i am a dev in analytics.

Great discussion.

I am not a fan of Amazon for the simple reason that I think their business model is not profitable enough and I dont think they do what I like to do.

Google is the very obvious choice, right now, I am looking at Account Manager type positions (obviously reporting into someone doing that role). I am not good enough to be a full blown programmer, I want to deal with a lot of different teams within the company and do more strategic work, not that much operations.

Facebook is second in my list, just because they got the most potential data-wise.

eBay was just on there, because it's a tech company and I think they'll be around long enough.

Microsoft same thing as above.

To be honest, at the moment, I can only see myself work at Google. Otherwise, I'd probably do consulting first and switch if I get the chance to.

lel

Gotta go with the lol too.

Even if you believe that about the ecommerce stuff (which I think is silly) AWS is at the cutting edge of cloud technologies. They're not going away anytime soon.

Yeah, a cool thing about working at amazon is the internal point of view of the entire aws stack/services.

It's my personal opinion, but I got high requirements for the company I want to work for. Amazon hasnt had great financial results since its inception, I am skeptical.
Also, I dont think they do, what I think, I want to do.

This is true on average however the tech jobs are nice and shiny whereas the jobs of the people in the warehouses and so forth are horrible.

I was assuming OP didn't mind as long as his job is nice since he mentioned Microsoft as a legit candidate.

My personal take is that they are essentially 21st century crack dealers. They do hire psychologists to optimize stuff to be as addictive as possible. I mean I'd never ask for them to be regulated or outlawed but they violate my moral standards and I concider them evil.
The argument that people play it and choose to play it again under their free will still stands but it's the same argument a crack dealer would make (note: I'm pro legalizing crack)

I think the Braid dude (who's somewhat strange imo) has some interesting rants on the company that more or less mirror my thoughts.

Let me say...roflcopter. There's more of an argument that they are one of the most essential companies around than one that their business model isn't viable. Maybe you're not aware of what they do outsite of running their stores

Re: Goolge..since you're German and seem to be looking for a manager type position (I'm assuming application from university not multiyear management background). BWL "sehr gut", at most one wasted semester (probably the killer for most poker players). WiInf (highly) prefered over BWL. They have pretty high requirements.
"Strategic" jobs are fairly rare. You might be better off getting a trainee position that prepares you for a high level management job (or a dreaded BCG etc job) at a non-tech company and then switching later.

I have an excellent degree and multiyear management experience at a software company (international) and I'd rate my chances of getting a "strategy" type job at Google fairly low. Then again I never applied for one because I'm foolish enough to get a PhD at slave pay instead

would that be to, get better, at using, commas?

I stand corrected, there is a comma missing.

My technical response is that its not just psychologists that I found interesting. It's their ability to have a very tight loop of theorize on what a feature is going to do, release the feature, see how it works, evaluate if your theory was right - and start over again.

As for the crack dealer analogy - seems like a ****ing horrible analogy.

jjshabado: Why is the analogy bad? They are researching addiction and implementing the results to make games addictive. Not by making them "fun" but by exploiting flaws of the brain. I guess I should have picked some drug with less body addiction and more brain addiction. Feel free to substitute one.

Said J.Blow talk:


Spurious as a rule of thumb German uses a ****load more commas than English.

I'm not watching a 2 hour video (well, I might - but not anytime soon). Can you explain to me why they're worse than poker, other video games, coffee, alcohol, the internet, sex, or any other activity that most people enjoy, can have various levels of addiction to, and in extreme cases can cause severe problems?

This idea that people don't find the games funs seems absurd to me.

Edit: I watched about 5 minutes of that video (around 20-25 minutes in) and it was super hard to watch. He seems to keep losing his train of thought and he's not very coherent. Does it get better?

Yeah, I wanted to emphasize the I think aspect, which I think requires a comma.

for the most part comma's are determined by grammar and structure. you'd rarely use them for emphasis. they are not a written equivalent of spoken pauses, even though they do indicate pauses. to emphasize think, you'd just italicize it.

No, I think he's somewhat odd

jjshabado: The problem I have (i.e. what I find offensive) is that they are actively trying to manipulate the brain. They are not A/B testing enjoyment of the game but rather addiction and they maximize on that mettric. Well at least that's true for Farm Ville. I don't know any other games (iirc there's some poker game) but if they do it for one that's evil enough for my taste.

Like I said I don't have fundamental objections but rather moral ones. I also don't like it if companies employ marketing "tricks" instead of improving the product if they have the choice.

Ah... Jonathan Blow... dont get me started... or maybe you should... heh.

At any rate.. I will just say this for now: Every few years, some indie game developer will win the game-dev lottery and produce a unexpected hit. They will be showered with praise and money. They will then proceed to spend the rest of their careers telling everyone who will listen that The Game Industry doesnt know anything about games, and that they alone have uncovered the secret truths to making Good Games. It then becomes extremely unlikely that they ever actually produce a game again because nothing they do would ever be able to survive their own self-inflicted legend.

Then again... what do I know.

But that said... Zynga does suck. lol. Probably the crack dealer analogy does go too far... but it almost certainly *is* like disco music in the 70s... record companies were hiring psychologists and neuroscientists to try to "optimize" songs for the perfect human response. Of course we know what happened to disco.

It's not just Zynga. A lot of game companies try to make their games feel like you're accomplishing some goal.

It's almost like a todo list or work. You talk yourself into finishing the task even if it's not fun. That is how you end up playing a game while not having fun at the same time.

