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Interesting, I get pestered by them constantly, and never actually considered going for it. For one thing, the common sentiment on HN seems to be 'friends don't

by larrik 10y ago

Interesting, I get pestered by them constantly, and never actually considered going for it. For one thing, the common sentiment on HN seems to be 'friends don't let friends work for Amazon'. Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. This is as someone completely on the outside who's only heard stories, though. When I brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged the reputation and their intent to improve. Perhaps unlike HN, I've never seriously considered joining a mega-corporation like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. I just don't see the appeal, nor do I want to work in a city (SV, Seattle, NYC, or otherwise).

Bartweiss 10y ago
Interestingly, I opened the Amazon door as a new dev and found something very different than what this post describes. The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to verify identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the entire time part - there was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the cam. Between the blind hostility of that opener and the meat-grinder rep, I passed without interviewing (and passed with the next Amazon recruiter shortly after, who had no idea they'd pinged me before). I'm sure this routine is reserved for new grads, and the weird "don't lean out of frame" stuff seemed to be from some interview-management third party, but it was still the most stilted process I've seen from an actual software company.
- dominotw 10y ago
  I applied to amazon last month, they asked me to do interviewstreet coding for 2 hrs. After that Recruiter didn't even have the minimum courtesy to let me know what happened. He simply stopped all communications with me. Reflects their attitude of treating ppl as mere 'resources' , I would work for amazon if I have no self-respect.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    After that Recruiter didn't even have the minimum courtesy to let me know what happened. That's pretty common recently for companies. I'm not sure why.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      Some claim it's them covering their ass thanks to the SUE SUE SUE culture of the US. I understand that, but when it's a purely technical decision they could easily enough give you constructive feedback. You missed these two edge cases. Your code crashes on certain inputs. This is very inefficient, you could have done XYZ. You could automate chunks of this, and protect yourself from any discrimination lawsuits by just making any engineer who reviews the code have zero knowledge of the candidate.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      The worst I've seen is a recruiter that didn't tell me I had been accepted. I found out when someone at the company followed up on why I hadn't responded to the offer. I have no idea how a commission-based business manages to do something like that.
      - _RPM 10y ago
        Are internal recruiters (sales people) commission based? Seems strange.
        Bartweiss 10y ago
        No, but lots of firms (this wasn't Amazon) hire external recruiters who are commission based, usually a percentage of salary for each candidate placed. Some also get "right to represent", where you can't apply through the employer directly once you've started a process with the recruiter. Which makes this utterly weird - it was literally a matter of giving up (potentially) several grand by not forwarding an email.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
- jc4p 10y ago
  I have just under ten years of experience and lead teams of developers, Amazon routinely spams me asking me to do 120 min online coding tasks before even a phone screen too. It's just fucking disrespectful of my time, to be honest.
  - wernercd 10y ago
    I'm at a new job where the "old team" of two developers is being replaced by 5 devs... the old team had ~15 years of experience and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Not saying anything about YOU... experience is important... but 15 years experience doesn't mean 15 years of good experience or lack of bad habits.
    - jc4p 10y ago
      Yeah, definitely agreed. I just wanted to point out the person's "I opened the door to Amazon as a new dev" isn't purely limited to new devs perspectives.
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      So, what were they doing for 15 years and why weren't they replaced sooner?
      - wernercd 10y ago
        Basically the company started expanding and their code base started falling apart at the seams. Two coders that each had "silos" with wedges to keep the two sides communicating together. One did web side - ordering, registration, etc on a Webform MVC customized hybrid. The other did floor applications. New customer? New database, website, etc. Sql statements? "If company a then select * from blah where field like '{text}';" everywhere. Why select *? Because the different code bases diverged... why like/text? Because sql injection doesn't exist. Almost everything text fields... 2 wide inventory fields that house more than 99 items... 10 wide inventory fields that house 2 items... I will have some posts for TheDailyWTF once I get my feet a bit more wet... As to why it took so long? They were able to keep it running with duck tape and bubble gum... once the company started expanding, the better of the two programmers knew they couldn't keep up and left earlier this year. The other is due gone soon... Good guy, but... unwilling to accept that his code is shit.
- cydonian_monk 10y ago
