Pay-to-continue is a concession to the reality that an arcade is designed to generate money. The balanced and high-intensity gameplay gets you interested, the continue feature just takes your money. The solution is to never continue! Try for a 1 credit clear.

How many times will you play and not continue? Might as well continue.

And that's why I play Nethack on a public server, instead of locally. Removes these temptations.

Why should I incur the risk and time investment of founding a startup when I can enjoy comfort and success working at a FANG company? Startups _sound_ great, but death marching myself without compensation is a stressful proposition.

Sure, I have a handful of ideas that seem reasonable and dreams of startup success—and maybe I'll explore them in early retirement.

Why should I incur the risk and time investment of founding a startup OR the culture at a FANG company, when I can thankfully avoid both and still be compensated really well and enjoy my work.

It's not like there's only two options.

What exactly are you risking (or incurring) with regards to FANG culture? From my perspective it's all upside.

It's not for everyone, just the same as working for startups. I prefer working with a small team, and having less external teams to deal with, and shorter pipelines. We run a service with true five nines availability requirements so wherever we can reduce unnecessary complexity its allows us to focus the complexity in the right places where it is needed.

Counterfeit items, e.g. video games, are all over eBay. I’ve reported many auctions over the years as infringing and have never seen one taken down.

I might consider Myst a “killer app,” especially for its time.

IMO the problem is that people want to buy Agile. They want to pay a consultant, or go to a class, implement a dozen scrum rituals, and call it “agile.”

Agile is not Scrum, Kanban, or even XP. It is the manifesto. It is shipping all the time at a sustainable development pace.

I have had great success implementing agile and I attribute this to continually reindexing on the manifesto and examining the impact of our process. Spoiler: removing processes is a solution as often as it is adding a process. No amount of stand-ups or sprint planning or retrospectives makes your software process a good one.

Most of it. Base salary caps out at $160k except for NY/SF where it caps out at $180k. Once you get into the higher levels most of your comp is stock, which historically has worked out very well for Amazon employees.

Base salary of $200K or more is definitely achievable for senior (level 5 or higher) engineers at big name companies in SF. I have friends who recently changed jobs so I know this for certain.

That said, the stock offers were excellent as well, sometimes more than salary.

Software Engineers outside the US make less, full stop. Amazon has a COL adjustment for SF and NYC but it’s not as much as you might think. Not as sure about other companies but I believe Google is similar (they also have a small local office).

The best setup IMO is to work at a FAANG company outside the bay, it’s the best of both worlds. Supposedly Amazon pays p90 of market rate, but in my area it’s more like p99.

Source: live in PDX, work at Amazon.

I’ve heard that working remotely (full time) for Facebook, Google, or Netflix is nearly impossible though unless you’re truly indispensable to the company. This may be 1-3% of their employees that can actually leverage that option?

Not work remotely, work in a distributed office.

What’s the benefit of being “not connected to Amazon retail?” Serving a large customer that demands scale seems useful for driving the platform forward—what is the downside?

If I had to guess it's the perception that Amazon is out to compete in any and everything, and if they wanted to they could figure out what products and services are the growing the fastest based on the customer usage data from AWS and then come out with their own competitor.

I used to do $100,000 a month in revenue on Amazon with one HP skew. The product grew to #1 in its category within a couple months, another month after which Amazon started selling it to, "shipped from sold by Amazon".

Amazon is happy to help be your growth partner until you prove worth devouring.

Why would Netflix fund Amazon's prime video service? Why would Walmart fund amazon.com and Whole Foods? Why would Dropbox fund Amazon Drive?

AWS is their most profitable business in terms of margin. It makes sense to avoid funding your competition if possible, which is a problem for Amazon given how many business divisions they have and continue to add.

Big retailers are dead set on not supporting their competition, valid reasoning or not, you won’t find them on AWS for that reason alone.

Competition. As Amazon grows as a conglomerate, competitors are less inclined to use their services, even if that one service isn't what they're competing over.

Two companies ago I posted in the “Who is Hiring” thread. I ended up only getting a couple responses (while other channels got much more activity) but I ended up hiring one of them. Though I’ve since left that company, my former employee has become a good friend and confidant, and ended up following me to every company I’ve jumped to.

What’s wrong with working at Amazon?