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'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience

• markbnj 10y ago
  I'm a cheater too. I confess to using Google, Stackoverflow, Hacker News, and tons of other online resources to look up stuff every day. This is obviously stuff I should know already, and be able to recall on-demand. I'm so ashamed. Seriously, though, that is one of the most surreal things I've ever read about our industry. I would have quit the interview too, but probably earlier in the process.
• konart 10y ago
  I'd quit the moment I was told they need to have something more than just a "share your desktop". The hell is this, really...
  • nkozyra 10y ago
    It's an general aptitude test. If someone cheats they move forward when perhaps they shouldn't and they waste Amazon's time. ProctorU does similar things for universities. I've taken a few, they're not always this intrusive, but I understand the sentiment. People cheat. It's hard to stop that and even harder to do remotely.
    • geofft 10y ago
      So it filters for only the good cheaters, then. To be fair, those people are very likely to be successful!
    • mikeash 10y ago
      Seems like the proper way to handle this would be to have the test taker go somewhere with a proper test taking environment. If you don't want them to come on sit, then I'm sure there are local facilities they could contract to handle it. Attempting to take over a person's own computer in order to prevent cheating on a test is simultaneously an egregious invasion of privacy and completely insecure. Are we really supposed to believe that you wouldn't be able to hide some cheating materials from your own webcam?
      • nkozyra 10y ago
        > Seems like the proper way to handle this would be to have the test taker go somewhere with a proper test taking environment. If you don't want them to come on sit, then I'm sure there are local facilities they could contract to handle it. I'm certain it's more expensive for the company, though. And some candidates don't have nearby access to this.
        • rewrew 10y ago
          There a so many locations that almost all do -- certainly much easier than any local interview location.
          • nkozyra 10y ago
            But easier and cheaper than ProctorU? That's the main sell.
            • mikeash 10y ago
              Doing things badly is usually easier and cheaper than doing them properly.
      • dom0 10y ago
        Mensa International tests work similar to this, ie. they rent a room in a VHS or university for a couple hours to conduct the tests.
        • mikeash 10y ago
          The FAA's written exam for pilots is similar, they have certified testing centers which can administer it. That's what made me think of this approach. Looking around a bit, it looks like dedicated testing centers are fairly common.
      • Broken_Hippo 10y ago
        I recently had this a version of this with test taking - As part of immigration, I had to complete civics and language learning courses. Both had tests to take to complete the training. The tests were held at the schools, all online. Purses, bags, jackets, electronics and so forth were left at the front of the room. Paper and pencils were provided in the computer labs, which were recorded and inspected for signs of cheating. Humans were at the site, but video wouldn't have been out of the question either. It wouldn't seem too much to be able to rent a local school's computer lab for these sorts of purposes, for a small fee. And the internet and security on these is already tax-payer funded. This should put test taking environments well within reach of most people.
    • konart 10y ago
      What is cheating in this situation? When we are talking about university exams - yes, you can cheat by using materials you are not allowed to. As a software developer - I alwasy kind of cheat. I use Stackoverflow and infinite google search abilities :)
      • FungalRaincloud 10y ago
        I consider cheating to be part of my job. I look up things I've done a dozen times before, if I haven't done them in a few weeks. I'll often ask google how to do something, then while it's loading the results, start writing the code that does that thing. A more valuable test, in my eyes, is how well someone CAN cheat in the interview. I want to hear someone say "you know, I've never actually heard that question before, let me see if anyone's talking about it on StackOverflow." Admitting you don't know the answer, and coming up with a way to get the answer is far more important a skill, to me, than blind recall. I've said "I don't know" in an interview, and while getting the words out took some effort, it showed the interviewer that I could admit to not knowing, and started a dialog between me and the interviewer, which gave him an idea of how I think about new problems.
      • nkozyra 10y ago
        You can consider this tantamount to a blackboard exercise. In all likelihood they're looking for basic algorithm stuff. In that instance, in your daily job you wouldn't even cheat by looking it up, you'd just use a library. I would assume that they value people who understand how these things work rather than just being able to implement it. After all, you can teach someone basic Python and how to use Scipy in a couple of hours, but does that make them a data scientist? Anyway my point is lots of companies have programming exercises/tests, and I'm not aware of too many that let you just look stuff up while you're doing them. Debate the merits of that, but it's common enough that seeing it in this platform shouldn't feel totally shocking.