  I danced with Amazon once (casually, I have zero desire to move to a Pacific Coast state), and had a similar "first step" experience, just with no webcam. Had they asked me to code on a webcam I too would've refused. At this point I don't recall if it was CollabEdit, InterviewStreet, or something similar (it's been some time and I deleted the emails), but I remember that if I tabbed out of the interview page at any time I would instantly fail it. And here I thought that was bad.... Leaning out of frame fails you? Wow. For comparison's sake I'm an experienced dev and have been hacking on embedded Linux stuff for more than a decade, though I have doubts that's the trigger for "webcam or not." Was there any data retention period mentioned regarding your interview? Do they keep those videos forever, or are they discarded as soon as they're reviewed (assuming they're not live)?
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I didn't look too carefully. There were other options open and I quickly decided to pass on that much hoop-jumping for something not high on my list. The general implication was that it would just be to ensure you didn't cheat (so there'd be no value once your candidacy ended), but I don't remember any actual contract, and I assume that anything not stated to expire is kept forever.
- sgk284 10y ago
  Bezos set a mandate to HR a few years ago that he wanted them to be able to hire a new grad without ever needing to speak to a human engineer. That is, he wants the entire interview process automated (specifically for new grads, at least for now). What you experienced is part of their experiment in figuring out how to make this work. They've got a number of variations of interviews going on right now. I believe this is so that they can scale up as rapidly as they need to. Apologies for the lack of citation but I don't believe this is something Amazon has spoken publicly about.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Oh that is great, robots hiring staff.
    - superuser2 10y ago
      Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is certainly tempting.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        Oh I agree. I think if an engineer has to spend over 2-4h a week interviewing long term you are spending too much time on hiring. A little break to talk to humans is good. Shouldn't be your main job, unless you work in HR or something...
      - wyldfire 10y ago
        Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?
        superuser2 10y ago
        Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about, it's just extremely rapid growth.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to verify identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the entire time part - there was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the cam. That's new and stupid. I'd tell them to get fucked.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    You're lucky we're in a market that allows you to make that choice.
- throwaway52584 10y ago
  Although being asked to code on webcam is obnoxious, it's probably also a symptom of cultures where people exploit every trick in the book to game university admissions, exams, job interviews, etc.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Absolutely. That's part of why I stressed that it didn't seem to be standard Amazon policy - it looked like some hiring agent had decided "No fraud on my watch!" and pushed through an aggressive policy to make it happen. My complaint was that it seemed both ineffective (imagine candidates with the Big-O cheatsheet taped above their monitor) and obnoxious (I wasn't even going to talk to an employee until I jumped through a bunch of hoops). If you're going to be demanding (and uncommonly so), then security theater with no engagement with the candidate is a bad way to go.
    - superuser2 10y ago
      >imagine candidates with the Big-O cheatsheet taped above their monitor You need some interesting mental gymnastics to explain why this is even a problem, given that they could easily have the same cheatsheet taped on their cubicle wall after getting the job.
      - serge2k 10y ago
        and you don't have it during the onsite.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        That's true - this all assumes that the existing "no resources but a whiteboard" system is even worth reproducing.
- Joof 10y ago
  My webcam doesn't work in Linux; and you won't find me programming in Windows under ordinary conditions. I guess I can't work at amazon?
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I was living in a place with spotty internet, so I wondered about these issues. It was fine to code online, but if the video got choppy would they blackball me?
  - khedoros 10y ago
    I've had a few rounds of interviews with different parts of their company. None of them ever involved a camera (with the exception of a 2-way video conference with someone in a different office, during an on-site interview).
kevan 10y ago
>When I brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged the reputation and their intent to improve. I recently interviewed, one of the interviewers actually brought up the NYT article and said that the retail side is intense, the tech side is more laid back, for whatever that's worth.
- nemtaro 10y ago
  I'm sure he did say that ;) but consider that he was not entirely truthful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243
  - kevan 10y ago
    I'm aware that people can say whatever they want and took it with a big pile of salt, just wanted to give another piece of anecdata.
- ryanczak 10y ago
  haha. when I worked at AWS we considered retail where people went to rest and vest.
ryanlm 10y ago
I'll work for them in a heartbeat. Seriously, I want to work somewhere where I'm never bored, and can take part in conversations, etc. It seems like a good place for an ambitious new grad for a few years. If there are any Amazon employees reading this, please reach out!
- rattray 10y ago
  > I want to work somewhere where I'm never bored, and can take part in conversations, etc. Try a startup?
  - deegles 10y ago
