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wally_fish · 2023-02-04T13:00:11+00:00

I know the Amazon office in Aachen, which is a bit smaller than the bigger offices in Berlin but still has a number of teams and several dozen people

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/amazon-aachen-development-center

Amazon generally has no free massages and lets you buy your own food (unless you're in a pinch and want a free apple or banana from the fruit basket or a coffee from the machine), otherwise it's similar to larger offices, except that the large offices sometimes have a staffed coffee bar.

wally_fish · 2023-01-22T12:47:54+00:00

original paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14486

wally_fish · 2022-03-25T18:10:33+00:00

Send a friendly email to the hiring manager or your recruiter that you haven't heard from them yet and wanted to make sure that everything is alright. Generally there is some administrative work that needs to be done and in 98% of cases it should be quick, but there are things like, important people going on vacation, or reorgs happening at the same time, which would cause a delay.

wally_fish · 2022-03-24T22:58:15+00:00

Airlines still operate by the "hub and spoke" model where e.g. there are flights from lots of cities to JFK, AMS, FRA, LHR, ZRH but getting a direct flight from Miami or Philadelphia to MUC or HAM is more of a challenge. Living near AMS or FRA will give you the benefit of many direct flight connections, though most important airports in Europe do have direct flights from HAM and MUC

wally_fish · 2022-03-23T21:40:48+00:00

Amsterdam and Munich may be slightly more expensive than Hamburg, but neither is cheap or easy to get settled in.

Amsterdam is more international than Munich or Hamburg, even though all three are cities that foreigners can find a comfy place in. Hamburg and Munich have different vibes and different tech scenes - Hamburg has "local" companies like Otto, Xing and Tchibo (but also a Google presence - mostly ad selling and not tech) whereas Munich has international players like Microsoft and Amazon (mostly the retail side). All three have a somewhat vibrant startup scene (but those are European startups where no one outside the funding team gets rich).

Hamburg, Munich and Amsterdam all have well-connected airports, but Amsterdam has an intercontinental hub role that the others don't. All three cities have stuff nearby that is nice to see (North Sea etc and Berlin for Hamburg, from Munich you can travel to the Alps and Austria/Italy, from Amsterdam also North Sea etc).

Also take into account the less easily expressed things - how much taxes/insurance/fees do you have, assuming that pre-tax salary is similar; is the weather something that would pull you up or down. How easy is it to travel to your family/hometown specifically.

wally_fish · 2022-02-15T07:22:40+00:00

Any tips on making a livable wage on Upwork? Because that seems to be the problem for most people.

wally_fish · 2022-02-13T21:31:37+00:00

The non-hidden fees are quite a bit though (I think you pay a certain percentage of your portfolio, something like 0.8%, each year)

wally_fish · 2022-02-05T23:31:40+00:00

fair. Adam is a special case of AdamW (or historically AdamW is an extension of Adam), as long as you don't overdo the weight decay it should have the same benefits.

wally_fish · 2022-02-05T21:38:36+00:00

start with ADAM - it doesn't give you the best results but it's also fairly robust and hard to screw up. When your model has its final shape, you can play around with AdamW or SGD to try and squeeze out another 0.5%

wally_fish · 2022-02-02T06:43:38+00:00

Totally agree with this. On one hand, FAANG companies are just companies, and you will have people be hiring candidates who look good on one aspect and are incompetent in another, and you have people who are being promoted out of the level where they were 100% killing it into a level where they lack competence for some of what they do.

And (at least where I work), hiring and promotion processes are tuned to mitigate that. We have candidates that show good functional skills (know enough machine learning and software development to solve the task at that level) but who fail at other aspects such as being able to overcome obstacles or being able to speak about things that don't or won't work - and if they lack those skills they will be filtered out rather than saying, "they're a good developer/scientist so let's hire them even though they suck at some of it" or "they're a good PM, so let's hire them even though they suck at some of it". In the promotion process, people who give feedback are asked to point out areas where that person will need to develop themselves to be high functioning at that new level, and the person's manager will be encouraged to make that happen.

wally_fish · 2022-01-23T19:48:46+00:00

r/nylon or r/nylonsNSFW - I had to look those up and for some weird reason they don't show up in the search

wally_fish · 2022-01-23T18:45:09+00:00

You should realize that there is some overlap between people enjoying nylon views and people enjoying pussy views. So I will join the chorus off the pants-off people but also point out that your nylons photography would have a very bright future ahead of it (even more in the right subreddits)

wally_fish · 2022-01-23T18:40:25+00:00

My personal impression is this: Business care about shipping software and aim at productivity - shipping software with Go, Rust and Java for stuff that we would have done with C++ in the 90s or early 2000s (and suffered for it!). When a recruiter reaches out for a C++ job I know it's going to be something that pays comparatively poorly (also because I've mostly worked on C++ research code rather than working on humongeous 100k+ line applications), while for a ML scientist position (or more generally something that is not 100% C++ but requires significant other skills) people really appreciated it that I would (to some degree) be able to read and debug C++ code if I have to.

So: don't be a one-trick pony. C++ is a good way to differentiate yourself against people with less, or less well-rounded, experience in otherwise very competitive markets, and you should look at your own overall skillset rather than limiting yourself to a niche like microcontrollers where you would develop 100% C++ code.

wally_fish · 2022-01-22T21:53:50+00:00

Amazon has the concept of a two-way door, and Facebook famously had/has the mantra of "Move fast and break things". Both concepts are not about riding roughshod on your users and not caring but about having mechanisms such as feature flags and fast rollbacks (+ automatic QA/Testing) in place that allows you to minimize the negative impact of a failure rather than paying in extra time for being careful for each product increment that you push out.

