lochlan's comments

lochlan | 4 years ago | on: MAME Turns 25

Pay-to-continue is a concession to the reality that an arcade is designed to generate money. The balanced and high-intensity gameplay gets you interested, the continue feature just takes your money. The solution is to never continue! Try for a 1 credit clear.

lochlan | 5 years ago | on: We throw away our power as engineers working for other people

Why should I incur the risk and time investment of founding a startup when I can enjoy comfort and success working at a FANG company? Startups _sound_ great, but death marching myself without compensation is a stressful proposition.

Sure, I have a handful of ideas that seem reasonable and dreams of startup success—and maybe I'll explore them in early retirement.

lochlan | 6 years ago | on: Everyone claims they are following “agile methods” but few do (2018)

IMO the problem is that people want to buy Agile. They want to pay a consultant, or go to a class, implement a dozen scrum rituals, and call it “agile.”

Agile is not Scrum, Kanban, or even XP. It is the manifesto. It is shipping all the time at a sustainable development pace.

I have had great success implementing agile and I attribute this to continually reindexing on the manifesto and examining the impact of our process. Spoiler: removing processes is a solution as often as it is adding a process. No amount of stand-ups or sprint planning or retrospectives makes your software process a good one.

lochlan | 7 years ago | on: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

Most of it. Base salary caps out at $160k except for NY/SF where it caps out at $180k. Once you get into the higher levels most of your comp is stock, which historically has worked out very well for Amazon employees.

lochlan | 7 years ago | on: Why you're having trouble hiring

Software Engineers outside the US make less, full stop. Amazon has a COL adjustment for SF and NYC but it’s not as much as you might think. Not as sure about other companies but I believe Google is similar (they also have a small local office).

The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.

Source: live in PDX, work at Amazon.

lochlan | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Did reading HN bring anything valuable into your life?

Two companies ago I posted in the “Who is Hiring” thread. I ended up only getting a couple responses (while other channels got much more activity) but I ended up hiring one of them. Though I’ve since left that company, my former employee has become a good friend and confidant, and ended up following me to every company I’ve jumped to.

lochlan | 7 years ago | on: Amazon Workers Facing Firing Can Appeal to a Jury of Their Co-Workers

You’re talking about Amazon like it is a small company. It isn’t. None of the scenarios you described are possible with Pivot, Amazon works hard to make sure the “jury” is impartial and has not been tampered with. Pivot adds an important check to the PIP process and I’m glad it exists.

Source: I work at Amazon.

lochlan | 8 years ago | on: Why your developers are slow

Speaking as someone who has worked as a developer for multiple early-stage startups, the opposite is true.

Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:

1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.

2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.

lochlan | 8 years ago | on: Why your developers are slow

How was technical debt not one of the things mentioned? In my experience that’s by far the #1 reason for poor velocity.

lochlan | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2017)

Amazon Delivery Experience | Front-End and Back-End Engineers | Portland, Oregon | Fulltime | ONSITE

My team at Amazon is hiring in Portland! We are looking for both front-end devs with 3+ years experience and back-end devs of all levels. Must have a strong CS background. Smart coworkers, awesome products, great compensation, and a fantastic culture forming here at the Portland office!

If you are interested or have questions, please reach out to me at [email protected] (please note that I am not the hiring manager but would be happy to refer qualified candidates)

links:

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528376

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528377

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/528378

https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/539351

lochlan | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)

Opal | Portland, OR | Front End Engineer, Mid-Level or Senior | Full-time, onsite | http://workwithopal.com/

Opal is hiring! We are a collaboration platform for omni-channel brand marketing teams. After recently doing a large raise we're expanding our team, and if you are a seasoned front-end web developer we would love to talk to you! We're currently migrating a Backbone application to React, along with some other interesting efforts—there are plenty of cool projects to go around as we scale our team and application!

Please e-mail your resume and a link to your github profile to [email protected] and I will refer you to the relevant hiring manager! Thanks!

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