I say this is only ok because he did that in amazon. Fuck amazon
If he did that in a medium-or-less sized company that would be a really shitty move.
In a small company noone would try to label you “l5” or “l6” and probably an actual human would make your comp decision. You take the byzantine incentive structure away and people just try to do a good job.
The problem is the large companies like Amazon buy all the small ones and put these people in charge lol
I apologize for bashing Java so hard in the past. I wish everyone wrote everything in Java these days. Digital life would be so much better.
You owe royalties
Yeah, Oracle licencing has really taken the shine off Java and relegated it to the legacy dust bin.
Fuck no.
I wish everyone used C#, Scala, Rust or Python (DSLs like VHDL, SQLs and CUDA and super specific languages like C, Erlang, Haskell and Bash notwithstanding).
You can hate on them, sure, each for their own reason, but they’re all very well supported and good for what they’re intended for.
Sure, me too, but that’s my point. Even Java is better than what we have now, especially from the user’s perspective.
The one thing which COULD justify it, is technical debt. A programming language not supported anymore or in short-term/mid-term, bus factor, too much knowledge transfer, etc. But yeah, lots of times it’s “business as usual” just for “progress” and fancy buzzwords.
Java is still supported… Or did I miss the memo?
What’s Java???
Golang is technical debt in language form. A language that gained limited and now sagging popularity, for good reason. I hate to work in Java but hate golang more. It’s the lightsaber of programming languages. I’ve got shit to do, give me blasters and all the rest. And I’m not interested in wanking myself off about how I did it all with channels. [edited for typo/clarity]
Flawless victory.
I am so tired of worse products in the name of upgraded products that are literally worse in every way but a bunch of buzzwords and in groups bragging at the top while not knowing anything at all about programs or even the product at all but just seem to be there because they drink with the CTO.
Ugh. The twiddling thumb era of trying to look busy by dismantling the old machines for parts.
So that’s why we suffer enshitification.
Those who succumb to the Socio-Economic and climb it so.
“Upwards mobility”.
Honestly probably got the project to more maintainable state. Probably didn’t need the rewrite to do it in a new lang to do it (the real killer hear it sounds like).
Those monoliths suck on the operations side, and even worse when it’s a corpse holding up the foundation to other projects that actually need it to change. Need to scale? good luck that decades old pizza box we call a server isn’t supported anymore. Oh of course we can spend millions virtualizing dead hardware to keep it running the same.
Yeah, longterm wise - Go is far easier than Java to maintain. This is still a win, albeit with a slight initial disadvantage
somebody please hack into amazon’s services so that they can tell amazon shoppers the truth about jeff bezos. seriously!
Well at least harming Amazon is a net good
Was in this position at Microsoft for two years. I already hated them because I ended up working for them after they acquired my smaller company. Pennies on the dollar, massive layoffs beforehand, fired literally all the most important people (which is why I wasn’t fired, I really am just trying to collect a paycheck and do nothing more).
Anyway, ended up basically being placed in a middleman position that I quickly realized didn’t need to exist. Basically, spent two years slowing down communication between my companies team and the existing Microsoft team. Literally, I just kept the two teams from directly communicating and going through me for everything. I think I wrote less than 1000 lines of code during that time.
And no, I didn’t like my team either from the original company. They were all new hires prior to us being acquired and they fired everyone on my team that had worked on the project for nearly 5 years. So, didn’t feel bad about slowing them down either.
Basically a shitty startup that milked it’s employees with hopes of Microsoft becoming our customer. Encouraging people to exercise their options only to sell the company for pennies on the dollar and fire them.
Got through two years of slowing down an awful genocide supporting company before the layoffs finally got me.
Was a good run.
Not really. If that service costs x2 in compute, it also means it causes x2 pollution.
Imagine getting paid to do it.
And this is why you rarely find decent people with good income in todays economy.
Sounds like whoever decides these things knows nothing about IT.
they don’t. I mean for example Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month. the LAST people I would want working On Call and waking up at 2am to try and solve something are fresh grad hires. You can actually watch videos on youtube of new grad amazon hires doing this, they actually document themselves, and the vast majority of them are “well it’s 1am and I just got a call…I’m going to try and fix this ticket but really I have no idea what I’m doing” annnnnd generally nothing gets fixed or they break it worse. So they end up being sleep deprived, going into the office the next day and sleeping at whatever workstation they can find available and it leaves you wondering “what’s the point?”
I personally am of the belief that being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world but I guess Amazon treats it as a sort of initiation process or whatever.
Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month
That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.
being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world
Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.
Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.
you should really watch some of these videos on youtube, there’s quite a few of them and yes you’re 100% spot on that if I recorded myself doing this stuff I would be fired but some of these kids go into great detail as to what issues Amazon is having, the details of said issues, and potential work-arounds/fixes their seniors suggest to them. When on call only the new hire is paged and it’s up to them to page a senior or someone else on the team when they’re stuck. The problem is these kids don’t want to admit they’re stuck to their seniors or other team members because they feel it’ll impact them negatively. They admit to it. So I’d say 8 times out of 10 the tickets they get paged for don’t get resolved and are passed on to another team in the morning. So the whole thing is pointless.
In one video I watched they do have a shadow but it was reversed. the senior is the shadow and ONLY during the day. the new grad hire is still doing all the work. and after office hours they’re no their own. I wish I could find the video again as it was awhile ago but one kid recorded himself working on a ticket at like 3am and I was almost screaming at the screen like “NO DON’T DO THAT OH MY GOD PLEASE CALL SOMEONE!”
