You are an alchemist whose spacecraft crashed at a nexus between worlds. You need to discover and perform alchemical rituals to explore and try to escape.
It has some great quality of life features, such as allowing you to re-perform any ritual you have successfully completed in a single command, and allowing you to recall any significant information you have deduced.
On top of this, some great writing and a very strange atmosphere.
I'll plug Scandal by Shusaku Endo. It is by a Japanese Catholic novelist and was written near the end of his career (lifetime achievement award timeframe).
It is about a Japanese Catholic novelist near the end of his career, who is accepting an award when he is accosted by reporters asking about rumors that he has been seen carousing in the red light district. He decides to investigate the rumors, but he isn't ready for what he's going to find.
It's a kind of meta, semi-autobiographical interrogation of the author and the pillars on which he built his life, that in some ways would be impossible to adapt to any other medium.
Amazon warehouses are shelters for things. Either someone pays the fee and adopts the thing, or it goes to the farm upstate.
There are lots of thing mills breeding special things that wind up in the shelter. It's a cold and cruel business, but that's humans trying to make a buck for you.
If things don't get adopted, they don't always get killed though. Sometimes they get adopted for pennies on the dollar, and move elsewhere in the system.
Definitely, although the quality of life goes way up with a computer doing admin.
There was a weekly column at Rock Paper Shotgun that covered them (and adjacent stuff like simulation), and lately the writer has taken up residence at a new URL.
You mostly play the vanilla game of Minecraft without programming. The survival loop is to mine resources in order to craft better tools that allow you to explore, build, and defeat enemies.
You can get a lot of mileage out of it this way and never touch the programming side. It is an all time bestseller for good reason.
There is an in game material called redstone that is used for simple electrical engineering and circuitry. The devices can play music, push blocks around, open doors, fire arrows, run train cars, and other applications.
The programming starts with command blocks, which can use redstone triggers to execute keyword commands.
There are a bunch of mods that can add automation through programming. For instance, programming a mining robot to drill out a tunnel, using Lua.
Mod programming itself would often be in Java, and add new game entities or systems. This can get fairly advanced and there are some total conversion mods (eg some Pokemon clones).
There are other fun games that are more like programming, like those from Zachtronics. So why Minecraft? It's fun and familiar, and provides a massive canvas for creativity that fires the imagination.
Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company.
Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre.
Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.
They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.
I'm intrigued by the idea that users will be able to solve this problem on the client side. Perhaps not on the underlying data directly, but running an adversarial browser agent clicking its way purposefully through the internet, in a tab you never look at.
I interviewed people for Amazon as well before moving to another FAANG. All I would amplify here is that entry level is entry level, especially in software. None of the college hires have professional experience (maybe internships, but they had to start from nothing to get those anyway). So what you are trying to do is
1) not be an asshole; look at their leadership principles and figure out how you resonate with them; answer honestly if you never did that
2) beat the technical questions. they are a proxy for skills and experiences
I used and recommend Leetcode for #2... for entry level I don't think you should need the paid tier.
If there were a Leetcode for not being an asshole, I would recommend the paid tier.
I try not to hype up albums I love too much anymore.
I think of Radiohead as our late stage Beatles. Experimental and exciting, even if there's a jagged edge now and then.
In Rainbows was very accessible and holds up in my view.
OK Computer was more of a surprise. Listen to The Bends first, and you will hear what a break it was in quality and style. Their next release, Kid A, was the one that was hotly anticipated. It was also a huge departure, but when they were the biggest band in the world.
Kid A holds up too.
I think Radiohead lives up to the hype. One way to check on this is to watch them live (say, on YouTube) or pick up some of their concerts on etree (a free taper sharing site). They make headphone records, and then they replicate most of their sounds in real time.
Factorio has a veneer of RTS but its challenge and interest comes from factory design and managing queues of supply and demand (if you want to think about it like that). It layers complexity on complexity.
Rimworld is all about character management and anecdote creation in my view. The challenge and interest is about managing randomness and character driven conflict in a game designed to produce conflict.
"But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion."
-- The Tragedy of the Commons
I recommend the whole paper as a good think on the unintended consequences of not biasing the options of people away from collective irresponsibility.
I would ask about how long people have worked on that team, how many have come on and left in the last year, and how many headcount they are getting in OP1.
This will tell you a lot about whether this team is growing and successful, stagnant, or on fire.
Getting paged a lot is a hallmark of teams you don't want to be on, but in the last couple of years, Amazon has instituted policies that make it easier to internally transfer (no strict time limit on how long you have to stay with a team).
Getting paged is sort of a proxy for the real thing you want to know: how many people are voting with their feet.
The example he gave was about consensus, and when you want to stop fighting. No one else can actually force you to stop fighting and move on to commit.
You don't have to win or draw out every argument, and you don't have to be convinced of everything. Sometimes you just put a pin in it and go.
That's funny because B+G, C+G to me says G major: a major third, then a fourth. Is the ear guided to keys by inversion, some inversions more natural or root-y than others?
I've been composing pop music for a long time without knowing stuff like this.
Before I worked here, I read Steve Yegge's posts on interviews at Amazon and Google. You cannot get information more straight from the horse's mouth.
I also agree with the general point that you are better off doing interview prep than your general undergrad algorithms courses.
But the catch is that interview prep will lead you back to CS fundamentals anyway. This is a both/and, not an either/or.
The other thing I wanted to address is whether working at Amazon can be practical and cool.
My team is the full stack physical rentals team. When you press a Rent-Now button on Amazon.com, you enter my team's world. Today, we rent physical textbooks to millions of students every semester, and they all get returned at the same time.
We own custom checkout, order management, and return customer experiences. Underlying them is a service ecosystem we built and maintain. To handle the seasonal, spiky nature of our business (back to school, Christmas vacation returns), we use AWS to scale up and down during peaks.
Success breeds success, and we're working on category expansion. Twenty engineers in three teams run the software for this business. That is cool.
There is an incredibly broad spectrum of work going on at Amazon, from mammoth services to front end optimization and everything in between, including unfortunately some very unhappy firefighting operations. Undergirding it is heavy company investment in builder tools and infrastructure, and excellent engineers.
One person's cool is another person's depressing, but I would look at the job listing carefully before writing off a stint at any of the Titans of software.
I had a year like that, 2014. I had four specific goals: write an album of music, create a video game, write a novel, and continue my chronological reread of Stephen King.
By the end of the year, I had written 60 pages and read one of the Stephen King books.
In 2015 I doubled down on music, and recorded 10 songs.
I started in 2000. I have a basic competence and can accompany myself and compose pop songs, but I somewhat regret not having put in the time up front in lessons and deliberate practice. I could have had 15 years of compound interest.
That said, I do play every day, or mostly, for love of the game. Life's too short to work or play without love.
I started counting calories on my mobile, to lose weight. I eat whatever I want but I record everything. Over time certain aspects of eating like frequent snacking and eating in ignorance get annoying. So you stop doing them.
Somewhere in there I remembered swimming and got a tape and learned to swim laps.
There's a silver bullet for you, diet and exercise.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/376240/Hadean_Lands/
You are an alchemist whose spacecraft crashed at a nexus between worlds. You need to discover and perform alchemical rituals to explore and try to escape.
It has some great quality of life features, such as allowing you to re-perform any ritual you have successfully completed in a single command, and allowing you to recall any significant information you have deduced.
On top of this, some great writing and a very strange atmosphere.