  • r1k 10y ago
    He could just have set up a separate user account.
    • dclowd9901 10y ago
      It sounds like he didn't know it would've been this intrusive. I had no idea personally and I know a lot of people who have worked at Amazon.
      • skaul 10y ago
        Exactly. I respect Amazon as a company, and wanted to work there at the time. Wasn't quite expecting this.
  • jmcdiesel 10y ago
    The moment they wanted access to my screen... I would have terminated it. I'm not a privacy nut, but I am a respect nut... and if your level of respect for your engineers allows you to enforce such a ridiculous policy of "testing" in the interview process, well, you don't have much respect for the engineers... or their time, or their own privacy (on their own machine). I wont work for a company who installs "screen watching" software on your machine. I wont work for a company who middle-man's the SSL cert. I wont work for a company who drug tests. (I smoke MJ, but a lot of companies state MJ doesnt fail, but I still refuse to take a drug test, its principle) We aren't cattle. When you're treated as such in the interview process, you can strongly infer that you will be treated as such in your position.
    • konart 10y ago
      Well, screen sharing is okay (even though I'd prefere some 3rd party service with real-life code editing) and most OS has this kind of feature by default. Or via something like Skype (some other IM softwar has similar features too). My main 'concern' was about "The proctor then proceeded to shut down all my running applications for me" - the fuck is this? Pardon my language.
      • hocuspocus 10y ago
        I've had one interview using Skype screen sharing where I had to import a toy project in my IDE and deal with some more "real-life" kind of tasks, and it was a good experience. Collabedit and the like are a bit limiting outside of Google-style algo questions. I'd never install something like LogMeIn/TeamViewer though.
      • jmcdiesel 10y ago
        Showing my screen is one thing... I prefer a collabedit or something similar... I work on a MacOS computer... so even when apps are closed, notifications still show. I set my messages notifications to show the full message... including images... so even with Messages closed, if my wife SMS's me, it shows on my screen. I dont want to have to go shut off notifications for an interview process... and i shouldnt have to. There are plenty of tools to share the code view in many IDEs.. there are sites and services dedicated to this. To have access to my entire desktop, INCLUDING control of my mouse/keyboard and installing software... I would have a hard time telling them not to go fuck themselves... because the level of disrespect in treating an adult like a child student is so high its painful...
  • FungalRaincloud 10y ago
    To be honest, my exact reaction to something like this would be to tell the recruiter the only way it was happening was in a virtual machine, with no camera or mic access. I'll happily do a video interview, but I'm not going to be given a test like that under such invasive, low trust circumstances. Either you trust me not to cheat, or you don't trust me enough to give me the position. I'm also a bit against tests of this sort, beyond just the privacy issue - in the real world, if you're not looking up things you're unsure of, you're making a mistake. Denying someone even written resources seems like setting them up for failure. But the privacy issue is a big one, and would likely cause me to quit before even allowing access to my machine.
    • konart 10y ago
      >you don't trust me enough to give me the position. This. Why would I want to work in a company that labels me as a some sort of cheater before proven otherwise?
  • amyjess 10y ago
    I would have quit the moment that either a) they asked me to turn on a camera inside my house or b) they asked me to give them access to my computer. I'm a pretty private person, and giving anyone access to either of these is a dealbreaker. Hell, I don't even let my friends in my house, much less an employer. One of the last times I dealt with a recruiter, he wanted me to have a Skype interview with him before he passes my contact information on to the employer (for a job I really didn't want, but I was unemployed so I didn't have a choice if I didn't want to lose my unemployment). I tried to argue him out of it, and I ended up doing the interview in my backyard because there's no way in hell I'd ever turn a camera on in my house.
