5 ms·

In total I had a little less than one month to prepare for the interview. I can't help but to wonder if it was really worth it. Surely, his prep helped him get

In total I had a little less than one month to prepare for the interview. I can't help but to wonder if it was really worth it. Surely, his prep helped him get the job, but the entire prep stage he describes seems like a very high up-front cost. I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. You should know exactly why you want to work for Amazon. It would be interesting to know more about his desire to work for Amazon that badly.

_halgari 10y ago
I tend to agree. In my opinion, if a job interview required me to brush up that much on a topic it either means: a) the company is putting to much emphasis on "non-google" programming, which doesn't match reality (real software engineering isn't a closed book test). b) I don't know the subject matter well enough and it would be a bad fit anyways.
- dgemm 10y ago
  > the company is putting to much emphasis on "non-google" programming, which doesn't match reality (real software engineering isn't a closed book test) Maybe if you work on gluing together APIs then the googling aspect is more important...? In this case I find the term "software engineering" to be a stretch...
outworlder 10y ago
> I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. I have this feeling too, but I am not sure if it is warranted. Let's do a thought experiment: grab an engineer at random, don't tell the interviewers that they are already a colleague, and subject to the same interview process as everyone else. Now, is this engineer going to pass the interview? Maybe, but I would not be surprised if most failed. It's very rare that the interview process will actually test anything that's used on the job.
- jghn 10y ago
  We've talked about doing that. My fear was always that I'd fail and they'd reconsider my own employment :)
  - outworlder 10y ago
    The idea was to reconsider the interview process. But, in the corporate world, you never know.
- khedoros 10y ago
  I know that Google's recruiters have told me that they often end up hiring candidates on their second or third interview attempts; even at a company with a fairly standardized interview format, they get a ton of what they consider "false negatives". It seems like a related phenomenon.
  - dgemm 10y ago
    I believe that's intentional - they prefer false negatives over false positives.
- ne0n 10y ago
  Most will fail. Amazon actually has an internal hiring standard that the candidate should be better than 50% of their peer employees in the position they're interviewing for. This goals helps Amazon strive to always hire more talented employees..
- eropple 10y ago
  > Maybe, but I would not be surprised if most failed. I used to work at a place where this was an actual goal: "we should always be raising the bar." Needless to say, that particular unicorn ended up shedding people pretty quick.
kuro68k 10y ago
It's not worth it. Think about what the work environment is going to be like if that is the interview process.
jknoepfler 10y ago
It's interesting to see how "whiteboard interview" prep mirrors standardized test prep. What is frustrating is that the prep month (?! a month is an eternity) could have been used to contribute to an personal project of choice, which would have said a lot more about the author's ability to program.
- ilostmykeys 10y ago
  Yeah the world is full of idiots in charge. If someone is "in charge" then they are most likely idiots. It's the statistical truth. Look at the world today? Who can claim thag over population and a melting planet is progress? The world is run by idiots. Did I stress that enough? :) The very idea of trying to control quality of anything complex (work, life, relationships, economy, etc) via some extremely shallow and arbitrary test is the most idiotic idea ever yet it is practiced on such a wide scale. The world is run by idiots.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    > It's the statistical truth. I don't think claiming something is a statistical truth without showing the statistics will fly on HN.
    - calibraxis 10y ago
      There's good arguments for their point. For instance: "When something goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: “you’re the new guy, you must have messed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring out what actually happened. ..." "True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplification. Ultimately the effect is not so different than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong: it’s a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous situations." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolution-in-reverse https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolu...) However downvoted the parent post is, it's nevertheless one of the saner observations coming from a species destroying itself.
vmarsy 10y ago
You would span that prep over more than one month if you're still in college. Then if you get to do some other interview later in your career, going over those same materials won't take you as long. so the up-front cost is paid only "once". >I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. The problem here is that your existing day-to-day skills are very different from what is being asked at the interview. See every Hacker news discussions about how broken interviews are. The author's job at Amazon is not going to be "how would you find the common ancestor of these 2 nodes in a toy struct Node{ int value; Node* left; Node* right ; }; binary tree" For the brushup on algorithms and data structures I would add this one, missing from many books: Implement a simple queue based BFS/DFS algorithm on a toy graph (struct Vertex{ T data; std::vector<Vertex*> neighbors; }; use of basic data structures like std::queue and std::unordered_map/set allowed). Being able to code a sssp on an unweighted graph should be a doable objective. PS: Another resource I enjoy that the author didn't mention : https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets-Landing/dp/1118261364 https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secret...
nilkn 10y ago
> I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. The other possibility is that it means the interviews aren't an accurate representation of the work.
khedoros 10y ago
> I can't help but to wonder if it was really worth it. It sounds like the kind of thing I might enjoy doing for fun, anyhow. It's my goal not to jump between employers. If I wasn't trying to find somewhere to stay for 5 or more years, then I'd be complaining about the up-front cost too. > I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. Ridiculous as it is, they're testing for things that your existing skills may not cover well, and that you may not have practiced in the last...well, since you learned it in school. You're trying to get a job doing things matching your skills, but the interview tests for something different (and arguably only loosely related). Still, that's the bar for getting the job. > It would be interesting to know more about his desire to work for Amazon that badly. For me, they've got local offices, so I wouldn't have to sell my home or leave the area my family lives in. They're a well-known company, and their engineering teams have a reputation for being picky. They also engineer for a scale that's hard to find in most other companies. If/when I decide to leave them, there would be the nice line on my resume where I can say I worked for them for x years. Of course, all of those apply for a couple other companies in my area as well, but they're still valid reasons to want to work there.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
spdy 10y ago
> You should know exactly why you want to work for Amazon. Never understood this company pride thing i like to work on interesting problems and if your company sells shoes or chewing gum so be it. Your problem space should attract programmers not who you are.
somethingsimple 10y ago
> It would be interesting to know more about his desire to work for Amazon that badly. Amazon is basically the company I really, really, really want to work for, and the only reason I don't apply is that I have a small kid and a wife already working there, and I know how chaotic life would be if I did it now. So I'm waiting for the kid to grow a little more. Now, the reason I want to work there so much is that I see them as the only big tech company providing actual value to society at large these days. Other companies have done it in the past, but it seems that now they only iterate on their old things or put out shiny but useless tech. Amazon on the other hand seems to be always coming up with new ways to innovate in ways that make people's lives more practical in a more real sense. I also admire them for basically having started the whole IaaS thing. Another reason I want to work there is to learn. Few companies run large systems at the scale they do. From the outside (and from a little perspective I get from my wife, but she takes the whole "don't talk about what we do here" very seriously), they seem to have an awesome engineering culture - I was thrilled when I read the paper about them using formal methods to prove correctness of a number of AWS services. Working there must be a tremendous learning experience.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
  Your kid must be really smart :-) I actually admire Amazon from the outside for the same reasons you do but I'm not too keen on working there because of stories it's rough for employees. Does your wife like it? Is she a developer?
  - somethingsimple 10y ago
    Haha, I should have proof read that, what a terrible sentence I wrote there :) My wife's an engineer there and enjoys her work. Her team seems to be a smart and fun bunch to work with, and the hours are pretty ok. The only times I've seen her working extra were because she wanted to, not because she had to.
kartickv 10y ago
Agreed. If I have to prepare for an interview, that means that the interview isn't testing what I use every day in my work, which makes it a bad interview process. I could do something more useful with that time, and I no longer feel like investing time jumping through artificial hoops like I did in school and college.

