On the other hand, when you're in the trenches of a product team at Amazon, good engineering takes a back seat to features, deadlines, and keeping everything running. There was an incredible amount of pressure from the top to maintain high levels of service, but not a lot of support for taking the time to refactor or rework those systems to address the underlying causes of service disruption. Everything was always an emergency, but we always had to make the shallow fixes.

Overall, I'm much happier at Google where there is a lot of support for good engineering at all levels of the organization, not just as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

As for the certification and elitism. The cert process was very straightforward and relevant. People easily forget that metalworking and some woodworking machines don't let you learn by experimenting. These machines kill in seconds, sometimes for mistakes that are very unintuitive. Like wearing gloves has killed several people. Which is unintuitive when you are handling razor sharp pieces of metal. Or the recent fatal accident at Yale where student was pulled in by her hair.

As for the particulars of Ihab. He is a very smart and diligent guy but he had very little practical machine shop experience. He recognized it himself and took classes to compensate. These standards aren't high just due to Rod, but because most Googlers are smart enough to be critical of their own skills when faced with lethal equipment.

Re-posted from this earlier thread on the same subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2487979

Edit: s/MIT/Yale/ for the lathe accident. Thanks.

As it should. When these companies merge, buy other companies out, or execute reverse takeovers, there's always talk of "brand synergies" and all of the business advantages of having one set of products associated with another. There's absolutely no reason why that particular sword shouldn't have two edges to it.

They aren't talking about the PSN Hack that brought down the network this time, they are going back and forth about how PSN stores the user's CC information in plain text on the console and that a shady/grey custom firmware has the potential to skim that information off the hardware and onto a bad guy's server.

The only slightly frightening thing about this is how they allude to the idea that this plain text CC information and security codes are transmitted over plain text, but that information is false. All transactions done between your PS3 console and the PSN network were done over SSL.

Let me explain: I work with the Urlteam, a group of people that saves shorturl->longurl mappings for a bunch of shorteners. The typical life cycle of small shorteners is this:

- URL shortener opens, gets some praise for weird feature that bit.ly doesn't have.

- People actually don't care about feature and continue to use bit.ly.

- Spammers discover the shortener and abuse it.

- Owner closes the shortener because he can't deal with the spam.

All that remains are some non-functional links.

Works out well for everyone - so, to some degree, a valid filter.

Certainly possible that it's purely coincidental, but seems unlikely.

The quote from _why uses "taste[s]" as a substitute for "likes / dislikes" whereas Ira Glass talks about "taste" (singular) as "the ability to appreciate greatness".

Assuming many or most here think it is relevant, it should be possible to respond to my question reasonably, without buzzwords and with only moderate downvoting.

It's going to be unfortunate when I can't do this anymore because of people blowing this issue out of proportion. I hope Apple will at least provide the option of caching this data for longer than 7 days.