Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:paywalled (Score 3, Interesting) 85

The paragraph summary is all the article says. It is all rumors at this point with three cities identified "Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas, and New York City"

start-article

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -2.01% plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, according to a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities.

The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company’s headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company’s plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems.

Under the new plan, Amazon would split the workforce with 25,000 employees in each city, the person said.

Amazon is in advanced talks with multiple cities but hasn’t made a final decision on which two locations it will pick, according to people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that Amazon was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City.

A decision and announcement could come as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. /end-article

Comment None-of-the-above (Score 1) 140

So, I've worked with all flavours of these managers listed, yet none of them are the most frustrating manager I've worked for.

The most frustrating manager was the guy who read all the books, always knew what to say, tried to be your friend, but never actually let you do the things you wanted to get done. He'd never say no, but make you resubmit your requests 10 times with various tweaks almost like he wanted you to give up.

Then in staff meeting's he'd complain that no one was being innovative except his favourites who can do no wrong.

He'd give you just enough information to do the thing he asked, then give you a bit more information with an enhancement request. If I had that information up front I could have done it all at once instead of two cycles taking twice as long.

He was also vindictive, if you didn't tow his view of the company line, you were basically shit listed and he would do everything he could to transfer or fire you.

I did not enjoy that work, and I left the company because of it.

Comment Family Plans and In-App Purchases don't get along (Score 1) 92

If the app cost $9.99 to download then I'd have already purchased it. Just like DS and Wii games before it.

My beef is I have a family account setup, so my family could share a $10 purchased game, but I need to buy the $10 in app purchase on every member of the families account. In app are great for the speed ups, they suck for actual functionality.

Comment Re:What's DevOps? (Score 1) 166

We have a few "test automation" people floating around, their managers want QA people embedded on their development teams and they only want to do it was to have programming skills as a job requirement. As a bonus it is a developer position/salary.

Comment Re:So, it is a culture after all (Score 1) 166

In my work, I'm viewing DevOps as automating the interactions between the Dev and Ops teams. For years the two sides would blame each other for everything and work to prove whatever happened was the other guys fault because they didn't want "root cause" to be assigned to them. With the few projects we have the deployment and configuration tasks completely automated, if an application isn't working then the developers have to own up. If a deployment fails the prerequisites then the ops guys can't hide the fact they didn't complete their tasks on time (regardless of what they tell the PM).

Functional Silos, no one does them better than an old Enterprise IT shop.

Comment Congreve Cube (Score 1) 266

The congreve cube is the best cube, but only because Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium is a great movie to watch Natalie Portman while eating hot grits.

Comment Freelance work (Score 1) 309

If you want to build up those two years of experience, and don't mind working on short deadlines and for maybe less money than you want, start bidding on small projects on sites like oDesk.com and Guru.com.

Then with a list of clients and references built up over time you will either have a much easier time getting internships once you are a junior/senior OR you might just want to keep doing your own thing.

Comment Focus on a Help Desk / Junior Admin (Score 2) 383

My first recommendation is to calculate your cost of downtime due to a failed hardware or software component you control. In some manufacturing environments even an extra hour (if your out of the office and need to drive in) could pay a $25k salary for a year.

Next is to focus on getting a dedicated resource for intake of calls/emails and to handle most of the running around. The first 2 years someone is out of school they are most willing to work for really cheap. Introduce yourself to some teachers at the local community college or trade schools and even see about getting some students during their on the job training to show the improved response time to incoming requests without actually costing the company money.

Once management gets better service, losing it might just make them more willing to pay to get it back.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what *can* you believe?!" -- Bullwinkle J. Moose

Working...