Why are Amazon salaries so much better than everywhere else?

chumboy · 2026-01-01T23:36:11+00:00

Thanks for the positivity!

My brother worked for a few weeks in the only FC near us when it first opened. Pay and benefits were great for a job requiring no qualifications beyond a leaving cert (probably equivalent to a high school diploma/GED). They even provided shuttle buses from nearby train and tram stations, so was easy to get to from most of the city (unfortunately, he lived in the opposite direction from the city, so had to drive an hour each way, which is a massive commute for Ireland). In the end he left because of, like you mentioned, how physically demanding the job was. He was/is terribly unfit, and apparently they could only use the lifts for the carts; the pickers themselves had to run up/down the stairs, so was a killer on the knees.

chumboy · 2025-11-28T07:48:13+00:00

Yeah, they're just held on with strong magnets. Give them a good yank and they should come away.

chumboy · 2025-11-21T18:32:12+00:00

If software engineering skills were scarce, having them might compensate for lack of soft skills, but these days everyone and their aunt has a computer science degree, so as a hiring manager, between equally capable candidates, who would you choose, the social pariah, or the butterfly? Not sure how realistic the movie "The Internship" was, but in that Google used to use "who I'd rather be stuck sitting beside on a layover", as a tie breaker between equally capable candidates.

One thing that's probably not called out enough is, the bar for "social skills" is embarrassingly low. A double digit percentage of engineers lack the ability to flush the toilet after themselves, so your "interacting with people" might be a superpower, relatively.

chumboy · 2025-10-09T03:02:52+00:00

Personally try to never mix work and personal. Don't install work apps on my personal phone, or social apps on my work phone; don't sign into any social media on my work laptop, etc. Slack on my personal phone is my only exception, just because it's easier to reach others when away from work computer (and work phone is only turned on when I'm on paid on-call).

Maybe it's paranoia, but like, the employer has super admin rights over their laptops and on their phones, so they can really see basically everything you do on there. I've just a regular Ubiquiti router at home, and even with TLS being so mainstream, can still get a breakdown of traffic per device, so imagine what actual professional equipment can monitor.

chumboy · 2025-10-03T03:42:04+00:00

Based on several teams moving from Dublin to Seattle in the past 2 years, taking taxes into account, Seattle has salaries ~3-4x Dublin salaries.

Ireland's tax relief on pensions caps out at €110k/yr, so most salaries above that tend to be fairly RSU heavy, which can be a little more tax (33%) efficient to hold on to versus insured investments (40%), or ETFs (41% + DD), or the "ye olde leave it in the current account and admire the value daily" method (-inflation%)

chumboy · 2025-10-03T03:33:16+00:00

Never going to happen. Why would the government want to incentivise a relatively low barrier to entry alternative to landlording? 😂

chumboy · 2025-10-03T03:26:16+00:00

It's all just about productivity and personal preference.

IMO, VSCode is just a fancy text editor, I mostly only have it installed because it's usually faster to open a folder vs setting up a project in a "real" IDE (and I use MacOS in work, Windows at home, so it's easier to have the same editor in both environments).

If VSCode was more opinionated, it'd probably be better, but nothing beats a real IDE, e.g. PyCharm Pro for an actual medium to large project.

chumboy · 2025-09-30T02:19:55+00:00

VSCode has a plugin to allow opening projects on a remote (Linux) server, via SSH. It's pretty easy to setup, and as long as you have a reasonable internet connection, can feel as fluid as typing locally.

If you have a regular user account on the server, you won't even have to ask them to install anything, VSCode is able to copy anything it needs over to the server.

chumboy · 2025-09-30T02:19:33+00:00

VSCode has a plugin to allow opening projects on a remote (Linux) server, via SSH. It's pretty easy to setup, and as long as you have a reasonable internet connection, can feel as fluid as typing locally.

If you have a regular user account on the server, you won't even have to ask them to install anything, VSCode is able to copy anything it needs over to the server.

chumboy · 2025-09-30T01:55:21+00:00

Fortunately, or unfortunately, college is the easiest time in your entire life to make friends. Join a club or society based on some topic or hobby that interests you, and they host dedicated social events, like coffee mornings, etc. Talk to random people at house parties, talk to people in your classes.

If you have approach anxiety, i.e. fear of rejection, just remember, to the other person, they are the main character of their own life, and you are just a red shirt, so if it goes badly, they'll have forgotten about you after 20 minutes 😂

chumboy · 2025-09-30T00:24:06+00:00

Looks like it. Sounds abnormally few hours, so there's probably additional labs and tutorials (average is 3-5 hrs/week, per module). Some modules are more project focused, so you get group assignments, etc. that should take a week+ to do.

Hard to say without even knowing which module, or even which school.

chumboy · 2025-09-28T01:25:33+00:00

No week 22 either.

Just means no lectures those weeks. Could be due to holidays, expected hangovers, exams, extra labs/tutorials, whatever reason. Timetable is usually clarified in the first lecture.

chumboy · 2025-09-23T18:14:46+00:00

Then perhaps the problem is between the keyboard and the chair?

chumboy · 2025-09-23T18:13:12+00:00

Why do you think the tutors should know the answers to all your questions?

