit of personality.
- there's always going to be "do you have any questions for me?", so you need to have a couple of questions ready to go that make you seem interested/thoughtful AND help you extract good signal from the interviewer.
> You should prepare for an interview
No, I really shouldn't. Especially if a company reaches out to me. If they are so flooded with fakers and coasters, they don't need to contact me.
Not after 25 years in the industry with easily verifiable companies and references.
If you are going to refuse any offer don't waste their and your time. However if you might accept an offer you should prepare, since you want to know what you will be getting yourself into.
part of preparing is learning what the company does. Most of us work for a company the majority reading this have never heard of. you want to know what the potential company does so you can ask intelligent questions.
You might be misunderstanding what I mean by "prepare". I mean companies that expect you to have crammed algorithms/leet code/CS new grad before their interviews. Then if you don't, they treat you like you are a huge imposter/liar who cannot code.
I certainly am mentally prepared when I speak with a company and treat them professionally. I expect the same basically.
You need to go back and read what I wrote originally - I thought I was clearly stating that you shouldn't be cramming algorithms/leet code. That should be a waste of your time, and even when it isn't it is a bad sign if the company asks questions where such studying would be helpful (though sometimes that might your least bad option to take a job there anyway).
Prepare for an interview means look up the company. You often can figure out what style of interview they do and prepare to answer those questions. You often can figure out if there are concerns that you want to probe in your turn to ask them questions.
Thanks, we're in agreement
every job process i went through so far has been applying -> if they like me a call with the usual job interview questions -> if both want to proceed a meet-and-greet with the actual team -> if both still are interested, sign a contract.
crazy how much time is wasted in US/VC tech.
I am absolutely sure that the money you missed out on had a bigger affect on you than them missing out on hiring you.
Every large tech company or any tech company that pays decent money requires preparing for coding interviews *if you are trying to get hired as a developer*.
I personally didn’t do much prep for my Amazon loop accept practice answering behavioral questions in STAR format. But I also had to thread the needle of having experience to get into the Professional Services department as someone who knew cloud, how to talk to people, architecture and leading projects.
If I came out of college post 2012 instead of 1996 with path dependencies in 2012, you damn well better believe I would have been “grinding leetcode” to make BigTech money.
They have an enormous amount of money, wonder why they don’t go after folks who know algorithms without cramming beforehand.
I call it a “gravity problem”. I might not like or completely understand gravity. But it makes no sense to complain about it. I’m not going to jump out of a window on the 30th floor.
If you want to make $150K+ straight out of college and $259K+ a year three years into your career, you play the game. If you don’t want to play the game, accept the reduced amount of money from staying in enterprise dev.
At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any lathe company especially BigTech again and I’m definitely not going to chase after a job where I have to work in an office. But I know what I’ve been giving up for the last 2+ years by ignoring recruiters from GCP’s internal consulting division based on my stances.
But again, I’m also 51, I’ve done the build the big house in the burbs thing twice and I have grown (step)children that I’ve raised since they were 9 and 14 who don’t live with us
I think the idea is they want to inconvenience you to filter out people who aren’t desperate and willing to deal with their bullshit. But, expecting you to cram for an interview just makes it seem like they value metrics over actual merit.
> I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams
Ha, my interview for an Amazon internship was an hour after a 3-hour final exam :-)
But the job market right now is quite bad, and after hundreds upon hundreds of internship applications I would've been stupid to give up this chance. I would work for Amazon in a heart beat.
Well pardon my saying so, but why don't you?
Well usually you have to get hired first. Can’t just show up without an offer.
Are they even hiring?
> to being surrounded by Dilbert characters.
As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart.
I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me.
The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore.
I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade.
It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
I'm currently in a place that pays me €100k just to sit on my ass, and I can do that remotely. I've tried actually doing some work, but that backfired. Not sure what to do, because on one hand my skills are evaporating, but on the other if I wanted a job that pays more I'd have to learn a lot and then work substantially more. I'm wondering if maybe sitting here until retirement is a viable option.