    Anyone would be way more valuable to a startup after a couple of years in industry. I would say that Amazon more so than others (maybe a little biased..) because of the team structure, engineering tools and development practices. Knowing what I know now, if I had gone to a startup straight out of college I would have been worse than useless.
  - pc86 10y ago
    At the risk of just repeating what deegles said, do startups really want the overhead of a new grad? I've met people 2-3 years out of school who can barely communicate or work in a professional environment. I can't imagine dealing with a new grad plus the faster-than-average-corporate environment of a startup.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Not as employee 1 or 2 or 3. Maybe by employee 5 or 6 you can afford 1 or so new guys. New guys are awesome, but a lot of work. Hard to justify them for a few years...
- throwaway52584 10y ago
  I'm picturing a wide-eyed lamb wandering into the lion's den. "Hai guys! Let's have conversations LOL."
gdulli 10y ago
You can find anecdotes about how working at any company is a bad experience and others about how it's a good experience. With Amazon, however, there's something qualitatively different. The anecdotes and evidence of it being a terrible place to work far outweigh the positive. Its bad reputation is confirmed by things you read about their policies, quotes from Jeff Bezos, etc. Poor treatment of employees is consistent across both the corporate and warehouse contexts. This reputation has persisted since at least 2007, the first time I considered working there and did some research on it.
- plandis 10y ago
  I've worked at Amazon for around 4 years now. I work 9-5 most days. The days I don't I'll work 10-6! I still work there because I get to work on interesting distributed systems. I've never really had any of the bad experiences that others have seem to had. I reasonably get along with my manager, his manager, and the VP of my organization. They are not the assholes that every complaint seems to mention. Even in Seattle my pay definitely puts me in the upper middle class. I can afford Seattle property reasonably well ($600k range). Interviewing at Amazon is kind of weird. They keep trying out new ideas to see how they work and includes things like: standard phone screen, coding test (don't know a better word for it), on site all day interviews, group interviews, etc... Chances are that if you had a weird interview process it was probably because you were trialing some different interview format. I guess I don't really have a point in this post but I didn't see one positive post about Amazon and thought I'd share (at least anecdotally) that it's not all bad.
  - pc86 10y ago
    $600k real estate puts you well above "upper middle class" nationally. Maybe not in a limited geographic area, and certainly not SF/NY/DC, but that's well over 3x the median home value for the entire country.
    - superuser2 10y ago
      Housing is cheaper in other places because salaries are lower. The same worker who is paid enough for a $600k house in a tech hub would be paid proportionally less in a place with cheaper housing. (Unless he was just underpaid in the tech hub, and could have gotten enough for a palatial house in the tech hub at a different employer). People don't live in the national average, they live in limited geographic areas, and the salaries that make people try to characterize tech workers as rich tend to come in - you guessed it - SF, NY, and DC.
linkregister 10y ago
> unlike HN, I've never seriously considered joining a mega-corporation Isn't the startup deified on HN more than any other type of company? Of course there are all kinds on here; it seems strange to stereotype HN posters that way.
- superswordfish 10y ago
  Once upon a time. Sadly, now a position as a Google SRE seems most prized here, followed by work for other big corps.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    Can you talk more about this? The only HN SRE discussions I have seen were when the Google SRE book was released and yesterday's Stack Overflow salary calculator was posted. I still maintain that in most comments portions, "startup" generates more hits than "Google". And "SRE" is still pretty rare. This thread contains more "startup" than "Google". And we're the only two posters talking about "SRE".
npinski-AWS 10y ago
Everyone's mileage may vary. I've been at Amazon for 3 years in 2 different offices on two different orgs (Vancouver-AWS, Europe-Retail). I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out. (A couple of people I know left because they didn't want to do any oncall at all anymore, but noone was misled, and as far as I know they are not bitter about it) But, the key is that there is no one "Amazon". A lot of freedom is given to each individual team and org, and as a result wild variations in work culture and expectations. I know teams that are great, and I know teams that are tougher. But, my reasoning for why those teams might be difficult to work with is because they are working on new bleeding-edge services (AWS, Echo/Alexa), and as a result there is a lot of pressure to stay ahead of our competitors. Which is completely understandable when Google and Microsoft are either just behind or just ahead on everything. Maybe I've just been lucky? But I work with a lot of teams in a lot of countries, and generally by and large people are challenged and content. I'm not saying there are no problems. And I'm sure all the people in the NYT article are not lying. But at a huge company of 200,000 employees, there's always going to be some unhappy and disgruntled people. I don't think I'll be able to convince you otherwise - I am a city-dweller through and through, so I sense we have probably quite different personalities. edit: I should acknowledge that I don't have direct experience with American work culture. Y'all work way too many hours, but that's not just at Amazon. And Silicon Valley is even worse.
- ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
