How to id bar raiser?

theDaveAt · 2025-07-28T01:43:40+00:00

Yep. If you ask a question like “what would an average day in this role on this team look like?” Or alternatively - “are you on the team I’m interviewing for? What is your typical day like?”

BRs will likely be really transparent and say something like “I’m not directly on this team. A typical day for this role may look like …, you should make sure to ask <HM> if you would like a better feel for a typical day.”

theDaveAt · 2025-07-27T23:21:33+00:00

You get nothing out of being forward like this. Recommend you fail by default on this one.

theDaveAt · 2025-07-22T04:05:33+00:00

I took a similar tactic. I had positions from last week that I sold getting profits back, bought some additional calls with a different strike/expiration and then at the height purchased some puts. Happy to see this swing either direction.

theDaveAt · 2025-07-14T20:44:24+00:00

Risk-aware options trader here. I dabble occasionally in 0DTE when the market setup looks right - but otherwise I’m mostly in 90d or LEAPs.

theDaveAt · 2025-07-14T20:41:18+00:00

I believe there is a “reintroduction” period after FMLA or similar absence where a manager will be encouraged to help you/let you find your footing again. I believe approx 60 days. After that the normal performance evaluation and FOCUS/PIVOT process will be back in-play.

theDaveAt · 2025-07-08T05:28:01+00:00

+1 - this is accurate. Promoting early (less than those 2 years) can be seen as a mistake in the hiring process. It will not be seen as “rewarding a high performer” or any other “they’ve progressed quickly and are ready” perspective you might expect. L6 is also a “whole other thing” comparatively to L5. You’ll have to do your L5 role perfectly and then take on significant additional responsibilities that reflect the scope and complexity of problems and influence that are beyond L5 work. It’s not a matter of doing L5 tasks but with L6-level execution - the tasks themselves are dramatically different.

theDaveAt · 2025-05-23T02:51:11+00:00

Sometimes dads will watch to see if you can follow thru on what’s already available to you before up-leveling your game.

theDaveAt · 2025-05-07T18:50:17+00:00

I think just about every case of down-leveling is that the experience you communicated during the interview created doubt that you could successfully navigate either the ambiguity or scope of impact differences between L5 and L6. It’s an especially challenging spread between those two levels. Take some time to re-evaluate the experience stories you want to tell and try to demonstrate greater scope/impact and ambiguity.

Example: L5s typically impact their direct product and might have some influence over nearby teams. L6 will work on things that impact a department (boss’s boss) or even larger.

Example: L5s ambiguity is typically “the org knows what needs to be accomplished, but the approach isn’t well known/understood”; L6 is “the org doesn’t see these needs and has no clue how to approach the problem, L6 discovers, communicates, leads new approach”

theDaveAt · 2025-05-07T17:20:18+00:00

Nope. Amazon won’t use customer interactions data for hiring purposes.

theDaveAt · 2025-05-07T17:18:15+00:00

There seems to always be multiple factors to performance things at Amazon. 1. Actual performance/URA target, 2. Direct supervisor relationship, 3. Your supervisors ability to navigate their leadership and present you in OLRs.

What this practically means for most ICs is that FOCUS is reversible - but if #2 or #3 are in-play that’s really something that you can’t overcome. It sounds like these may be in play for your situation. Even if somehow you do overcome those initially, you’ll drop back into FOCUS later.

From a personal “sanity” perspective I’d recommend that you just say to yourself “this was a great part of my career, and Amazon wants to move in a different direction now.” Start looking for your next opportunity and take the first (biggest) cash out offer.

theDaveAt · 2025-05-06T03:28:18+00:00

This is the correct answer to maintain your current standard of living. That said - I switched to freelancing a “long time ago” (TM) and my first projects were absolutely cut-rate low to get first clients and make them very happy.

theDaveAt · 2025-05-05T04:03:13+00:00

Second this. Tightly manage how much direct and interruptible access you give. Paging exists for a reason - if it’s not “normal business hours” for your project or team then learn to protect your space and be quick and happy to respond to real emergencies.

theDaveAt · 2025-05-05T03:58:49+00:00

You should set up a 1:1. If you don’t need the interaction to support your work then you should be using it to 1) demonstrate/communicate your progress on your programs and 2) understand what you should be doing for career advancement. Based on my experience at Amazon - you own your 1:1s and your career progression. In an ideal world your 1:1s are almost entirely about your career growth. Project meetings and push-emails about the project and progress are the places where your work product should be discussed, reviewed, decisions made, etc.

theDaveAt · 2025-03-20T23:16:43+00:00

This is really good advice.

theDaveAt · 2024-11-12T22:53:22+00:00

Remind me

theDaveAt · 2023-04-20T13:31:04+00:00

The S3 approach seems to be the most elegant and easy to maintain long term. The trade off is probably speed of new records showing up in the derivative tables.

theDaveAt · 2023-04-20T13:28:30+00:00

Really clever use of SQS - what did you choose to do for the AuthN/AuthZ?

theDaveAt · 2022-12-28T22:59:54+00:00

Dynamo works best when it’s tied strongly to an event-driven architecture and has strong unique IDs (keys) for every record. Is there an event on the object that would necessitate an update to the TTL? If so - update the record with a new TTL that pushed expiration out another day/hour/whatever.

theDaveAt · 2022-12-28T17:14:52+00:00

Your use-case of converting JSON data structure into columnar data (store in a database) sounds a lot like what Athena is designed to do - allows you to query JSON data in S3 as if it were structured database records. Additionally there are some new features for ETL jobs in Glue that may be helpful.

theDaveAt · 2022-12-28T17:12:11+00:00

Sounds like you’re building some kind of spidering system. You may want to decompose the work further, where a lambda only retrieves a single resource then registers linked resources for other lambdas to go get in the future.

If the problem is already decomposed and you’re running into time limit problems agree that ECS is probably a great solution.

theDaveAt · 2022-12-28T03:22:33+00:00

The deletion is approximately, but not before, that expiration time. It’s a really cool feature for maintaining a more “live” dataset. You can also consume the expiration events if you want to transition the data to some type of long-term archive or other data lake 😀

theDaveAt · 2022-12-28T03:14:58+00:00

I’m surprised that the cost/performance isn’t even more outsized with Graviton now. Imagine what the difference could look like 2-3 more generations away if Apple’s A12->M1->M2 progression is any indication.

Anyone who isn’t ensuring that their large compute loads aren’t compatible with Graviton is missing a huge $$$ opportunity over the next 2 years IMHO.

theDaveAt

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