> Amazon engineer salaries are in the 90th+ percentile in the tech industry
FANG engineers are typically in the 99th percentile of tech excellence. Amazon engineers are not well paid when compared to professionals of the same league. Amazon SDE1s in Austin, Texas have a salary of around $120k/year and new hires have a total compensation package of around $160k/year. In Europe salary ranges for the same role go from €80k/year in northern countries and €40k/year in southern European countries. Check Glassdoor.
We're discussing positions and professionals which compete in a global stage.
Amazon is far from well paid for this sort of position. It's one of the key factors why Amazon SDEs tend to bail out after 2 or 3 years. They are smart enough to not bother with high stress, low-paying jobs .
> "functioning" is an exaggeration. Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time.
This is a silly red herring. Top speed means nothing. The only key factor is door-to-door travel time, and it means nothing if a train goes 180km/m in some sections and 320km/h in others if in the end you reach your destination 1h earlier than b flying.
> They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled.
Things that are completely unheard of in any sort of public transportation service, specially air travel!
Please look at the Netherland's Schipol airport, one of the largest in the world and often used as the paragon of well functioning hub, and how they've been systematically cancelling and delaying flights throughout the year.
> They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
No, not really. Only the lowest-cost low-cost operators tend to beat high speed railway on price, but they often have flights to airports well outside of city centers or even in suboptimal terminals with all sorts of hidden costs, and ultimately lead to a slower suboptimal experience.
> A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist.
Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering.
The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
> The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places.
Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed.
Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time.
It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds.
Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
> The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical.
The author is showing considerable ignorance on the topic.
For decades it's well understood that railway top speed is lower than airwaily travel. That's irrelevant. For travelling, the key factors are door-to-door speed and rider comfort.
It makes no sense to look at plane speed as the defining factor because anyone onboarding to a flight has to endure mandatory 60m-90m waits within an airport to pass through security and embark, not to mention the fact that airports are very often located tens of km outside of city centers. Meanwhile, railway travel is hop on/hop off with central stations typically right in city centers.
Consequently, it's very well understood for decades now that high-speed railway is by far the fastest solution for trips up to a 600km-800km range. Above that threshold there's a tradeoff threshold with air travel, with longer travel distance favouring flights over train trips. Increasing high-speed rail's comercial speed only works to hike the crisp threshold where high-speed rail dominates air travel.
> I think this would throw cold water on some feminist claims of only women get prosecuted for fraud like Elizabeth Holmes and men aren't.
I believe you're making stuff up. I went through the trouble of googling for your "only women get prosecuted for fraud" claim and if anything I found exact opposite claims.
Amusingly enough, googling for "only women get prosecuted for fraud" does return search hits on Elizabeth Holmes, but showcasing how she was the only woman prosecuted for fraud.
I feel you're either making things up just to take cheap shots at women or you misunderstood references to how Elizabeth Holmes was one of the very few women prosecuted for fraud.
> That being said ‘the more words you know, the more things you can say’ as my old English teacher used to say.
Sure, you can say more things. That's great, if your goal is to talk a lot without caring if anyone else around you is listening to what you're saying.
> You really believe that it’s because of a single rep? Then you also might also believe that most management disasters are “programming errors” like that sometimes say?
It's uncanny how all of the world's problems are either caused by lower-end employees or acts of god.
The higher the position, the more infallible they are.
That must be why higher-uos are paid the most: they are physically unable to do no wrong.
> You're going after the wrong people here. Journalists hungry for clickbait can't wait for incompetent customer reps to tweet some stupid shit. So the "journalist" can blow it out of proportion. It's literally their bread and butter.
You're quick to spread around accusations of incompetence and dishonesty.
Is it too hard to think that a corporation's main PR communication channel actually reflects the company's official PR policy, and that their backpedalling is really the company changing it's public message to reflect a change of heart in a company policy?
> > The point is not to never use frameworks, but to isolate them. To call them from a single place. One that we own. That we are responsible for and that we limit very much in what it can touch.
I had the misfortune of working on a project which abstracted a framework. It was awful. It ended up being an ad-hoc component that was half-façade, half-adapter that was inadvertently tightly-coupled with the framework. It added an awful lot of complexity with the only tradeoff being theoretically being able to abstract away the underlying framework.
It was not worth it. It created far more problems than those that it solved.
> I think many, maybe most, companies that try to build loosely coupled and highly cohesive code bases end up failing and it ends up being a mess.
Companies who try to build any type of codebase end up with a mess. Always. No exception.
There is no reason to pretend software development's natural tendency to increase entropy is exclusive to a specific type of software architecture. In fact, some developers even go to the extent of criticising software architects for existing, because they have "rules" and enforce "order" and "organization".
If anything, being mindful of a specific architecture goes already a long way to fight entropy.
> But, what the commented is saying is that it is not just that we do not know everything so our theories are incomplete, it is that the "scientifically derived knowledge" that we do know, is mostly false.
This is your personal assertion, not a fact. And a baseless one, at best.
Science is based on seeing stuff for yourself. If you ever come across something that fits your personal definition of "scientific derived knowledge that is mostly false" then you have on your hands clearly something noteworthy for the scientific community to see. If however your personal finding is something that no one but yourself is able to verify then that's something else, and it is not supportive of your thesis that everyone is wrong.
> I think once you see how the sausage is made you start to see science for what it is: just another complicated, fallible process built by many fallible people with a wide set of perverse incentives that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage.
To me this sounds like a major misconception of what science is.
Scientists aren't expected to be infallible, let alone right at the first try. Science is an iterative process of building knowledge and understanding of how things work, which by definition means there's always stuff that is not known and misconceptions on how things work. The output of science is progress, hut the bleeding edge is often riddled with swing-and-misses.
As a clear example, see how the plate tectonics theory was addressed initially by the scientific community.
> Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!!
Oh this brings back memories. A few years ago I worked for a company which offloaded functional testing to a team in Chennai, including pre-release shakedown tests. We did that until there was a release which started to blow up in a critical point that was very hard to recover from, right after being deployed to all customers. We were baffled because we had test sets covering precisely this scenario, and the tests all passed. To cut to the chase, we soon discovered that our trusty Chennai team was not to be trusted and in reality was signing off releases without performing a single test. Everyone in that team was fired and replaced by other replacement testers also based from Chennai, and once the new testers started running the exact same test sets then all sorts of red flags started to surface. Now, here's the kicker: it only took a couple of weeks until the new Chennai-based testers started to flag tests as passes even though they never ran them at all, which we discovered because we also added telemetry to track those.
Anecdotal evidence, but we only ceased to have problems with Chennai-based teams once we finished automating away their job.
> Indians were by far the hardest to work with. They ghosted women systematically which was a nightmare for our project manager.
I recall that Amazon went through the trouble of paying for TV ads proudly stating that they now have in India delivery posts manned exclusively by women, and the ad is comprised of indian delivery women delivering packages to indian men who in turn are giving them all sorts of weird looks.
I recall seeing this ad and thinking to myself: are things in India so bad to the point that this sort of measure and ad passes off as something to be proud about?
Irrelevant. Just because you work for a US company that does not mean your kids should go to US colleges.