  > Everyone's mileage may vary. In Amazon it can vary quite a lot across countries, cities, teams. > I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out. I met plenty. Heavy on-call rotations being the primary reason. Many people were quite bitter about the real VS claimed on-call load. But again, I agree that this varies a lot.
- abbasaamer 10y ago
  This. I'm a hiring manager at Amazon (in natural language on Alexa). One thing I can say about Amazon culture is that teams can vary quite a bit. This is because Amazon gives a huge amount of ownership to each team, which naturally means each team's leadership has a lot of control on their culture. Amazon does try to instill certain cultural elements across the company, but despite that, things can vary based on the leadership and the part of the company you're in. Prior to Alexa, I was in supply chain systems and I would say the culture there was quite different there. Personally speaking, I really enjoy this team. It's definitely not a meat grinder; on the contrary, I think our team has great work-life balance while providing sufficient challenges to keep us motivated. By the way, I'm sorry to hear some of the negative stories from others about their interviews. That's certainly not deliberate; our goal is to create a positive experience for every candidate irrespective of whether or not they successfully clear the interview. I personally work with some very professional and courteous recruiters on Alexa, but if anyone has had a negative experience interviewing for Alexa, I'd be happy to follow up and see if I can take some action on your feedback.
inopinatus 10y ago
I'm ex-AWS. Actually an ex-AWS hiring manager. My experience is at odds with the negative stories. What Amazon has is a culture with a strong flavour. Like all strong flavours, I think you're going to either love it or loathe it. I had a fantastic team to work with - they were all either ex-tech-sector CTOs or equivalent or they had that level of potential. So as the team manager I had permanent case of imposter syndrome. My manager was the kind of engineering leader you want to be, a listener first and foremost, smart and principled and demanding but not harsh. The technology is all the more mind-blowing when you look under the bonnet. The culture and corporate structure is remarkable and in my opinion a major strategic factor in the Amazon success story. We were always hiring, all the time. When you have such strong ICs, they don't want anything less than A-list peers. As an AWS manager I allocated roughly a third of my time to hiring and promotion, and more during certain internal cycles. So it was hard work in a demanding environment but I loved it, and that made stepping away all the more difficult. Would I return? If my startup tanked, in a heartbeat, if they'd have me back. I also think that those who loathed it are far more vocal than those who loved it. Part of the culture is a strong sense of nondisclosure, and if you have positive memories of the place, that's going to carry over. I will say, the hiring process described may differ between teams. There are consistencies that the recruitment folks systematically enforce, but as a hiring manager (at least in my region) we had latitude to vary screening steps and the mix of the in-person interviews. I didn't futz with it much though, to avoid screwing up procedural fairness. I am not surprised this author got an offer, they seem bright enough, and engaging with the process and the company with genuine interest and an open mind (without trying to game it) is definitely a very positive framing and I imagine this came across in person.
- justinv 10y ago
  I'm at Amazon (non-tech; 3 different orgs; so literally NYTimes' focus or whatnot). Your first paragraph is exactly how I describe Amazon to people. You either love the culture - or you hate it. There are very few people I know who are ambivalent about working there. It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone.
  - serge2k 10y ago
happypants23 10y ago
Ex-AWS engineer here. The Amazon experience can differ wildly between teams and orgs. Best thing is to find some peers that work there and get the inside loop on which teams are sane. I worked on some really cool stuff there, and learned a lot. But then after a while AWS grew rapidly and I ended up spending most of my time on pretty boring stuff, such as operational firefighting, endless deployments, config updates, and of course that oncall thing. That said, in my experience, Amazon was still a bit of meat-grinder. I've come to realise though that its just part of an extremely long interview process, with the goal of weeding out those who just aren't thriving in Amazon's environment of "organised chaos". New grads who don't make SDE2 within a certain amount of time will eventually be PIP'ed, which is basically a signal that its time to find greener pastures.
jmcgough 10y ago
> Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. It's still like that. All of my friends who've worked for Amazon burned out within a year or two.
burdalane 10y ago
I've replied to Amazon recruiters. I did one phone interview with them, and another time, I sent my resume to the recruiter as requested and never heard anything back. For me, at least, it seems that getting hired is hard.
hacknat 10y ago
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but Amazon's reputation doesn't really extend to AWS. I lived in Seattle for 7 years, and AWS workers always seemed baffled by their company's reputation. Everyone who worked for the store had horror stories to tell. On the other hand it is only a handful people who get to flesh out interesting products for AWS.
johnward 10y ago
Before reading the article I started asking "why". I don't really pay THAT much attention to industry news or even HN but it seems like pretty common knowledge that working for Amazon is terribad. Then again I work for another company with that reputation but I didn't apply I was acquired.
thefastlane 10y ago
"Amazon seems like a meat grinder" who isn't a meatgrinder these days? (serious question.)

