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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 anyo

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
    I'm not sure why. Because as a culture, we stop thinking of candidates as human beings the moment we decide we aren't hiring them?
- ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
  Ex Amazon here: that's not supposed to happen.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    okay
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    But it does all the time, of course.
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).

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
  I'm not sure why. Because as a culture, we stop thinking of candidates as human beings the moment we decide we aren't hiring them?
ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
Ex Amazon here: that's not supposed to happen.
- dominotw 10y ago
  okay
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  But it does all the time, of course.

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).