_halgari 10y ago

I tend to agree. In my opinion, if a job interview required me to brush up that much on a topic it either means: a) the company is putting to much emphasis on "non-google" programming, which doesn't match reality (real software engineering isn't a closed book test). b) I don't know the subject matter well enough and it would be a bad fit anyways.

dgemm 10y ago
> the company is putting to much emphasis on "non-google" programming, which doesn't match reality (real software engineering isn't a closed book test) Maybe if you work on gluing together APIs then the googling aspect is more important...? In this case I find the term "software engineering" to be a stretch...

outworlder 10y ago

> I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. I have this feeling too, but I am not sure if it is warranted. Let's do a thought experiment: grab an engineer at random, don't tell the interviewers that they are already a colleague, and subject to the same interview process as everyone else. Now, is this engineer going to pass the interview? Maybe, but I would not be surprised if most failed. It's very rare that the interview process will actually test anything that's used on the job.

jghn 10y ago
We've talked about doing that. My fear was always that I'd fail and they'd reconsider my own employment :)
- outworlder 10y ago
  The idea was to reconsider the interview process. But, in the corporate world, you never know.
khedoros 10y ago
I know that Google's recruiters have told me that they often end up hiring candidates on their second or third interview attempts; even at a company with a fairly standardized interview format, they get a ton of what they consider "false negatives". It seems like a related phenomenon.
- dgemm 10y ago
  I believe that's intentional - they prefer false negatives over false positives.
ne0n 10y ago
Most will fail. Amazon actually has an internal hiring standard that the candidate should be better than 50% of their peer employees in the position they're interviewing for. This goals helps Amazon strive to always hire more talented employees..
eropple 10y ago
> Maybe, but I would not be surprised if most failed. I used to work at a place where this was an actual goal: "we should always be raising the bar." Needless to say, that particular unicorn ended up shedding people pretty quick.

kuro68k 10y ago

It's not worth it. Think about what the work environment is going to be like if that is the interview process.

jknoepfler 10y ago

It's interesting to see how "whiteboard interview" prep mirrors standardized test prep. What is frustrating is that the prep month (?! a month is an eternity) could have been used to contribute to an personal project of choice, which would have said a lot more about the author's ability to program.

