ResilientBiscuit

Agile does not work so hot when the consequences for failure are life and death. It is a great way to develop software that can adapt and change quickly, hence agile. It is a good choice for a huge amount of the software out there.

But when it needs to confirm to specific standards and be tested to hit every path for every conditional and people die when a bug shows up, agile becomes less tenable and waterfall begins to be a more attractive option.

Defence contractors tend to work more with the latter than the former which is why you see waterfall more commonly used.

Do you have anything to base this on? In general it is fair and good practice to, you know, pay people when they provide a service to you.

In pretty much every other aspect of life where someone provides knowledge or skills to help make our lives better we pay them, either directly or via taxes for that service.

Expecting someone who is living their life successfully to give you advice for free is kind of a dick move.

Also mentoring.org is for mentoring children and findamentor.com is basically exploiting people who will mentor for free to make ad revenue.

So if you want a mentor, consider paying them instead of finding ones who do it for free via an exploitative company using them to make profits for themselves.

Do they expect you to stay awake for 24 hours? Or do you just sleep and then get woken up when a call comes in?

It seems like it would make people prone to errors if they had to stay awake for 24 hours...

Most AmAs are pretty boring if you are in the same job as the OP and the job is what makes the AmA interesting.

Necessary but not sufficient seems pretty fair. As in good grades alone are not enough.

In my grad program (not MIT) if you have a proven record of getting papers published, that is worth a whole lot more to the gradduate admissions committe than good grades. I assume similar things might apply at MIT, where if you are published in top conferences you can get away with average with a lower than A average.