I'm curious what you find exploitative about that?
When I visited a south east asian country I was very surprised by the wealth disparity. However, I'm not seeing the connection between spending money as an expat with a significantly higher income compared to the rest of the country and exploitation. If anything it could be argued that you are injecting more cash into the economy from outside.
Exploitative in a sense where old dudes with questionable morals go to 3rd world countries and use their money to do questionable things like have sex with underage individuals or just exploit women in general. Women will tend to be submissive because they can get financial security. Your average joe programmer in HN isn't the usual type to go and stay in another country and try to assimilate properly. A good portion of them are outcasts or losers in their home countries (for a reason) and trying to experience rockstar life in a 3rd world country. That's a cynical take but if you ever to go Philippines/Vietnam/Indonesia you'll see what I mean and remember this comment. Obviously there are exceptional cases where people marry for "love" but usually it's for financial security.
Have you been living there? I always wonder why people have this idea of Asian women as submissive and expats being exploitative in SEA. Perhaps there are some old guys with questionable morals, but in my experience, neither Asian women are submissive, and most of the people I met (late 20s and early 30s) were normal individuals (both men and women) doing their own thing. This could be my bias, as I'm part of that age range. Anyway, I feel these generalisations are dangerous, e.g. "Obviously there may be exceptional cases where people marry for "love," but usually, it's for financial security". Does this statement not apply to any specific part of the world? If you are married, would your wife be with you only for financial reasons? Then why do you think so poorly about Asians in general.
Thailand and the Philippines are prime destinations for morally dubious westerners to find the "love" they never found at home.
Britain is full of middle aged men with 20-year younger SEA wives (many of whom look almost child-like). I'm amazed the Home Office looks at the "relationship" arrangement and allows all of the visas.
I think Amazon is not as bad as people harp on. However, other FAANG's definitely pay more, have better benefits, give refreshers, and also don't have a culture which heavily emphasizes PIPs.
Since Amazon interviews are similar to other FAANGs, people who pass an Amazon interview have a higher correlation of passing other interviews. Those FAANGs and associated companies tend to have a higher value proposition so people tend to choose them.
I would suggest toning this down it’s really painful to read your self flagellation all over Hackernews. Your tone comes across as people in non Amazon FANGs are gods.
I’ve worked at both FB/Apple in the ML space and have been promoted multiple times. I can promise you people aren’t throwing themselves at my feet to bow down to my amazing intellect. I do not sit and laugh with my heaps of cash at the poor peasants who only make 100K a year. My life is not perfect! People in FANG are not perfect, a lot of the tech there is also not special at all.
Stop obsessing over your career I can promise you no one is paying attention to where you work so closely. Get some friends you’ll see how little this matters. I have many CS friends in non FANG jobs and I do not care where they work nor think less of them. They’re some of the smartest and happiest people I know. Do you really judge people who don’t work at FANG like you judge yourself, because that really makes you a rude misguided person.
By the way I went to a state school not even in the top 50. I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world, I had an amazing time. No one cares where you went to school two years after you graduated. And no one definitely cares about your SAT scores how do you even remember that anymore?!? Seek professional help, stop whining so much, and do something else besides freaking out about Amazon.
I mean, to people like me they might as well be. Even if people don't bow down to you, it's still better than being dismissed and ridiculed for only making $200k at Amazon from a state school with a < $300k net worth. Fwiw, my smartest friends all work at better companies than me (Google, FB, Airbnb, trading firms) and make quite a bit more than me - somewhere between $80-250k. If anything that makes me feel worse. I have friends that are students and they're all miserable, poor, and I can't really do things with them for a lack of money on their part. On the other hand, I can't do anything with my richer friends because I lack money and can't go on expensive vacations or do expensive activities. It's not great for me. It obviously doesn't help that everyone assumes people like me to be stupid, again, due to my lack of pedigree - every year of my (top 200? 250?) undergrad felt like a stab in the chest, I worked so hard to get so little (a resume that can't get me an interview at Jane Street and or a shot at a top school's grad program). I honestly don't have much hope for the future anymore as a loser in meritocracy. There's just no point if anything I do is just going to lead to the same suffering and derision from the meritocrat elites.
You say
“ It obviously doesn't help that everyone assumes people like me to be stupid, again, due to my lack of pedigree”. I am telling you with 100% certainty this is false. People do not think like this.
You should seek therapy to challenge these assumptions you hold.
If I can give you one more anecdotal evidence my partner works at Amazon. I make more than them by over 100K. I do not care, I do not view them any differently. My partner is also proud of their job and likes it. They are smarter than me, it’s just through various circumstances I got a higher paying job. They actually don’t want to leave Amazon right now. They are not depressed that I make more than them. I also try and model my life after them because I view them as more successful than me at life.