ilostmykeys 10y ago
Yeah the world is full of idiots in charge. If someone is "in charge" then they are most likely idiots. It's the statistical truth. Look at the world today? Who can claim thag over population and a melting planet is progress? The world is run by idiots. Did I stress that enough? :) The very idea of trying to control quality of anything complex (work, life, relationships, economy, etc) via some extremely shallow and arbitrary test is the most idiotic idea ever yet it is practiced on such a wide scale. The world is run by idiots.
- daveguy 10y ago
  > It's the statistical truth. I don't think claiming something is a statistical truth without showing the statistics will fly on HN.
  - calibraxis 10y ago
    There's good arguments for their point. For instance: "When something goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: “you’re the new guy, you must have messed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring out what actually happened. ..." "True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplification. Ultimately the effect is not so different than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong: it’s a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous situations." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolution-in-reverse https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolu...) However downvoted the parent post is, it's nevertheless one of the saner observations coming from a species destroying itself.

vmarsy 10y ago

You would span that prep over more than one month if you're still in college. Then if you get to do some other interview later in your career, going over those same materials won't take you as long. so the up-front cost is paid only "once". >I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. The problem here is that your existing day-to-day skills are very different from what is being asked at the interview. See every Hacker news discussions about how broken interviews are. The author's job at Amazon is not going to be "how would you find the common ancestor of these 2 nodes in a toy struct Node{ int value; Node* left; Node* right ; }; binary tree" For the brushup on algorithms and data structures I would add this one, missing from many books: Implement a simple queue based BFS/DFS algorithm on a toy graph (struct Vertex{ T data; std::vector<Vertex*> neighbors; }; use of basic data structures like std::queue and std::unordered_map/set allowed). Being able to code a sssp on an unweighted graph should be a doable objective. PS: Another resource I enjoy that the author didn't mention : https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secrets-Landing/dp/1118261364 https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interviews-Exposed-Secret...

nilkn 10y ago

> I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. The other possibility is that it means the interviews aren't an accurate representation of the work.

khedoros 10y ago

> I can't help but to wonder if it was really worth it. It sounds like the kind of thing I might enjoy doing for fun, anyhow. It's my goal not to jump between employers. If I wasn't trying to find somewhere to stay for 5 or more years, then I'd be complaining about the up-front cost too. > I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. Ridiculous as it is, they're testing for things that your existing skills may not cover well, and that you may not have practiced in the last...well, since you learned it in school. You're trying to get a job doing things matching your skills, but the interview tests for something different (and arguably only loosely related). Still, that's the bar for getting the job. > It would be interesting to know more about his desire to work for Amazon that badly. For me, they've got local offices, so I wouldn't have to sell my home or leave the area my family lives in. They're a well-known company, and their engineering teams have a reputation for being picky. They also engineer for a scale that's hard to find in most other companies. If/when I decide to leave them, there would be the nice line on my resume where I can say I worked for them for x years. Of course, all of those apply for a couple other companies in my area as well, but they're still valid reasons to want to work there.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

spdy 10y ago

> You should know exactly why you want to work for Amazon. Never understood this company pride thing i like to work on interesting problems and if your company sells shoes or chewing gum so be it. Your problem space should attract programmers not who you are.

somethingsimple 10y ago

> It would be interesting to know more about his desire to work for Amazon that badly. Amazon is basically the company I really, really, really want to work for, and the only reason I don't apply is that I have a small kid and a wife already working there, and I know how chaotic life would be if I did it now. So I'm waiting for the kid to grow a little more. Now, the reason I want to work there so much is that I see them as the only big tech company providing actual value to society at large these days. Other companies have done it in the past, but it seems that now they only iterate on their old things or put out shiny but useless tech. Amazon on the other hand seems to be always coming up with new ways to innovate in ways that make people's lives more practical in a more real sense. I also admire them for basically having started the whole IaaS thing. Another reason I want to work there is to learn. Few companies run large systems at the scale they do. From the outside (and from a little perspective I get from my wife, but she takes the whole "don't talk about what we do here" very seriously), they seem to have an awesome engineering culture - I was thrilled when I read the paper about them using formal methods to prove correctness of a number of AWS services. Working there must be a tremendous learning experience.

ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
Your kid must be really smart :-) I actually admire Amazon from the outside for the same reasons you do but I'm not too keen on working there because of stories it's rough for employees. Does your wife like it? Is she a developer?
- somethingsimple 10y ago
  Haha, I should have proof read that, what a terrible sentence I wrote there :) My wife's an engineer there and enjoys her work. Her team seems to be a smart and fun bunch to work with, and the hours are pretty ok. The only times I've seen her working extra were because she wanted to, not because she had to.

kartickv 10y ago

Agreed. If I have to prepare for an interview, that means that the interview isn't testing what I use every day in my work, which makes it a bad interview process. I could do something more useful with that time, and I no longer feel like investing time jumping through artificial hoops like I did in school and college.