Specifically, my tendency to latch onto some things like an iron jaw trap, and never let go.
Last night, it was my intention to do some job hunting, which was why I didn’t go to gaming. So, I went upstairs, discovered the Amazon email & was completely derailed from looking for anything else. I spent most of the evening reviewing C++ class inheritance, and the many meanings of ‘static’ (my brain got fed up with 3: static global, static local, static within class. Is static within template much like static within class?), because amazon was all about the C++, and it’s been a few years since I’ve made active use of classes. I’m pretty sure I learned stuff about multiple inheritance (yay programming languages roomie) that I never knew before. Having reassured myself that class hierarchies and language idiosyncraries did not scare me (beyond templates, which I’ve had less luck with than programming in ML (and that’s saying something)), I emailed the recruiter back with my portion of the “gee, that’d be nice” recruitment dance. And proceeded to do no other job hunting, but did advance my high level, diablo2x character … An Amazon 😉
I went to sleep, got up less than an hour later, and ate breakfast, then checked the time. Whoops. So much for my recent efforts to not eat late at night (and I’m seeing results from it, I’ll keep with it, though I wonder how much of those results are purely in my head). Back to sleep, up at 3:15, and still not back to bed. Considering the ramifications of potentially being hired by Amazon. And coming to terms with the fundamental conflict between ‘very much in debt and wanting to get out of it soon’ and ‘I wanna go to grad school soon.’ Were I to join up with Amazon, I would also be quite tempted to stay until I vested, ie, at least a year or two, which would probably mean that my current applications would be irrelevant. Ugh. Of course, I could just take classes locally in Seattle, evening classes on an occasional basis, which would provide me with more certainty as to my educational choices, opportunities for more academic references (and better ones at that), and, of course, a chance to haul my ass out of debt. It’d be kinda cool to make beaucoup money in an urban center, then go to college rurally and live it up, buy myself a condo type thing in ‘downtown’ Ithaca, NY, or Burlington, VT, or wherever, having housing taken care of, and a stipend as a Doctoral Student.
Plus, hey, Seattle, not an armpit. Amazon may very well not suck as much as Motorola, and judging by mapquest they seem to have their headquarters located in an area where I wouldn’t hate my life (a mile or two north and east of the airport,
And, on the gripping hand, this may all be totally irrelevant, as I got this info less than 12 hours ago, all of which have been non-business hours. I may never hear back from Amazon again, and I may get run over by a bus tomorrow on the way to work (chances of which increase as sleep decreases), but having expressed much of my internal conflict, maybe I can get some bloody sleep now. (5:30am, dear gods, someone sedate me.)
Is static within template much like static within class?
Offhand, I would say that a static local variable inside a template is the same as a static local variable not inside a template, and ditto for static class members in class templates. Presumably a different variable is allocated for each instantiation of the template. (I don’t know of any template-specific usage of
static. Am I missing one?)Were I to join up with Amazon, I would also be quite tempted to stay until I vested, ie, at least a year or two, which would probably mean that my current applications would be irrelevant.
Might you be able to defer an offer of admission?
Actually, on the static stuff, having just reread the section, you’re completely correct. Or, at least, about the static template members. I would be surprised if they did something different and broken for static locals.
As for deferring, I might well be able to. Uchicago let me defer for a year the last time I played this reindeer game. I’m not sure about more than one year. Additionally, I think I’d kinda like to slow the headlong rush to grad school. I feel good about public policy for grad school, but it would be good for me to get more practice reading, researching, and writing. Skills that I developed very little in my undergrad years. Plus, if I really warm up to public policy and want to apply to PhD programs, it’d be helpful to have more experience in policy classes, and more people willing to testify that I rock, in an academic sense. =)
Assassins are better 😉
It would be nice if you moved to Seattle. Our buildings are pretty much both at the south side of downtown… one is in the middle of Chinatown by the stadiums and one is on top of Beacon Hill and has a gorgeous view of the city and the mountains.
We do take people who do Perl and Java too, but C++ is our main thing. If you would like an employee referral, have your recruiter contact me or something…
isn’t that building an old hospital? The first time I saw it, I thought: pink insane asylum on the hill. 🙂
s/e
Yup, it was. When I was up in the big orange building on the hill (it’s not really pink), one of the guys in my group found some blueprints and was like “Hey guys, our hallway used to be the tuberculosis ward! Don’t lick the walls!” And the mailroom was the morgue and whatnot…