by larrik 10y ago

Bartweiss 10y ago

Interestingly, I opened the Amazon door as a new dev and found something very different than what this post describes. The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to verify identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the entire time part - there was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the cam. Between the blind hostility of that opener and the meat-grinder rep, I passed without interviewing (and passed with the next Amazon recruiter shortly after, who had no idea they'd pinged me before). I'm sure this routine is reserved for new grads, and the weird "don't lean out of frame" stuff seemed to be from some interview-management third party, but it was still the most stilted process I've seen from an actual software company.

dominotw 10y ago
I applied to amazon last month, they asked me to do interviewstreet coding for 2 hrs. After that Recruiter didn't even have the minimum courtesy to let me know what happened. He simply stopped all communications with me. Reflects their attitude of treating ppl as mere 'resources' , I would work for amazon if I have no self-respect.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  After that Recruiter didn't even have the minimum courtesy to let me know what happened. That's pretty common recently for companies. I'm not sure why.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Some claim it's them covering their ass thanks to the SUE SUE SUE culture of the US. I understand that, but when it's a purely technical decision they could easily enough give you constructive feedback. You missed these two edge cases. Your code crashes on certain inputs. This is very inefficient, you could have done XYZ. You could automate chunks of this, and protect yourself from any discrimination lawsuits by just making any engineer who reviews the code have zero knowledge of the candidate.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    The worst I've seen is a recruiter that didn't tell me I had been accepted. I found out when someone at the company followed up on why I hadn't responded to the offer. I have no idea how a commission-based business manages to do something like that.
    - _RPM 10y ago
      Are internal recruiters (sales people) commission based? Seems strange.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        No, but lots of firms (this wasn't Amazon) hire external recruiters who are commission based, usually a percentage of salary for each candidate placed. Some also get "right to represent", where you can't apply through the employer directly once you've started a process with the recruiter. Which makes this utterly weird - it was literally a matter of giving up (potentially) several grand by not forwarding an email.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
jc4p 10y ago
I have just under ten years of experience and lead teams of developers, Amazon routinely spams me asking me to do 120 min online coding tasks before even a phone screen too. It's just fucking disrespectful of my time, to be honest.
- wernercd 10y ago
  I'm at a new job where the "old team" of two developers is being replaced by 5 devs... the old team had ~15 years of experience and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Not saying anything about YOU... experience is important... but 15 years experience doesn't mean 15 years of good experience or lack of bad habits.
  - jc4p 10y ago
    Yeah, definitely agreed. I just wanted to point out the person's "I opened the door to Amazon as a new dev" isn't purely limited to new devs perspectives.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    So, what were they doing for 15 years and why weren't they replaced sooner?
    - wernercd 10y ago
      Basically the company started expanding and their code base started falling apart at the seams. Two coders that each had "silos" with wedges to keep the two sides communicating together. One did web side - ordering, registration, etc on a Webform MVC customized hybrid. The other did floor applications. New customer? New database, website, etc. Sql statements? "If company a then select * from blah where field like '{text}';" everywhere. Why select *? Because the different code bases diverged... why like/text? Because sql injection doesn't exist. Almost everything text fields... 2 wide inventory fields that house more than 99 items... 10 wide inventory fields that house 2 items... I will have some posts for TheDailyWTF once I get my feet a bit more wet... As to why it took so long? They were able to keep it running with duck tape and bubble gum... once the company started expanding, the better of the two programmers knew they couldn't keep up and left earlier this year. The other is due gone soon... Good guy, but... unwilling to accept that his code is shit.
cydonian_monk 10y ago
I danced with Amazon once (casually, I have zero desire to move to a Pacific Coast state), and had a similar "first step" experience, just with no webcam. Had they asked me to code on a webcam I too would've refused. At this point I don't recall if it was CollabEdit, InterviewStreet, or something similar (it's been some time and I deleted the emails), but I remember that if I tabbed out of the interview page at any time I would instantly fail it. And here I thought that was bad.... Leaning out of frame fails you? Wow. For comparison's sake I'm an experienced dev and have been hacking on embedded Linux stuff for more than a decade, though I have doubts that's the trigger for "webcam or not." Was there any data retention period mentioned regarding your interview? Do they keep those videos forever, or are they discarded as soon as they're reviewed (assuming they're not live)?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I didn't look too carefully. There were other options open and I quickly decided to pass on that much hoop-jumping for something not high on my list. The general implication was that it would just be to ensure you didn't cheat (so there'd be no value once your candidacy ended), but I don't remember any actual contract, and I assume that anything not stated to expire is kept forever.
sgk284 10y ago
Bezos set a mandate to HR a few years ago that he wanted them to be able to hire a new grad without ever needing to speak to a human engineer. That is, he wants the entire interview process automated (specifically for new grads, at least for now). What you experienced is part of their experiment in figuring out how to make this work. They've got a number of variations of interviews going on right now. I believe this is so that they can scale up as rapidly as they need to. Apologies for the lack of citation but I don't believe this is something Amazon has spoken publicly about.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Oh that is great, robots hiring staff.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is certainly tempting.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Oh I agree. I think if an engineer has to spend over 2-4h a week interviewing long term you are spending too much time on hiring. A little break to talk to humans is good. Shouldn't be your main job, unless you work in HR or something...
    - wyldfire 10y ago
      Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?
      - superuser2 10y ago
        Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about, it's just extremely rapid growth.
serge2k 10y ago
> I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to verify identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the entire time part - there was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the cam. That's new and stupid. I'd tell them to get fucked.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  You're lucky we're in a market that allows you to make that choice.
throwaway52584 10y ago
Although being asked to code on webcam is obnoxious, it's probably also a symptom of cultures where people exploit every trick in the book to game university admissions, exams, job interviews, etc.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Absolutely. That's part of why I stressed that it didn't seem to be standard Amazon policy - it looked like some hiring agent had decided "No fraud on my watch!" and pushed through an aggressive policy to make it happen. My complaint was that it seemed both ineffective (imagine candidates with the Big-O cheatsheet taped above their monitor) and obnoxious (I wasn't even going to talk to an employee until I jumped through a bunch of hoops). If you're going to be demanding (and uncommonly so), then security theater with no engagement with the candidate is a bad way to go.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    >imagine candidates with the Big-O cheatsheet taped above their monitor You need some interesting mental gymnastics to explain why this is even a problem, given that they could easily have the same cheatsheet taped on their cubicle wall after getting the job.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      and you don't have it during the onsite.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      That's true - this all assumes that the existing "no resources but a whiteboard" system is even worth reproducing.
Joof 10y ago
My webcam doesn't work in Linux; and you won't find me programming in Windows under ordinary conditions. I guess I can't work at amazon?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I was living in a place with spotty internet, so I wondered about these issues. It was fine to code online, but if the video got choppy would they blackball me?
- khedoros 10y ago
  I've had a few rounds of interviews with different parts of their company. None of them ever involved a camera (with the exception of a 2-way video conference with someone in a different office, during an on-site interview).