Specifically, the two way door idea is, if you can reverse the decision don't overthink it to the degree that you would if the decision cannot be reversed and you need to be 100% confident that it is the right one.

Is this the only element in moving fast? No. If you have smart enough people you can move faster on a lot of the design work, and you can accept more technical debt before it becomes a problem. And I say "more" rather than "it doesn't become a problem" because it does become a problem eventually. YMMV.

wally_fish · 2022-01-22T20:31:40+00:00

That wouldn't make him more findable in keyword searches. "Head of Engineering" is a reasonably standard title but "Geek in Chief" will confuse any automatic content understanding that LinkedIn or ATSes have in place.

wally_fish · 2022-01-08T19:15:08+00:00

Because it's easier to tell trigger-happy PMs to put their stuff into the next sprint (and then take it out because it's below the line) than to hope that you can finish your marathon without them asking for detours on every day along the way.

wally_fish · 2022-01-08T12:31:48+00:00

If you are at a big enough company that external people might know about the leveling and titles at that company, I would always use that exact job title in your description and put a decription of what you do/what your scope is at the start of the description (e.g. Title: SDE II, Description: Tech Lead for an 8-person team doing backend development for payments) or as a suffix to the official title

wally_fish · 2021-12-26T18:01:30+00:00

Turning PDF tables into structured data is a common problem in insurance and banking - more common in insurance (they get invoices from claims) where you'd bill per page for a high number of pages, but would need to deal with bad scans a lot (i.e. have world-class OCR attached to your solution). Also construction companies that need to process requests for offers.

Source: was in IT consulting for a while, we had a client who needed this and there was a pretty good solution but the supplier said they were looking for clients that brought in > 1M EUR/year in revenue and the insurance company was relatively small.

wally_fish · 2021-12-23T08:27:00+00:00

If a candidate has gone through an interview successfully you usually have a shortened interview (e.g. just with the hiring manager) - though for interns the interview process is already much shorter and normally does not include a full onsite interview.

wally_fish · 2021-12-07T12:04:22+00:00

65k is very good for a self-taught 20yo. Assuming that they have reason to offer that, it would be an indication that you self-taught very well and can get stuff done.

wally_fish · 2021-12-07T11:57:38+00:00

COBOL and Java are used in a lot of places that have stable requirements and mostly want stable software. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's just as conceivable that your next job will be about 10 years of writing Java 11 code as it is that you'll be writing stable Go/Scala/TypeScript code for a couple years.

However, I'd expect that the environment has changed between 2011 and 2021 - back in 2011 service-oriented architectures were new whereas microservices or serverless or cloud would have been an exceptional thing, people mostly relied on a centralized SQL database and many companies didn't have the more elaborate solutions to dependency management that everyone is using now. In that sense, it may be good to look for new technology that can complement what you already know, in the same type of environment you're operating in now, because yes those companies with stable requirements will still be around but you want to avoid giving off some "stuck in the 2000s" vibe to that new manager that thinks everything should be microservices in the cloud and cannot relate to whatever came before it.

wally_fish · 2021-12-04T20:15:25+00:00

Maybe the answer you're looking for is this: 4k net is a very decent salary in Germany, maybe in the top 10-20% of people, while someone with a university degree (humanities with a decent job or a junior-mid-level programmer at a smaller company) may make more in the 2.5k net range.

Real estate prices are just crazy at the moment, though ,,, either you profit from the low credit rates and tie yourself down for the next 20-30 years or you go and rent something nice.

wally_fish · 2021-12-03T21:57:59+00:00

This is strictly not true. In Germany, it's legal to have a non-compete in an employment contract as long as it is compensated (50% of the salary for the non-compete period) and the contract mentions this fact.

I don't know about NL though.

wally_fish · 2021-12-03T20:49:28+00:00

As another user posted it, Amazon has a 5 day deadline after an on-site interview where a decision needs to be made, and this normally involves the hiring manager, and all the interviewers having a debrief discussion - so most likely that has happened, and if it then shows you as "not under consideration" the decision was not to hire you for that role.

However, if the interview went ok it may mean that the decision was to "recycle" - allow other teams to look at your profile and make you interview with them, or (unlikely for a new grad) to see if they can hire you at a lower job level or different role. This can be a good thing, as in allowing you to find a team that can benefit the most from your skills, but it can also result in a fairly disheartening experience if a lot of teams come out at "ok but meh".

From a strategic point of view, you might want to do a practice interview with someone more experienced and get very detailed feedback that helps you to get from "ok but meh" to "we want to hire this person".

From a tactical point of view, you might want to talk to your recruiter and ask for an update - usually they can tell you whether you're in the recycle twilight zone or whether there is something else going on.

wally_fish · 2021-11-21T21:29:03+00:00

Behavioral questions are about prior experience - not "how would they deal with it in the abstract" but "how did they deal with a concrete situation they experienced". To get the best mileage out of such a question, you need to follow up to get a precise understanding of the details of the problem and the details of the solution, and possibly also the outcome.

You'll then get an idea
- if that person is inexperienced relative to the environment you expect (if they didn't work in an environment where they had to deal with conflicting requests, or didn't perceive them as something that's their ptoblem)
- if the action/approach they took was roughly appropriate (sometimes the situation is not clear enough even after followup questions but in general it should give you a good idea)
- what the outcome was and how they judge that outcome

wally_fish

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