You can blame that on the studios, they make licensing content extremely complex.
Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.
Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.
You won't get fired for no reason, but you do get compared with your colleagues.
But you also won't get promoted just because of seniority, most of what people say about being hard to get promoted is true. However, there are only 3 SDE levels if you don't count Principal, so SDE II has a very large range of pay rates, and you don't need to get promoted to get a higher pay. Higher levels are all about being a better leader and influencing more people. There are people who spend 10 years as SDE II and are happy with it, because they don't care about leading others, they just care about doing their job, and this is fine.
How does me, a single person and a simple SDE, being defensive (was I being defensive just because I wanted to clear up misconceptions?), says anything about an entire company's culture and image?
Seems like you had a very bad experience at Amazon, but you are also spilling a lot of lies about the company, and I'm afraid people might buy it.
Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid or what I work on, they are there to support the business and are accountants, financial managers, etc.
> It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers.
Who isn't? Most companies are short on talented engineers.
> Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business.
Shows how little you know about the company. Instant Video is huge, Website is huge, other/restricted projects are huge, and there are a lot of engineers on all those teams. Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are.
> If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types.
As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer.
> All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back
The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least).
The other points you make are either subjective or anecdotes, but overall I think you just hate the company for some reason and are spilling every negative interaction you ever had.
I truly hope talented people don't buy on your negativity.
Amazon is definitely not a terrible place to work at, even though it does have some problems (what company doesn't?).
Duolingo has an also cool approach, where they offer free language courses for students, and charge companies that want certain documents translated.
The students themselves translate those documents as part of the course, and once a consensus is reached (a given amount of students came up with the same translation) the document is returned to the submitter, who pays for its translation.
Exactly what I thought as well, [as a Brazilian myself] I predict this PT-SO will be filled with "easy" questions easily answered by a search, and should have a very low level of actual good content. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, I tried participating in multiple Brazilian programming communities, but it's always the same beginner-level-you-could-have-figured-it-out-yourself type of questions.
As for the youth that doesn't speak English well yet, I suppose they could see the low quality that this PT-SO would be as an incentive to actually start learning it :-)
So I just installed KDE 4.10, plugged my HDMI cable to watch some series and - TA-DA! - it is finally recognizing AND adjusting the screens in the right resolution without my assistence! It still asks me if I want to do it, which is great, but it actually set up the resolutions exactly right (opposed to gnome3, which messed up the resolutions completely). Great stuff!
Call me whatever you want, say I'm wrong, I don't care, but I hate kinds of Email Marketing, no matter what, because everything comes with a catch.
Would I like a ticket with 50% off from Brazil to NY? OFF COURSE I WOULD! But I know that if you had to send a mass message about that, it certainly has a catch, so I won't even bother looking at it.
Update: Google has released a new YouTube app for Android which allows videos to be downloaded and stored in a permanent fashion on the device. I don't think that it is necessary to comment this.
How convenient that they decided to start shutting down services that download videos/mp3 from youtube while launching an app to do exactly that
I have the impression that he's trying to glamorize spam. I suppose it also depends on the concept you have of what's spam.
For me, if I receive a marketing e-mail from a company that I never made direct contact with, that's spam. I don't care if they have a "commercial agreement" and got my e-mail from a "legitimate" vendor; if I haven't specifically subscribed for updates from you, you're spamming me, and I will not care about your "content".
He makes a point of saying that this is a marketing strategy and that we should not be outraged because someone is trying to sell us something. But this is similar to someone knocking on your door to sell stuff; it's no illegal, but it's annoying and I hate you for doing that. I like my personal e-mail to be personal, and I hate having to filter out the garbage I never subscribed to.
If I want to buy something, I'll go and search for it, or I'll ask someone about it, but I will not look in my e-mail to see if I ever got an e-mail from someone saying they sell it.
Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.
Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.