kislayverma

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything,

rgs

Falsehoods programmers believe about prices

1. You can store a price in a floating point variable.
2. All currencies are subdivided in 1/100th units (like US dollar/cents, euro/eurocents etc.).
3. All currencies are subdivided in decimal units (like dinar/fils)
4. All currencies currently in circulation are subdivided in decimal units. (to exclude shillings, pennies) (counter-example: MGA)
5. All currencies are subdivided. (counter-examples: KRW, COP, JPY... Or subdivisions can be deprecated.)
6. Prices can't have more precision than the smaller sub-unit of the currency. (e.g. gas prices)
7. For any currency you can have a price of 1. (ZWL)
8. Every country has its own currency. (EUR is the best example, but also Franc CFA, etc.)