http://www.jobster.com/at/person/show/2?hbxcmp=feed&hbxsrc=rss_user_answers http://www.jobster.com/at/assets/images/jobster/logos/rss_logo.gif http://www.jobster.com/at/person/show/2?hbxcmp=feed&hbxsrc=rss_user_answers Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:03:02 GMT Most recently updated answers by Laurel Fan http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/8?answer_class=AnswerBase Don't try to figure out everything yourself. There's code from the first days of the company, and new code is being added every day. The best way to avoid breaking things is by understanding the code that yours depends on and the code that depends on yours. There are a lot of unexpected dependencies, so even that's not an easy task. Find the people on your team who have been there a while and don't break things. They probably also know the best people on other teams to talk to about dependencies. Ask them how things work when you're not sure. Ask them for code reviews, even if you feel pretty confident. Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:03:02 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/8?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/3421?answer_class=AnswerBase I worked in an open office with about 10 desks. One of the other residents of the office was a miniature dachshund named Scooter. He was a little high-strung, and one of the ways he would express frustration was to leave little 'presents' around the room. When these were discovered, his owner would drag him over to the evidence and tell him 'Bad!'. But you could almost hear Scooter giggling under his breath... Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:02:55 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/3421?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/62424?answer_class=AnswerBase The week after I got there, I worked with Eric Vadon on the prototype for search similarities (the feature where it suggests terms that are similar to the search terms that you typed in). His team took it to the product stage, and last I heard it was one of the best performing features on the search page. Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:02:46 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/62424?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/62425?answer_class=AnswerBase One of the projects I worked on before we left was a rewrite of the core recommendation engine to fit in with sweeping company wide architecture changes. I didn't realize it at the time, but the direction we chose for it meant we ended up reimplementing the wheel a few times (things like inversion of control, dependency injection). I think the Not Invented Here thing is one problem with a lot of groups at Amazon, and something I've tried to be more aware of. It's helped that open source frameworks and tools like Spring and Rails have gotten a lot better and more well known since then. Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:02:45 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/62425?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/131032?answer_class=AnswerBase The 4 Hour Work Week Tue, 08 May 2007 23:19:34 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/131032?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/62423?answer_class=AnswerBase This one. Jobster.com as it is now started about April of this year. At that point, Jobster was more focused on recruiters, and the only real "consumer" (meaning non-recruiter) application was meta job search. Ray, Ryan, and I, three developers, kind of took over the project, and had a couple months to come up with a beta-able prototype. The first prototype just contained our core idea that people answer questions about their experiences at companies in order to provide insights about their companies, themselves, and their careers. A few months and lots of work from many other people later, here it is. We also used the opportunity to experiment with ruby on rails (honestly, I don't think we could have done it without it), and now pretty much every page on the site is at least partially served up by a rails app. Thu, 07 Dec 2006 18:04:28 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/62423?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/22622?answer_class=AnswerBase A few nearby restaurant/bars had half price food specials for students around midnight. Most of the time we'd eat our cheap food and go back to some assignment due at 8 AM the next day -- deadly combination of heavy workload and heavy procrastination. Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:24:14 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/22622?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/22624?answer_class=AnswerBase I ate the same thing for lunch almost every day for the last 3 years -- Indian food that some guy sold out of the back of his van for $3. Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:25:48 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/22624?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/19543?answer_class=AnswerBase I worked on replies to answers, which just shipped, oh, about an hour ago. Hey, someone reply to this! Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:27:26 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/19543?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/18442?answer_class=AnswerBase Scott just added us to last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/JobsterSlim/ Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:45:07 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/18442?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/16821?answer_class=AnswerBase There are three dogs chasing each other around the office right now. So I can hear a lot of clicking and squeaking. Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:22:05 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/16821?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/3861?answer_class=AnswerBase One of the projects I worked on was ICQ integration for the wireless IM project. Since the ICQ spec is of course not published, I spent a lot of time wallowing in packet sniffing dumps and poking around other peoples' reverse engineering efforts. It only took a few days to memorize what my ICQ UIN looked like... Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:49:42 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/3861?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/13382?answer_class=AnswerBase From someone I knew there using Jobster of course! Ray sent me a campaign, and at that time the entire engineering team was pretty much made up of people I'd worked with at Amazon/Openwave, so I knew I'd enjoy working with them. Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:01:34 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/13382?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/4441?answer_class=AnswerBase Joe, Jeff, and I volunteered to be filler for a crowd scene for a Jobster print ad. I learned that being in a photo shoot is actually pretty tedious. How hard could standing there while they take pictures of you be? Well, it could take 6 hours! Joe took some pictures of the photo shoot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldberg/sets/1377897/ And Jeff uploaded the final ads: http://www.flickr.com/photos/64728240@N00/sets/72057594073867511/ Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:13:28 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/4441?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/4102?answer_class=AnswerBase We moved desks so I can answer this again! - Smith Tower - Columbia Tower - Ray - Tim - Samson Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:43:06 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/4102?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/164455?answer_class=AnswerBase Check out my list on www.43things.com/people/laurel Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:09:38 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/164455?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/147913?answer_class=AnswerBase My best interview experience was when I interviewed at Jobster, because it wasn't really an interview. Everyone on the dev team had worked with me before, so they didn't bother with the coding questions, and pretty much started off by getting the CEO in to convince me to join. Fri, 20 Oct 2006 21:32:29 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/147913?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/146103?answer_class=AnswerBase The path I took to my current career was not terribly exotic. I went to Carnegie Mellon and got a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I was doing all of my interviewing in the fall and winter of my last year, which was 2000/2001, right before the bubble burst, so everyone was still interviewing for college hires like crazy. I got a few offers from the big computer companies to do stuff actually relevant to my specialization (microarchitecture CAD), but I went with Avogadro, a little startup doing something with mobile phones and instant messaging because it was cool and in downtown Seattle instead of some suburb like Shrewsbury, MA, Poughkeepsie, NY, or Beaverton, OR. It got acquired by Openwave right before I started, then moved to Bellevue, started laying people off, and cancelled our project. I landed at Amazon, (referred by an Avogadro co-worker, http://www.jobster.com/at/person/experience_answers/107 http://www.jobster.com/at/person/show/8886 of course) and was there for a couple years. I was just getting a little disgruntled about the large company thing when I got a note from Ray http://www.jobster.com/at/person/experience_answers/3 (who I knew from Avogadro), who was now working at Jobster with a bunch more Avogadro people. So here I am... Wed, 20 Sep 2006 18:29:56 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/146103?answer_class=AnswerBase http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/147232?answer_class=AnswerBase A friend recommended me for a position at a startup company doing stuff with mobile technology. After sending the recruiter my resume, I never heard back. My friend later told me that this was because I 'refused' to send my resume as a Word document, and instead sent a link to download it in text, html, or pdf. Fri, 01 Sep 2006 17:13:25 GMT http://www.jobster.com/at/answer/view/147232?answer_class=AnswerBase