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.
Check the policy again. As of 2017-04-01 (for reals) there are effectively no restrictions on internal transfers. Including "performance" restrictions.
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.
I can see the G major argument. That would be a I/3 into IV. My professor would have said that answer is wrong due to voice leading, the 7 to 1 is very powerful. And the last chord is C, in root, meaning that's where you have resolved. Had the second interval been G+B, it would make the GMaj argument stronger. Ultimately, it's really context. You're really just asking about cadences, very roughly translated means "how chords resolve".
B+G is a minor sixth, not a major third. If you invert it, it's a major third.
B+G followed by C+G is most likely going to sound like a cadence in C Major. You could claim it is G major only if you considered it unresolved transition to the subdominant.
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 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.
Amen to that. My problem is that there are too many things that I do for love of the game. I want to spend more time reading, and drawing, and painting, and carving, and tinkering, and gaming, and gardening, and blacksmithing, and cycling, and motorcycling, and writing, and paddleboarding, and traveling, and catching up on TV, playing boardgames with my kids, going to movies with my wife, and cooking, and skating, and lifting weights, and playing softball, and walking my dog, and working on my house, and calligraphy, and on and on and on...
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 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.
Not for every reader but Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) is something between historical fiction and science fiction. Worth a try in your case.
Also, it's hard to go wrong with the yearly Hugo Award winners and nominees. Sometimes they are middle entries in long running series, which is worth checking on Wikipedia if you like to start at Book 1. Usually it is just going to mean the whole series is great.
How about a few great authors who have all won?
Ursula K LeGuin
Lois McMaster Bujold
CJ Cherryh
Connie Willis
Jo Walton
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.