Agreed, I feel like the article didn't address the other major benefit of sync calls, namely their simplicity.

A system built on purely synchronous calls is infinitely easier to reason about and design in all aspects other than e2e latency.

I'd almost approach from the opposite direction, defaulting to sync calls till you have concrete performance reasons not to.

Every time you make an async call there is a whole state machine that has to be instantiated and managed. The only situations I would argue justify async over sync:

1. You are making an I/O bounded call and most of the CPU time would otherwise be spent idle.

2. You are making a CPU bounded call that the UI thread cannot directly await.

3. You need to propagate an asynchronous call context for one of the 2 above scenarios.

There are situations where you can put yourself in a position where it seems async needs to be everywhere (i.e., sharding a monolith to a bunch of separate networked elements).

Ironic read given I'm currently sat on a half hour delayed, hopelessly overcrowded (due to 2 prior cancellations) Avanti west coast service.

I'll be happy to claim my delay repay on my employer's dime for the 5th time this year. My only regret is that I booked off-peak

Oh it gets so much worse. Train is now parked up just outside Manchester with zero power. Another 10mins is worth £35 at this point

Did you get there in the end?

Yeah, 56 minutes late in the end. I would have happily traded another 4 minutes for £35. Next time I'll sabotage a door or two

(For the benefit of British transport police, the above is satire)

Zeno's train ride.

Yeah, I’ve moved off vscode entirely, back to fully featured out of the box ides for me. Jetbrains make some excellent tools and I don’t need to install 25 (dubious) plugins for them to be excellent

Most FAANG and FAANG adjacents will background check after interviews so you're rolling the dice on getting blacklisted.

Resume fraud is prosecutable in plenty of jurisdictions as well (Australia and the UK at the very least).

google argued with me. a lot. I went to school but didn't graduate. not something they were prepared to deal with. never claimed I had a degree. but the fact that they called the school and the school said I didn't have a degree was a huge red flag.

I did a startup. the year before we were incorporated I was doing prototypes and fund raising. We called the company and you're weren't employed until 20xx, but you listed 20xx-1 as the start date! now you're in trouble.

I’ve known people who has dropped out of college after receiving job offers during their internships. The problem is that some companies cap your your maximum pay and promotions unless you finish college even though you had excellent performance reviews. So you either stay on college and lose the job opportunity, or stay knowingly that at some point you’ll have to come back to college to finish your degree.

I mean surely twitch(an Amazon brand) is leaning on the s3 scale econ for storage no?

> an Amazon brand

The word you're looking for is "frugality." This is a tail use case that isn't cheap to run.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

> The word you're looking for is "frugality."

> https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

Leadership principles? Are you saying some exec / director ("leader") is looking for a P&L bump for their promo doc?

You have to regurgitate (reframe your personal story in the context of) leadership principles in your interviews for an IC role too.

Individual Contributor, a euphemism for "non-management"? copilot is usually pretty good with deciphering contextual acronyms. Why "IC" instead of "NM"?

Because for whatever reason IC is an acronym widely used in the tech industry (and daily in career discussions on this website) and NM is not.

No, frugality has been an Amazon "value" from the beginning. Look up the story of Jeff Bezos famously using an old door for a desk. Or all the execs complaining about having to share a hotel room during business trips for the first couple of decades of Amazon's existence.

Anyone know if they’re stopping internal use?

There wasn’t much love for chime while I was there, but I have no idea what a replacement looks like

They’re moving to teams and zoom and slack calls. In classic Amazon fashion I’m sure it’ll take a minute

Hilarious, I’m sure the move to teams will do further wonders for morale.

Come in 5 days a week to be sat in teams calls all day.

To my ex-colleagues, the grass really is greener elsewhere

Correlated or inversely correlated?

Seems like a very limited subset of software development to be basing a benchmark on

Where’s the kernel dev? Where’s the embedded dev? Where’s the throwaway python script?

We all know that nobody actually writes kernels, compilers, firmware, or video games, they're just mined straight from the earth.

* for some values of FAANG

C++ has been dead and effectively banned at amzn for years. Only very specific (robotics and ML generally) projects get exemptions. Rust is big and only getting bigger

Fair! I would say people would be surprised to learn pretty much every large AI project is mostly c++ because of its interop with python.

Some FAANGs focus on AI more than others.

s3 open bucket syndrome is basically cured at this point. (Aside from legacy buckets, which should all be exploited by now)

The "yes I really want to do this" confirmations you need to go through when opening up a bucket these days are about 4 deep...

Authn/z issues are real though, they'll never be fixed