Luis Custodio lcustodio

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

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 real

	'
	' Q B a s i c N i b b l e s
	'
	' Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1990
	'
	' Nibbles is a game for one or two players. Navigate your snakes
	' around the game board trying to eat up numbers while avoiding
	' running into walls or other snakes. The more numbers you eat up,
	' the more points you gain and the longer your snake becomes.
	'

	/**
	* An implementation for Quicksort. Doesn't
	* perform as well as the native Array.sort
	* and also runs the risk of a stack overflow
	*
	* Tests with:
	*
	* var array = [];
	* for(var i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
	* array.push(Math.round(Math.random() * 100));

	echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
	. ~/.bashrc
	mkdir ~/local
	mkdir ~/node-latest-install
	cd ~/node-latest-install
	curl http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz \| tar xz --strip-components=1
	./configure --prefix=~/local
	make install # ok, fine, this step probably takes more than 30 seconds...
	curl https://www.npmjs.org/install.sh \| sh