Taskrabbit takes a 20% cut as well, I'd say it's going rate for sure. Especially with Amazon backing it and the guarantee.

1 out of 300 offers is really low assuming you're doing 2-3 screens then a ~5 panel onsite after that. I'd be seriously concerned with your sourcers.

Sarcasm generally doesn't go over too well over here..

Too many crazy posters who are dead serious.

no it doesn't!

It's the money.

I get several emails from recruiters each week, almost none of them include a salary range at all.. I won't even respond.

That's short sighted.

I agree, but having to spend the time on the phone with them or writing up a crafty email where I actually don't use 'hello $NAME' just to find out the salary range would be nice.

Any competent recruiter should be able to open a conversation with a developer by quoting a salary range.

Perhaps, but it can also be a good filter. Experience replying to the messages would tell.

I've had some rather amazing opportunities that came without a salary range in the initial email. Using that as the primary factor is surely suboptimal.

Curious to know what these emails looked like. Were they random messages from recruiters? Or emails from friends or friends of friends?

From recruiters. I can spot the good ones.

Care to share your knowledge with us? I've just been ignoring them all as well.

The Taxi drivers in Seattle protested by blocking downtown traffic in their cabs on multiple occasions when the Uber/Lyft vote was going on. Uber and Lyft are now capped at 150 cars each.

Employee Handbook. A lot of the big tech companies have something similar but it's pretty bad at Amazon. You cannot write any code in your personal time and submit it without being approved. I mean anywhere, homework questions or telling a person how to write a bash script that copies a file each day.

"if you care about, say, responding to load within ten seconds, VMs aren't a great choice."

That's actually exactly why I would use a VM..

You can spin up, configure, and push into production an application in a new virtual machine in ten seconds? I'd like to see proof of that.

The best I've managed was ninety seconds on my own hardware and three minutes (on average) in AWS.

Ah sorry! I didn't think you meant literally "10 seconds", was assuming you just meant quickly (a few minutes).

I can't really think of a use case though where someone would need more capacity in sub 10 seconds. Maybe if you only intend to scale horizontally with a bunch of 500Mb instances and had little to no room to set an appropriate scaling threshold? What would be a couple examples? With the apps I've seen the past several years generally they have scaling thresholds at 'X' resource and 3 minutes is more than enough to provision extra capacity for their needs.

Also, kind of ironic but your site is giving me a 503 :p

This isn't exactly news and belongs on reddit under one of their conspiracy forums.. Amazon has quite a few number of people working to stop this type of stuff. If you want to help I'd shoot them this link.

Some people may be 'product testers', take a look at the person "Mystic Reviewers". She is a real person, her pics in her reviews match her facebook page. She works at a reputation management company in San Fran and only has done 5 star reviews.

@gonzi I think your comments are a bit cynical. I don't think this sort of stuff is common knowledge. If it is true that there is a ring of sellers, this is really highly coordinated, dare I say almost organized ecommerce crime. I for one, certainly would like to know these sellers get away with it. I think it is appropriate to get Hacker News community to weigh in on how it might be achieved.