Similar situation. I work for a provincial government and make €61k, my scope is actually relatively large for how long I’ve been with my team but the actual problems are simple enough that some decent code means I have 0 downtime. As a result if I don’t bug anyone I typically get left alone to manage a bunch of products that run without issue. This week I literally have no meetings on my calendar, just a small project with a generous due date where I’m the solo developer.
I’m lucky in that before I got the job I was in talks to do a PhD but negotiated saying I’d only do it remote.
Now I do whatever is required to keep my day job happy and then spend the rest of my time working on my PhD. My plan was to go to FAANG after I got my degree but who knows… a comfy, unionized tech job that gives me ample time to do side projects is also not something I’d give up too easily.
I’d say do whatever is necessary to keep your job and then devote any extra hours 9-5 to some project. If I wasn’t doing my PhD I’d be making an app or a game probably, or maybe still moonlighting as a researcher. I think most office/tech jobs don’t require your full 40 hours and I can tell you I have a bunch of friends who have even less work responsibilities than me but they just use that spare time to play video games. Just do something productive 9-5 and you will outpace 99% of people is what I’ve found.
Honestly I do use that time to play video games because I don't see the point of working my ass off. Suppose I grind my ass off and manage to get a €200k on-site job with on-call. Is that actually a win? I don't think so.
I do the same, but mostly because when I have bothered to work my ass pff to try and get a cool job, I never get hired anyway because they only hire established domain experts and juniors via a university pipeline.
What games are you playing now?
[dead]
If this is really the case work on a side gig you find enjoyable.
I don't find anything enjoyable
You at least need some source of self-actualisation
It would be easier for me to appreciate the small things in everyday life if I weren't so lonely but it is what it is
Software development evolved well past the point of solving problems, now it is just plugging solutions. Very few people actually work in novel stuff these days...
I got interviewed twice for Google, the first one I made it to the second round of phone calls, the second one only the first phone call.
The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences.
Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way.
I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.
I'm not saying this is the case, but isn't it possible that you weren't a "great engineer that they would love to have at any price" in the past, and you developed your skills and knowledge? Or even if you've always been a great engineer, since you were born, why take personal offense to not getting a job before? Interviews are mostly luck, anyways, so the previous interviews have no relation to the 3rd one.
Of course I have my limitations, what I don't accept is the snake oil lip service of Google HR trying to meet their KPIs of candidates.
Followed by an interview process that is designed to get those that want to work there at any price.
I've had two first round phone interviews with Google, separated by about 5 years. Both times they contacted me.
Both times they asked me the exact same tricky question. First time didn't do so well, second time I knew the 'correct' answer. They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.
> They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.
Most places will appreciate if you tell them before you work on the problem. That gives them a chance to give you a different problem instead. Likewise, they won't appreciate if you tell them afterwards since it makes it harder for them to judge any semblance of problem solving skill.
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun.
I feel the same, and especially about video games.
I would never work in the modern video game industry. It seems really miserable to be overworked and underpaid to work on some design-by-committee game that I don’t even care about.
But I hear stories of some Of the companies back in the 90s that seemed to magically muster the capital to sit down and put out effectively what was a passion project, but also commercialize it.
>I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview.
Is this a common Google practice? Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. On how many different levels does this insult work?!
I'm just very interested in this tidbit of information.
>Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java.
2nd edition of Kleppmann comes out in a few months... if I flunk a DE interview think I can request it?
Next level misogyny a la google :)
yeah maybe they only do it for the women they interview, as a form of negging pickup technique
My first instinct is that the Google interviewers were just so full of themselves that they think they're doing you a favor and would do it to anybody, regardless of gender.
If I were turned down for a job that involved writing FreeBSD kernel code and the hiring manager gave me a free book on FreeBSD kernel programming, I'd think they were cool people and try again in 18-24 months.
It's not the act of giving a a rejected candidate a textbook, the insult is that it was a supplemental text book for the very first CS class most undergrads take.
Going back to the interviewers, there are going to be jerks in any organization with more than 20 employees, but the fact that their culture sees this kind of patronizing behavior as "saving the world" and "making a difference" is a red flag for me.
i’ve interviewed with aws and received offers twice over the years. the first time they made me pay for my own lunch. the second time no lunch break was afforded. i didn’t accept the offers though i know several truly excellent people who work there.