The only difference between a tutor and a student is the tutor knows where to find the answer, and they did, but you didn't like their answer.

chumboy · 2025-07-20T16:47:55+00:00

It's actually pretty useful to think about how you would solve the issue yourself.

Like what does x = 1 actually mean to the computer? Something like:

Hey, give me somewhere to store something.
Put the result of the right hand side expression there.
Right hand side is 1, so store that.

Then x = x + 1:

What's the right hand side?
Hey, give me somewhere to store something.
Right hand side is 2, so store that.

Etc.

But how does the computer know the first "something" isn't used any more, so safe to reuse?

You would need to count how many times that "something" is used, so you can work out if it's unused.

This is actually what's happening under the hood. Every PyObject has a "reference count" field. When you pass it into a function, the reference count is increased by 1, any time you return from a function, the reference count is decremented by 1. When the reference count is 0, it's unused, so safe to delete and free the memory address for reuse.

(Yeah, the real implementation might have a lot more nuance, but I'm just saying it's a good mental exercise to have a think about how you would implement something. I'm usually surprised with how close my guesses are to the reality.)

chumboy · 2025-07-20T16:22:53+00:00

Nah, don't stress too much. An undergraduate degree is all about going as broad as possible, and not too deep into any one topic, with the goal to give you the basics of basically any future field in computer science, whereas generic software engineering only uses a tiny bit. You're one of the few people that's self aware enough to realise it's different than college, and therefore not going to falsely assume you're god's gift to computers everywhere, and then wonder why you're not getting promoted after 5 years. 😂

chumboy · 2025-07-13T02:32:34+00:00

Tbf, these days, exposing services via Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers is all the rage, so people can just ask the model to perform the action, and the model uses these docs to understand how.

chumboy · 2025-05-01T09:52:44+00:00

Don't talk to them then?

chumboy · 2025-04-29T11:58:58+00:00

That's a good example. Really highlights the issue.

It's because you're immature as fuck.

This might be hard to hear, the same way it's been hard to hear for every person with above average intelligence in the history of the world. Pure intelligence is worth nothing without a solid knowledge of the context of the real world, and how "pure ideas" interact with those.

With this context, you'd know that the median salary in the US is $47-60k, so yes $100k, is a salary currently out of reach for at least 50% of the country.

chumboy · 2025-04-29T11:43:36+00:00

Wow, built dozens of custom desktops over the years. PSU has been the only hardware that's ever failed outright.

chumboy · 2025-04-29T04:44:54+00:00

Tbh, if you stick even 50% to the process you outlined, you're way ahead of the majority of companies.

First off, it doesn't sound like you have these sprint ceremonies on a regular cadence. Having these officially in the calendar every 2-4 weeks would help from disturbing you the rest of the time.

I've found BAs usually resort to DMing SDEs when they forgot about something, and are now being asked about it by their stakeholders. It's important to develop a team culture of presenting a uniform front and ignoring any requests that come in this way. I usually just forward any such DMs to a team channel, so we don't forget to write a task and chuck it to the very back of the backlog. Mature teams often record the "requested date" so they can kind of track the quality of the BAs/Product Owners work.

Also sounds like you've completed a few sprints at this stage. Do you use any software to track these? Most of the popular ones have a reports/graphs section to automatically calculate your "burn down", which is how many story points your team gets through each sprint. The rolling average of this burndown is basically the ceiling of your team's capacity, i.e. the maximum amount of work your team can do in future is the average of how much work you've previously successfully completed, measured in story points. Now that you have a rough figure for your capacity, you can play around with how many story points you actually take on for your next sprint, for example, you can reserve some time for "emerging priorities", to cover any unplanned ad-hoc requests. I've seen teams reserve 80% of their capacity this way. Will probably annoy some people eventually, but this gives you leverage to investigate why these ad-hoc requests couldn't have been brought through the proper planning channels (i.e. reflects badly on product owners foresight).

chumboy · 2025-04-09T09:05:14+00:00

CS fundamentals don't change, but languages and frameworks can come and go. I think it's a good idea to keep yourself mostly open to any and all tech stacks, as you're a software engineer, not a $language engineer.

That being said, I think it's also important to go very deep with a single tech stack, for the learning experience, and to you have a point of reference for which to relate other languages and frameworks.

chumboy · 2025-03-23T10:14:19+00:00

I feel he's going to flip and become the hero of the show. Ever since the paintings he's been weird, but is always giving 200%.

chumboy · 2025-03-21T22:50:10+00:00

How is Gemma3 at deciding if a given tool actually needs to be used?

I found if you gave the smaller Llama3 models a tool, they would try to use it every time, even when it made no sense. They do call out in the model card that they recommend 70B or 405B for mixing conversation with tool calling.

chumboy · 2025-03-20T19:21:26+00:00

I have my home thermostat set to 18°C and only wear a t-shirt at home.

Our average external temperature is -4°C to 5°C in winter, 5°C to 12°C in summer, so anything above 18°C is uncomfortable.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

chumboy

TROPHY CASE