    • dom0 10y ago
      That seems overall sensible to me. I don't have any cameras* in the rooms I stay/work/sleep, and made sure that things like microphones are really only active when I want them to (eg. the mic line on my VoIP phone is hard-wired to the big, red indicator light on it). I feel very uncomfortable when I feel watched/listened to, and with digital devices there is no easy way to discern "could watch/listen" and "does watch/listen", so restrictions need to be placed in the real world, not in the world of bits and bytes... * Actually I do have one-or-the-other (D)SLR, but these are "dumb", not networked, and can positively not take pictures without somebody noticing - clack.
• woliveirajr 10y ago
  > After about an hour of this, I tell the proctor that I am no longer interested in the interview, and that I want to quit. I’m asked if I want to reschedule. I repeat that I want to quit. I’m told that a Log Out Procedure(™?) will have to be initiated. Isn't enough to have total access to your computer, you also have to leave them enough time to clean up (?) any copyrighted material they might have downloaded on your equipment... Interesting that you'll never know if they have uploaded some material from you, be it documents, photos or whatever.
  • pidg 10y ago
    You could just run the test software from inside a VM - with all those helpful 'written materials' on your real desktop.
    • DuskStar 10y ago
      They check to make sure you aren't running within a VM, unfortunately.
      • Avery3R 10y ago
        Malware checks for VMs too, there are documented ways to trick things into thinking that they're running on bare metal.
        • andai 10y ago
          Judging by the article and the comments, that sounds to me like more effort than Amazon is worth.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • makecheck 10y ago
    I imagine that a continuously-running backup process could capture anything they do. There’s not really a way for them to “clean up” anything.
• ajamesm 10y ago
  This vividly reminded me of PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
  • hood_syntax 10y ago
    One of the better greentexts, probably because it hits so close to home.
    • pjc50 10y ago
      Greentext? It was a Black Mirror episode.
      • CocaKoala 10y ago
        Unless the Black Mirror episode aired before 2013, the greentext predates it. http://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF http://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF
        • demonshreder 10y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits The episode aired on 11 December 2011. Seems unlikely that they are connected.
        • joncrocks 10y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits "first aired on Channel 4 on 11 December 2011." But it's Cuppliance, a substance (drug) to ensure compliance during 'Hot Shots' auditions rather than to verify identity.
      • bowyakka 10y ago
        In black mirror its a can of compliance
  • binarymax 10y ago
    I had no idea what this was so I found it, and its great: http://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png http://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
• rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Putting up with the bullshit is a part of the test.
  • andy_ppp 10y ago
    Yes, it's a screening for compliance as well as technical knowhow.
  • mindcrime 10y ago
    Both sides are being tested. In this case, Amazon fails.
  • lolc 10y ago
    I don't like how you're right.
• jasode 10y ago
  FYI: same topic (not dupe) a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076073
• Cyph0n 10y ago
  The previous HN submission about an Amazon interviewee being monitored during an online test was kind of strange but not a big deal. But this... this is absolutely horrific. Clean your desk?? Do you expect people to not use paper in the real world, or what exactly?
• repler 10y ago
  Amazon is truly awful at hiring. Their engineers often give strange programming puzzles to solve, then add arbitrary constraints like, "this needs to operate in 16MB of RAM". If Amazon can't spring for a $15 stick of memory it's probably not going to be a great work experience. I also wouldn't want to work with engineer who asked BS questions like that. Waste of time.
  • mclee 10y ago
    It is true that their hiring process may be far from optimal. But IMO it's also fair to ask algo related questions by throwing in constraints and see how the candidate reacts.
  • zackbloom 10y ago
    Obviously though the idea is you would be writing code at scale, where you will be processing a much greater volume of data where a $15 stick of memory is not going to solve your problems. Also, it's common to introduce those constraints to force you to use the 'clever' solution rather than the brute-force method.
  • praptak 10y ago
    But this is a legit question. Believe it or not, even at Google/Facebook/Amazon a) memory is neither infinite nor free and b) tasks tend to run in thousands of instances. Being able to save 10M means much more that $15 for a single die.
    • holydude 10y ago
      This is not true. Google is using tons of throw-away commodity disks because it's cheaper in the long run than to buy a more reliable enterprise storages. It would be a legit question in some circumstances.