When I interviewed at a Google outpost, a good-cop employee they mistakenly thought had a connection to me took me to lunch (message: forget about the bad-cop interviewer you were just with, you're among friends, loosen your tongue so our spy can report back) in their cafeteria (message: look at the free food perks you'd enjoy), and initiated a conversation with an visiting economist there who then spoke of something oddly relevant to my research interest at the time (message: look at the interesting people and collaborations you will bump into every day).
Your interview lunch experience sounds like message: this is what it's going to be like, and we don't care if you join us.
I've been on the other side of that (not google), taking people to lunch who are interviewing. Usually you're picked because they're from the same country as you or something like that. At least where I work it's not like those messages. Instead it's lunch because food is good to have, and if you were lunching with them you weren't involved in the interview process at all, and it gave them a person to ask questions of and get an unbiased-as-reasonable response. If there were real red flags I'd probably raise it, but otherwise I had no contact with anyone in the hiring process regarding that person at all.
I don't know what percentage of companies use the lunch in an on-site interview for evaluation, but definitely some do. Either with express feedback into the process, or because it's the hiring manager taking the person to lunch, and this is shaping their opinion.
I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).
yes, i definitely walked away with that impression. maybe they reserve the better experience for mire desirable candidates :)
That’s weird, both times that I interviewed for Amazon (admittedly pre-pandemic) they paid for flights, hotels, and all meals, including lunch. The lunch was basically either before or after your interview (depending on whether you had an afternoon or morning interview schedule) and you just grabbed whatever you want on your own. But it was expected to be expensed just like all other interview expenses.
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs.
That's great imagery and a good description of how it felt! I was lucky to work at two of those three and those were awesome years. Going to work with people who created Unix and had commands named after them and later at Sun with all the magic, those were the days.
Post-Sun I've only done startups and while that has been a lot of fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as special.
I think you can still find those kinds of workplaces if you focus on research-oriented companies in "deep tech" (meaning those designing and building cutting edge hardware rather than advertising/social media).
I too had the pleasure of interning under some former Bell Labs employees, it really was a great experience.
Oxide looks like it may be that sort of company.
If you had been born early enough, you probably wouldn't be a programmer at all because far fewer people were. Conversely, everybody is born at the right time to join in the heyday of something amazing. You just have to identify that something and be lucky enough and/or try hard enough to become one of the few future-gandalfs. There are companies today making flying cars and dexterous humanoid robots ffs! Or SpaceX! Amazing engineering work never stopped, it just didn't linger on in the same fields.
Fair enough, but in my estimation that next big thing is gene therapy, and the best way to get involved with it is to become a medical geneticist.
I'm sorry to be a buzzkill, but I just can't get excited about privately-funded space rockets or Japanese girlfriend robots, not even if there were an 8 figure stock compensation package in it for me. To me, it's all just "do something grandiose for the venture capitalist bucks, and then maybe figure out how it helps people in 20 years."
"My sister killed her baby because she couldn't afford it and we're sending people to the moon.
September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time. Now he's doing horse. It's June.
Is it silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes And everyone still wants to fly
Some say a man ain't happy truly Til he truly dies
Sign o the times"
-Prince
the prince song reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
Huh? Computers were privately funded and you could have called them pornography machines if you wanted to be dismissive of the technology. I understand you're not excited by those technologies but no need to mischaracterize them. I'm not excited about curing cancer because it's just not something I think about much, but I still recognize it's a good thing, even if some big-pharma company ends up owning all the IP and overcharging for it.
> gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview
Although I doubt it was really their intention to be passive aggressive, I have to say: That was a Flawless Victory of passive aggression.
the dummies guide to java might have topped it into active aggressive
I had a very similar experience with an amazon interviewer over an even dumber reason: I was going on vacation. Seems dumb, but in your early 20's, with everything booked, I was excited, and frankly didnt see why it was worth insulting me (Its pretty normal to be too busy to do a first round interview on a given week, sometimes things get pushed back 7 days.)
> they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview.
That's surprising. I've never seen any major tech company provide any sort of feedback, let alone handing you a book, even if it does feel condescending.
"every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs."
Thanks for this.