Also your friends sound crazy it they are going on trips that you cannot afford on 200K salary. You can definitely afford a few trips to Hawaii a year. Also going out to eat, movies, shopping, camping, hanging out, video gaming etc. are all activities you could do year round on your salary.
I’m done talking back and forth but if I could give you one last message. Use Amazon’s insurance to see a therapist (my partner does and it’s covered). Show them your hacker news comments. Just see what they say. I promise you, you will feel better about these thoughts a few months in the future if you do.
By the way, the reason why I took the time to write out such a long response, is I worry about people like my partner who might read this. While they are quite mentally healthy and I’m sure would brush off your comments I can see someone else slipping into your mindset and getting stressed.
Comments like “FANG gods, I make only 200K, etc.” are really out of touch. I actually hope you someday get a job at Google/Apple/etc. and see that it really is not all that it’s cracked up to be :)
Both the website, and product look very polished. I like the design.
Is this a competitor to PagerDuty? I'm curious what features you're offering to take on them as the incumbent in the space.
I've never actually used either software. The companies I've worked for all use their own in-house incident/oncall frameworks. But would love to know more!
Hey there! Thanks very much. It's all Tailwind CSS — we highly recommend it.
Yes, and no. Almost all of our customers already use PagerDuty, with Opsgenie a distinct second. They predominantly use them to wake people up when things go wrong, but don't use them to actually _run_ their incidents.
I think there's a variety of reasons for this from it not being easy to imprint your process onto PagerDuty, to it being harder to use for non-technical folks, and it not being where you communicate with the rest of your organisation (often Slack).
The most common competitors we come up against are:
1. Your process being written down on a piece of paper, which humans then remember to follow (spoiler: it's hard to do this)
2. In-house tooling that folks have built to help fix this problem. Many scale-ups have built their own (Stripe, Monzo, Robinhood, Transferwise, Influx Data, etc).
We take people from thing went wrong, to response, to debriefing, to following up on actions afterwards. Right now, we don't wake people up through alerting, but it's a natural next step for us to go and do that as well.
I'm not commenting on whether these programs are a good idea or not. But I wanted to point out one thing about these programs I find funny is while the candidates races may be diverse their educational background is usually quite similar. A program at my work is very similar, and the majority of students went to the top ten CS schools.
The education system’s admission criteria is heavily correlated with the hiring criteria, even without taking the prestige of their degrees into the account.
I'm making my first comment on Hackernews because I saw your remark. I would encourage you to seek help for this negative thinking or at the very least reflect. I promise the majority of people in society do not view you as subhuman for working at Amazon. This is really an irrational thought.
Based on your post history I think you are beating yourself up over a non issue. You're working at a top company, with reasonable pay, and exciting projects. Yes some companies pay much higher, have more perks, better wlb, etc. but there will always be a better company wherever you work. Your work doesn't define you.
Chin up my friend, and maybe seek some professional help to improve your thoughts. You don't have to go through life suffering like this! I used to get extremely anxious/depressed focusing on my career but after going through therapy, and yes some medication I have been feeling much much better.
While I appreciate that and I've been working on it, it seems that whatever I do I just see more evidence for it - the $70k wage cut to not associate with people like me, the significantly lower social class and standard of living people like me have all weighs on me pretty heavily these days.
If you ever made it to Google, you'd immediately see the stratification within. The elites with their lake houses... the people operating at levels you never will be able to... the people bailing to start startups because Google got boring.
Fuck it and be happy. And while you're working on it, you should consider no longer voicing your negative thoughts. It definitely doesn't help, and there's a good chance it makes it worse. (Or don't, I'm not telling you what to do obviously)
Perhaps, but I don't think there are even elites at my company with lake houses that they can invite me to for team events - even our directors say they can't afford to vacation in the Hamptons or buy Herman Miller chairs (whereas going to the Boss's $10M house for whisky tasting is seemingly common at Google).
This is not how people outside of the HN/Reddit/Twitter bubble view Amazon. They're generally a highly trusted company and the American populace views people who work there fairly positively.
Amazon have one of the most trusted brands in America, rivaling Google in how people view them.
It's your life, so you're welcome to feel as you will, but if it's on inaccuracies then you're just hurting yourself.
When I visited a south east asian country I was very surprised by the wealth disparity. However, I'm not seeing the connection between spending money as an expat with a significantly higher income compared to the rest of the country and exploitation. If anything it could be argued that you are injecting more cash into the economy from outside.
Happy to be enlightened if I'm missing something!