  • Twirrim 10y ago
    This may come as a great big surprise to you, but memory capacity is legitimately a problem, most especially at scale, and even where you can just "spin up a new instance". Taking your "$15" stick of memory comment, that's a cost of $1.5m dollars when you start talking about a hundred thousand servers. You could pay the salary of a number of SDEs for the lifetime of that generation of servers for that much money. Working in a memory constrained approach can lead to lower latency and faster applications, and make the difference between a service being profitable or not. Without going in to details that would put my NDA at risk, when I worked on an AWS team, there was a change went through that improved the efficiency of the service by about a third. The original code was well written, extremely logical, and exactly what almost anyone would write when presented with the problem. You could have shown it to developers anywhere and they wouldn't have found fault with it. Stopping and thinking very carefully about largely fictitious constraints revealed a potential other approach, one that was somewhat left-field, but both worked and came without any risks. When your service is operating on many tens or hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide, or more, being able to retire up to a third of your servers is far from negligible in annual costs.
• praptak 10y ago
  The only way I'd agree to do that would be on a machine that I'd reimage before and after. Hopefully I'll never be that desperate for a job though.
• q3k 10y ago
  Thankfully, I would fail this interview the moment they require me to own a Windows or OS X license. > ProctorU currently supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X 10.4 or newer version of those systems. At this time, ProctorU does not support any Linux operating systems such as Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. edit: but I'd like to see them muck around with my linux.git .config to make sure I'm not cheating.
  • joncp 10y ago
    Ironic, since so much of Amazon's infrastructure runs on Linux.
  • danjoc 10y ago
    Underrated post :) This was the first thing I checked too. I run GNU/Linux. My internal web cam has never worked.
  • drivingmenuts 10y ago
    They'd lose me the moment they wanted full access to my system. My computer, my rules. You want to take control, mail me a computer and take control of that.
  • j1vms 10y ago
    That's why you put Win7 in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox) and let them figure out the rest.
    • q3k 10y ago
      That still requires a Win7 license.
      • dexterdog 10y ago
        No, just a Win7 installation
    • Bartweiss 10y ago
      No virtualization allowed if they detect it. ProctorU really isn't prepared to be running this stuff for Amazon.
• manacit 10y ago
  I mentioned this in the last post about this process, but this is not exclusive to Amazon. I did a ProctorU test for Epic a few years ago that followed the same requirements. I installed LogMeIn, let them poke around my laptop, showed some ID and did a sweep of my room with my webcam. I did not quit however, and ended up taking a ~3 hour SAT-like test. I don't dislike the idea of setting up a standard environment for a candidate to take an assessment, but this process feels a bit inhumane and intrusive, imho.
  • pjc50 10y ago
    > inhumane and intrusive I guess they feel that if they can be inhumane and intrusive towards their minimum wage employees in the warehouses, they might as well treat everyone that way.
    • manacit 10y ago
      I completely agree, and I think this is the natural evolution of Amazon (and, to an extent, corporate America). Amazon gets to treat their min wage warehouse employees as fungible, and their process around hiring and firing shows that. Have they gotten to the point where a certain amount of their engineering resources are the same? It's looking like they are trying to get there. It's a demonstration of our privilege on HN that we rally against these interviewing practices, yet they are a mainstay for a huge percentage of the USA. I'm not sure I'm getting my point across well, but I think there's going to be a point where this becomes more and more normal across more and more companies. They'll hire people to abstract the very difficult parts of computers away, and bring people in en-masse to fill in the blanks.
      • pjc50 10y ago
        I'd suggest getting organised as a preventative measure against this kind of thing, but that's likely to go down like a lead balloon here. As long as there's a shortage of developers, we're somewhat safe, but that position is very precarious.
        • 10y ago
• leroy_masochist 10y ago
  I guess the key takeaway here is to set up a clean guest user account on your computer before you interview with Amazon.
• Ianvdl 10y ago
  Is there a list of companies with over-the-top/invasive hiring practices somewhere? It would make it easier to avoid them, and maybe send a message.
• baddox 10y ago
  I am amazed at how far you tolerated it. This is probably how I would have handled it: > As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse. Nope. Goodbye.