It’s like when AWS went down a few weeks ago I was thinking “probably one of these new hires at 2am trying to fix something”
I just really hope that Amazon at least has it set up so that the really important stuff goes to actual, trained SREs. They could set it up so there are queues for things that aren’t business critical and have a very loose SLO that get assigned to the new grads. Or, the new grads get paged when the error rate for the service is 1% and if it gets above 3% someone who knows what they’re doing is woken up. If say all issues with Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service is shunted to new hires, AWS would be going down constantly.
Its not an initiation, it’s hazing
I wonder if you’re actually right. I’ve held positions I had no business holding. Ended up having to escalate half across the world anyway. But sure got my feet wet. Don’t know how much the company lost. Sorry, companies.
“You are saying you are superfluous to the organization, gotcha.”
Technical people don’t understand the business, you see.
You fuck over poor people for money, it’s not complicated
As long as I fuck over more people than fuck me over, I’m ahead.
Ah, a republican!
Zero Sum Party 4 Lyfe.
Not untrue. I don’t understand or give a fuck about the business side. Same goes for my business colleagues about software.
How do “real” engineers handle this shit? I feel like IT shouldn’t have to reinvent it
You write clean code and you get replaced in 2 months, because everyone can work on that code.
You write an unreadable mess that no raise will convince other employees to work on and suddenly your holiday requests don’t get declined anymore.
It’s almost like the “meritocracy” under capitalism is a bald faced lie.
Reminds me of the time when we wrote an internal tool with strict SOLID principles. As new programmers came on, they had no idea what was going on cause no one in college told them about design patterns. Most of the OG’s quit soon after and the new guys remained.
These days it’s also because you want the AI to get confused by your code too. If it’s too clean you’ll have a PM with cursor making PRs wondering why your salary is justified.
Or you get fired because everyone else says your code is an unreadable mess.
In my experience, nope. Assuming it works as promised, the situation (usually) gets viewed as a skill gap. You think their code is bad, because you don’t understand it well enough. Unless you are personally willing to redevelop it, of course.
Depends on the company. You wouldn’t last very long at mine putting out garbage.
In my experience… nope. Never seen it happen. Even when there are clear coding guidelines, and stacks of code smell violations.
If the code actually works and is vaguely important, I think you are right.
If anyone ever has to fix it because it’s also broken on top of being a mess, well they aren’t quite so safe. Maybe if you are always available to fix it same day, but if you ever go on vacation and it hits the fan while you are unreachable…
What’s L5 and L6? What’s TC?
L5 and L6 is a label for career progression, like getting promoted from staff to senior, just with different words. TC is total compensation.
Total compensation per what, year?
Yeah, typically per year. And usually it’s called Total Compensation because some of it is in salary, some in stock, some in stock options, sometimes even some kinds of perks, etc.
So all of that gets balled up into Total Compensation, which is different than annual salary
$550,000 a year as a software developer. That’s insane money. You could buy a luxurious house in the city CASH after saving for two years with that salary, where I live. Including other expenses. They are making 3x my salary, also as a software developer.
The “where I live” part is key. Because very likely this person is in SF, where they cannot buy a luxurious house cash with that money, and where cost of living eats surprisingly far into that stupid high number.
But notably, this is why all the normal people who don’t make a half million dollars a year can’t live in SF! 😅
That’s why I mentioned “where I live”. 😉
Amazon throws money at people with niche skill sets.
They were paying engineers with experience with SELinux and CDS developers nearly 500k the past few years.
Insanity
Tbf selinux tends to be a hell of a black box. Anytime my shit doesn’t work and I can’t explain why, I default to blaming selinux and hit up IT. Seems like I’m right about half the time lol
It’s open source - literally the opposite of black box.
SELinux is super simple, you just gotta understand how the system works.
Once you understand the syntax and flow of SELinux policy then writing it is easy. Writing GOOD policy on the other hand …. Lmao.
Typically most IT departments “fix” it with
setenforce 0which is the equivalent of removing the seatbelt cuz you can’t figure out how to latch it.Android has one of the most “robust” applications of it but it doesn’t serve the purpose a good policy does, it does add a substantial layer of defense. Apple contracted my company to come out and teach them how to SELinux a few years back. Ultimately they (companies that desire SELinux as an added layer of defense) tend to just pay “us” to do it instead lmao.
Big tech pays large amounts of money. This is why people choose to work there.
Well yes, that goes without saying…
PS: 🇸🇪👋
Career levels at Amazon (basically pay grades)
Total CompensationAt Amazon you have the following levels
L4 - Junior. A new grad. Expected to be promoted within 2 years or let go
L5 - Mid engineer. Very wide band. Encapsulates anything between a level 2 engineer and a team lead at other companies. Can be expected to lead individual teams at times. Is considered a “terminal” position (there’s no expectation of a promotion past here)
L6 - Senior. Has the scope of what a Staff engineer would at other companies where you’re not only concerned with your team but others in the department. I think like 10% of engineers ever hit L6
L7 - Principal Engineer. You have like 1-2 of these per department. These are more like architects at other companies. About 1-2% of engineers ever hit this band.
L8 and beyond are for fancy hires and shit. Very few if anyone ever works their way up to those bands.
So, where are L1-L3?
Are L3 student programmers?
L2 people who never coded anything in their life?
L1 are people who can’t read? Like babies?
Non-engineering roles I think.
IIRC levels correspond to all employees across the company.
Yeah it’s weird and I don’t get it either.
Non-engineering positions
Not really. That’s just how it works at mega tech corporations. He should try working for a startup.