kevan 10y ago

>When I brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged the reputation and their intent to improve. I recently interviewed, one of the interviewers actually brought up the NYT article and said that the retail side is intense, the tech side is more laid back, for whatever that's worth.

nemtaro 10y ago
I'm sure he did say that ;) but consider that he was not entirely truthful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243
- kevan 10y ago
  I'm aware that people can say whatever they want and took it with a big pile of salt, just wanted to give another piece of anecdata.
ryanczak 10y ago
haha. when I worked at AWS we considered retail where people went to rest and vest.

ryanlm 10y ago

I'll work for them in a heartbeat. Seriously, I want to work somewhere where I'm never bored, and can take part in conversations, etc. It seems like a good place for an ambitious new grad for a few years. If there are any Amazon employees reading this, please reach out!

rattray 10y ago
> I want to work somewhere where I'm never bored, and can take part in conversations, etc. Try a startup?
- deegles 10y ago
  Anyone would be way more valuable to a startup after a couple of years in industry. I would say that Amazon more so than others (maybe a little biased..) because of the team structure, engineering tools and development practices. Knowing what I know now, if I had gone to a startup straight out of college I would have been worse than useless.
- pc86 10y ago
  At the risk of just repeating what deegles said, do startups really want the overhead of a new grad? I've met people 2-3 years out of school who can barely communicate or work in a professional environment. I can't imagine dealing with a new grad plus the faster-than-average-corporate environment of a startup.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Not as employee 1 or 2 or 3. Maybe by employee 5 or 6 you can afford 1 or so new guys. New guys are awesome, but a lot of work. Hard to justify them for a few years...
throwaway52584 10y ago
I'm picturing a wide-eyed lamb wandering into the lion's den. "Hai guys! Let's have conversations LOL."

