My experience at Amazon paints a very different picture.
There's layers and layers of management. There were 12 people between me and Bezos.
Unlike Google, peer feedback is a lot less important at Amazon. Promotions and PIPs are solely based on your manager. If you have a great relationship with your manager, you're fine.
Yeah, it's an interesting space, trying to help companies and people have less friction.
We were solving a very real and emotional problem, received a lot of press coverage. TIME magazine named us one of their "Top 10 of everything" in 2011, for example. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288... (look at that old iOS interface :)
Each time we were covered, we got more downloads, and were able to raise some more money. I don't think the money was misplaced. It was a good bet, sometimes they just don't work out.
The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.
Richard Feynman
Facebook. From what I can tell, Google's negotiating strategy is to offer max(their initial offer, highest competing offer+10k). The only people I heard of them not doing that for were those getting absurd amounts of stock from Snap, pre-IPO (like $300k+ worth at estimated IPO price over four years).
Too many uninformed people spreading misinformation. There's clear and measurable difference between a software engineering degree and the one you get from a boot camp. It's exactly as strict and rigorous as you'd expect from a degree in mechanical engineering. In Canada, you get an iron ring when you graduate and after about 4 years, you get a professional engineering license.
Software engineering is a very real thing. I'm about to finish my BSEng with the iron ring. Unlike computer science, I had to take courses in DSP, ethics, software management and development lifecycles. It is exactly as structured as you'd expect from an electrical engineering degree.
I'm not saying you have to write open source code on your own time.
I'm saying that you can't complain that an interview doesn't show you are good coder if there is no other way for somebody to look at a project you've done.
Saying you did X/Y/Z at your last company but can't share the code since it belongs to them isn't a valid excuse for why you have no code out in the world to show off.
Maybe in California, where contract terms around owning your products outside work aren't honored, but in most of the rest of the US and the world, this is still a valid excuse.
Can't exactly contribute to open source if my contract says my employer owns everything that I do, and even if you think that can get tossed out, you'd better have a good legal fund.
Yeah, you do. You can't rely on your employer to continuously retrain you through your whole career. Show me an engineer with 10+ years of experience who refuses to ever learn anything away from work, and I'll show you somebody working on old tech.
I can only speculate, of course, but I've met a developer who runs around inflating salary reports in hopes that he will set the expectation that employers at tech networking events will think they should pay him that much. It's strange to observe.
But mostly I'd just say that people like to have something impressive and interesting to say, and making up numbers is a quick way to do that.
There's layers and layers of management. There were 12 people between me and Bezos.
Unlike Google, peer feedback is a lot less important at Amazon. Promotions and PIPs are solely based on your manager. If you have a great relationship with your manager, you're fine.