I'm guessing you never really played games. Your game seems to be to troll everyone who replies. Your urge to troll them is identical to someone's urge to try and complete one more task in a task oriented game.

you keep saying that, but then you said Facebook has the most potential data-wise, which i don't think anyone in the industry believes except for maybe mark zuckerberg.

for example, a simplified indicator of where a person spent money in some time window is a much better indicator of what they are going to buy then a listing of pictures and statuses that they like. also, the history of a person's search terms is also a better indicator. put on top of that the data-mining infrastructure that amazon/google already built, and i don't know that facebook is a real competitor in the analytics business.

I play some games and don't play others. The civilization series - great games. I've played most of them for hundreds of hours. World of Warcraft I played off and on for two months and found it boring (because to me it quickly devolved into doing a lot of repetitive things). But has it occurred to you that people like doing tasks? They enjoy accomplishing goals?

I mean, zynga isn't doing anything that every other video game/marketing/board game/whatever company is also doing. And yes I find it ridiculous to think they're all evil.

Edit: As for trolling - I'll be honest there's a small group of people in the programming forum who I respect and the rest I kind of shake my head at. I've been toying with an idea of starting a thread about it because I actually find it pretty fascinating. I probably come off condescending because I honestly believe a lot of people on this forum don't know half of what they think they know about being a good programmer. It's cool if people feel the same about me.

The CEO of zynga has outright admitted into tricking kids into doing things like installing malware and adding charges to their parents' phone bills. Pincus makes zynga really easy to hate imo. Also, one primary difference between zynga games and most addictive treadmill games is that zynga pretty much leaves out the "game" part. Like I know you hate the crack dealer analogy but my standard description of a zynga game to people is "it's like if someone took the original recipe for Coca-Cola and refined out everything but the cocaine." I mean have you ever played any of their games? They are literally just "click the 'grind' button, or click the 'pay to grind a little faster' button, or click the 'spam my friends' button."

And while I admit I don't have hard evidence, I doubt most FarmVille players are having any more fun than most people have on their sixth straight hour of drinking (even though there are people who voluntarily do it). FWIW I'm not a huge fan of MMOs and their grinding schemes either, and I actually think grinding schemes are the single worst thing to happen to modern gaming, but zynga is the only company I know of that makes a product that is just grinding and nothing else.

Also, an interesting read: http://www.cracked.com/article_18461...-addicted.html

I'm sure there are tons of crappy programmers on Hacker News, SE, and anywhere you get an ecosystem of programmers + aspiring programmers mixing together.

Hopefully I don't fall into the category you are deriding and I'm considered exactly what I am -- a student.

I shake my head at some ideas at times, but I've come the conclusion that there is little correlation between "good" and "successful" programming, and this line becomes more fuzzy when you consider games -vs- websites -vs- data -vs- whatever. The question for me isn't who is good or who is bad, but pondering how it is possible that many people are successful with varying philosophies.

There was an article on HN yesterday that I bit my virtual tongue on. I was quite surprised that a person with 12 weeks of education, no notion of algorithms or data structures, with zero programming experience before hand, ended up getting a job as a developer. I chalk it up to desperation for bodies to fill the seats that someone can get an 80k/year job in this situation. This sort of situation re-enforces my thought that "successful" and "good" aren't connected in the ways people would prefer. What makes this scary is that people read this stuff and seriously consider dropping out of college.

If I wanted to be "successful," I would just learn Drupal and build rock and roll and artist websites, but I want to be "good."

Last weekend, I interviewed with one of those acceleration programs and they accepted me, but I can't realistically move to SF and be homeless. They told me that the key thing they are looking for more than a developer is someone who can communicate thoughts and ideas to people who are not technical. I have quite a bit of experience in this, as marketing requires summarizing and culling statistical findings in a way that sales and management can understand it, and takes considerable knowledge of the audience (C-Levels -vs- Sales -vs- the graphic designer). I told the guy that I would be skeptical of anyone who says they can do this unless the applicant has real-world experience doing it. Basically, I can explain anything if I have all day, but limit it to 10 minutes and then you realize that you need a full day to prepare the material. This is one part of "success" that isn't well-defined or can be taught. It really is trial-and-error. Note that this does take considerable knowledge of the technical material you are working with, but this suggests that knowledge is no longer good enough. The introspective genius be damned.

For the record I don't think I'm a good programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

RE addictive patterns and games, if you think they are unethical then would it not also make sense to say poker is also unethical as well? It has a ton of addictive patterns in it, the difference between poker and farmville is that money is involved as well. It may not have been engineered to be addictive originally, but the end products are both addicting.

Isn't there money involved with farmville or other zynga games? It's just the money is a one way street. You pay them for virtual progress but get no money in return.

At least with poker if you practice and stick to making +EV decisions you will come out with $ gains in the long run until you get to a point where you're over whelmed by your opponent's player skill.

I think gambling addiction is more complex. There's people who like the action, people who feel like they can't remain stuck, and people who are chasing the dream of winning big.

I'm too tired/lazy/don't care to reply to most of the replies but wanted to be clear that I'm not deriding you. I have a ton of respect for what you're doing and the fact that you've stuck with it for so long.

And to be honest I shouldn't have even said that I shake my head at people in this forum. It's more like there are certain ideas that people sometimes have and believe strongly in in this forum that I shake my head at. Part of what I find fascinating and what I want to start a thread about is how people's background/experience totally shape their programming beliefs and how this forum is made up of a very different group of people than the people I've worked with/met in my real life. But just like anyone else I'm probably a product of the fact that most of my work experience is in startups to medium sized software development companies.

Edit: @DaveT - I'm also kind of hoping you stick with it for another 4-5 years. I think watching the career path and personal projects of someone like you over that time will be really interesting.