gdulli 10y ago

You can find anecdotes about how working at any company is a bad experience and others about how it's a good experience. With Amazon, however, there's something qualitatively different. The anecdotes and evidence of it being a terrible place to work far outweigh the positive. Its bad reputation is confirmed by things you read about their policies, quotes from Jeff Bezos, etc. Poor treatment of employees is consistent across both the corporate and warehouse contexts. This reputation has persisted since at least 2007, the first time I considered working there and did some research on it.

plandis 10y ago
I've worked at Amazon for around 4 years now. I work 9-5 most days. The days I don't I'll work 10-6! I still work there because I get to work on interesting distributed systems. I've never really had any of the bad experiences that others have seem to had. I reasonably get along with my manager, his manager, and the VP of my organization. They are not the assholes that every complaint seems to mention. Even in Seattle my pay definitely puts me in the upper middle class. I can afford Seattle property reasonably well ($600k range). Interviewing at Amazon is kind of weird. They keep trying out new ideas to see how they work and includes things like: standard phone screen, coding test (don't know a better word for it), on site all day interviews, group interviews, etc... Chances are that if you had a weird interview process it was probably because you were trialing some different interview format. I guess I don't really have a point in this post but I didn't see one positive post about Amazon and thought I'd share (at least anecdotally) that it's not all bad.
- pc86 10y ago
  $600k real estate puts you well above "upper middle class" nationally. Maybe not in a limited geographic area, and certainly not SF/NY/DC, but that's well over 3x the median home value for the entire country.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    Housing is cheaper in other places because salaries are lower. The same worker who is paid enough for a $600k house in a tech hub would be paid proportionally less in a place with cheaper housing. (Unless he was just underpaid in the tech hub, and could have gotten enough for a palatial house in the tech hub at a different employer). People don't live in the national average, they live in limited geographic areas, and the salaries that make people try to characterize tech workers as rich tend to come in - you guessed it - SF, NY, and DC.

linkregister 10y ago

> unlike HN, I've never seriously considered joining a mega-corporation Isn't the startup deified on HN more than any other type of company? Of course there are all kinds on here; it seems strange to stereotype HN posters that way.

superswordfish 10y ago
Once upon a time. Sadly, now a position as a Google SRE seems most prized here, followed by work for other big corps.
- linkregister 10y ago
  Can you talk more about this? The only HN SRE discussions I have seen were when the Google SRE book was released and yesterday's Stack Overflow salary calculator was posted. I still maintain that in most comments portions, "startup" generates more hits than "Google". And "SRE" is still pretty rare. This thread contains more "startup" than "Google". And we're the only two posters talking about "SRE".

npinski-AWS 10y ago

Everyone's mileage may vary. I've been at Amazon for 3 years in 2 different offices on two different orgs (Vancouver-AWS, Europe-Retail). I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out. (A couple of people I know left because they didn't want to do any oncall at all anymore, but noone was misled, and as far as I know they are not bitter about it) But, the key is that there is no one "Amazon". A lot of freedom is given to each individual team and org, and as a result wild variations in work culture and expectations. I know teams that are great, and I know teams that are tougher. But, my reasoning for why those teams might be difficult to work with is because they are working on new bleeding-edge services (AWS, Echo/Alexa), and as a result there is a lot of pressure to stay ahead of our competitors. Which is completely understandable when Google and Microsoft are either just behind or just ahead on everything. Maybe I've just been lucky? But I work with a lot of teams in a lot of countries, and generally by and large people are challenged and content. I'm not saying there are no problems. And I'm sure all the people in the NYT article are not lying. But at a huge company of 200,000 employees, there's always going to be some unhappy and disgruntled people. I don't think I'll be able to convince you otherwise - I am a city-dweller through and through, so I sense we have probably quite different personalities. edit: I should acknowledge that I don't have direct experience with American work culture. Y'all work way too many hours, but that's not just at Amazon. And Silicon Valley is even worse.

ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
> Everyone's mileage may vary. In Amazon it can vary quite a lot across countries, cities, teams. > I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out. I met plenty. Heavy on-call rotations being the primary reason. Many people were quite bitter about the real VS claimed on-call load. But again, I agree that this varies a lot.
abbasaamer 10y ago
This. I'm a hiring manager at Amazon (in natural language on Alexa). One thing I can say about Amazon culture is that teams can vary quite a bit. This is because Amazon gives a huge amount of ownership to each team, which naturally means each team's leadership has a lot of control on their culture. Amazon does try to instill certain cultural elements across the company, but despite that, things can vary based on the leadership and the part of the company you're in. Prior to Alexa, I was in supply chain systems and I would say the culture there was quite different there. Personally speaking, I really enjoy this team. It's definitely not a meat grinder; on the contrary, I think our team has great work-life balance while providing sufficient challenges to keep us motivated. By the way, I'm sorry to hear some of the negative stories from others about their interviews. That's certainly not deliberate; our goal is to create a positive experience for every candidate irrespective of whether or not they successfully clear the interview. I personally work with some very professional and courteous recruiters on Alexa, but if anyone has had a negative experience interviewing for Alexa, I'd be happy to follow up and see if I can take some action on your feedback.

inopinatus 10y ago

I'm ex-AWS. Actually an ex-AWS hiring manager. My experience is at odds with the negative stories. What Amazon has is a culture with a strong flavour. Like all strong flavours, I think you're going to either love it or loathe it. I had a fantastic team to work with - they were all either ex-tech-sector CTOs or equivalent or they had that level of potential. So as the team manager I had permanent case of imposter syndrome. My manager was the kind of engineering leader you want to be, a listener first and foremost, smart and principled and demanding but not harsh. The technology is all the more mind-blowing when you look under the bonnet. The culture and corporate structure is remarkable and in my opinion a major strategic factor in the Amazon success story. We were always hiring, all the time. When you have such strong ICs, they don't want anything less than A-list peers. As an AWS manager I allocated roughly a third of my time to hiring and promotion, and more during certain internal cycles. So it was hard work in a demanding environment but I loved it, and that made stepping away all the more difficult. Would I return? If my startup tanked, in a heartbeat, if they'd have me back. I also think that those who loathed it are far more vocal than those who loved it. Part of the culture is a strong sense of nondisclosure, and if you have positive memories of the place, that's going to carry over. I will say, the hiring process described may differ between teams. There are consistencies that the recruitment folks systematically enforce, but as a hiring manager (at least in my region) we had latitude to vary screening steps and the mix of the in-person interviews. I didn't futz with it much though, to avoid screwing up procedural fairness. I am not surprised this author got an offer, they seem bright enough, and engaging with the process and the company with genuine interest and an open mind (without trying to game it) is definitely a very positive framing and I imagine this came across in person.

justinv 10y ago
I'm at Amazon (non-tech; 3 different orgs; so literally NYTimes' focus or whatnot). Your first paragraph is exactly how I describe Amazon to people. You either love the culture - or you hate it. There are very few people I know who are ambivalent about working there. It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone.
- serge2k 10y ago

happypants23 10y ago

Ex-AWS engineer here. The Amazon experience can differ wildly between teams and orgs. Best thing is to find some peers that work there and get the inside loop on which teams are sane. I worked on some really cool stuff there, and learned a lot. But then after a while AWS grew rapidly and I ended up spending most of my time on pretty boring stuff, such as operational firefighting, endless deployments, config updates, and of course that oncall thing. That said, in my experience, Amazon was still a bit of meat-grinder. I've come to realise though that its just part of an extremely long interview process, with the goal of weeding out those who just aren't thriving in Amazon's environment of "organised chaos". New grads who don't make SDE2 within a certain amount of time will eventually be PIP'ed, which is basically a signal that its time to find greener pastures.

jmcgough 10y ago

> Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. It's still like that. All of my friends who've worked for Amazon burned out within a year or two.

burdalane 10y ago

I've replied to Amazon recruiters. I did one phone interview with them, and another time, I sent my resume to the recruiter as requested and never heard anything back. For me, at least, it seems that getting hired is hard.

hacknat 10y ago

I don't disagree with your sentiment, but Amazon's reputation doesn't really extend to AWS. I lived in Seattle for 7 years, and AWS workers always seemed baffled by their company's reputation. Everyone who worked for the store had horror stories to tell. On the other hand it is only a handful people who get to flesh out interesting products for AWS.

johnward 10y ago

Before reading the article I started asking "why". I don't really pay THAT much attention to industry news or even HN but it seems like pretty common knowledge that working for Amazon is terribad. Then again I work for another company with that reputation but I didn't apply I was acquired.

thefastlane 10y ago

"Amazon seems like a meat grinder" who isn't a meatgrinder these days? (serious question.)