To this day, I still regret not rejoining the first team I worked for, otherwise I would still be …

> to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.

I have done a round one interview and I don’t see how it can be interpreted to do anything but turn away people with a brain. Memorize Amazon’s insane company values and relate your resume experience to it. And that I mean every single bullet point. Interviewers were all run by robotic people. Coding test had zero flexibility, you had to just write code in a special barebones text editor that had zero feedback besides pass/fail. You’d have to solely care about Amazon RSUs to consider that job. They are self-selecting for the worst kinds of candidates. The dumb thing is that it should be a job that doesn’t burn people out because they basically own the market and haven’t needed to do any sort of innovation. Amazon’s corporate culture just has a burnout fetish.

> I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams Ha, my interview for an Amazon internship was an hour after a 3-hour final exam :-) But the job market right now is quite bad, and after hundreds upon hundreds of internship applications I would've been stupid to give up this chance. I would work for Amazon in a heart beat.

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.

If you had been born early enough, you probably wouldn't be a programmer at all because far fewer people were. Conversely, everybody is born at the right time to join in the heyday of something amazing. You just have to identify that something and be lucky enough and/or try hard enough to become one of the few future-gandalfs. There are companies today making flying cars and dexterous humanoid robots ffs! Or SpaceX! Amazing engineering work never stopped, it just didn't linger on in the same fields.

i’ve interviewed with aws and received offers twice over the years. the first time they made me pay for my own lunch. the second time no lunch break was afforded. i didn’t accept the offers though i know several truly excellent people who work there.

> gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview Although I doubt it was really their intention to be passive aggressive, I have to say: That was a Flawless Victory of passive aggression.

I got interviewed twice for Google, the first one I made it to the second round of phone calls, the second one only the first phone call. The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences. Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way. I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.