  • dom0 10y ago
    Well it's good that someone tolerated it; now I have another couple names for my job black list. Thanks! :) (Although I wouldn't work for Amazon anyway, but now I don't have to do any research if a company brings up "ProctorU").
    • Karunamon 10y ago
      Holy cow.. I've got an Amazon SRE headhunter sitting in my inbox right now. I am sorely tempted to decline and send a link to this article as reason why.
      • edoceo 10y ago
        Please do
      • mc32 10y ago
        I think that would be good feedback, if you're turning it down --hopefully it will incentivize them to change. If you're taking it, of course not.
      • rublev 10y ago
        Do it.
      • jensvdh 10y ago
        Same here. It was for lab126, I was excited about it until I read this article..
        • euyyn 10y ago
• diegorbaquero 10y ago
  Now I know that I will need a ready-to-use VM when I apply to Amazon. But seriously, what?
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• sergiotapia 10y ago
  I imagine Amazon pays engineers $450,000 because of all of these hoops?
  • vkou 10y ago
    Not unless they are Jeff Dean.
• krishicks 10y ago
  Is there a business opportunity here? If Amazon wants complete control over the interview experience, maybe there's room for a service that rents out small office spaces, like ZipCar or AirBnB, but for a desk/small office with just a Chromebook, for this express purpose. Amazon or any other company could say they need a desk close to some place on some date, and the service could make one available that meets the requirements (laptop, multiple camera feeds, etc). Or maybe this already exists?
  • Tomdarkness 10y ago
    This is something similar, except they run test centers rather than just renting out office space for that use: https://home.pearsonvue.com/ https://home.pearsonvue.com/
  • djb_hackernews 10y ago
    ProctorU does that for people without webcams/compatible systems.
  • moolcool 10y ago
    I don't know if it exists for interviews, but there are definitely firms which offer facilities and services for test taking. I think it's quite common for certification and distance education
  • tylerpachal 10y ago
    A friend of mine interviewed for a tech position with the government (Canada). After the first couple screening interviews the subsequent interviews were all held in a hotel room. Similar to your suggestion, the hotel was picked so it was close to the candidate's house, and the interviewer supplied laptop and such.
    • a3n 10y ago
      Personally, I'd feel a huge creep factor interviewing next to a bed.
      • 10y ago
• doingmyting 10y ago
  I'd rather strip for dollars on the side of the street than take that job. At least you'd have a little dignity left.
• rescripting 10y ago
  I have a confession to make. I cheat at my job. I cheat all day, every day. I have this little book next to my desk I use to write down ideas and notes, and then I refer back to it later. Sometimes my boss is standing right there! I get such a rush. I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself! Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught! I know that my cheating gives me an unfair advantage in the job market. I know this cheating makes me an inferior programmer. And now I know I can never work at Amazon because I can't get past their super scrupulous interview process. Oh well, I guess I'll just try and get by, cheating my way though life.
  • Raed667 10y ago
    Today I used "man" to check some parameters of a command. I felt such a rush knowing that I cheated the system.
    • verandaguy 10y ago
      I think I know what you mean. I had to run a few commands using the `--help` flag this morning to look up features that I wasn't sure they could do. It just feels so _dirty_.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        At least we know now that we can't be counting on you in situations of dire need - like https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/.
    • fauria 10y ago
      If you want to cheat a little more you can try tldr: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/ https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/ It gives actual examples of commands, just like a cheatsheet does.
• tuwtuwtuw 10y ago
  Maybe you can spin up an EC2 instance and run the test from there.
  • kzisme 10y ago
    They would still require access/camera probably
• wyldfire 10y ago
  Semi-related tangent: I had a not-terribly-unpleasant experience when taking an online exam for a linux certification. The certification exam was effectively an interview round similar to this one because it was the first step the employer suggested after I submitted my resume for the job. The test proctor was unseen but could use my webcam to see me. It made me uncomfortable, for some reason I thought I'd be able to see and hear them if I needed anything. I suppose they might multiplex the proctors across multiple test takers. I knew in advance that they wanted a tidy area, so I used a guest bedroom with a small dresser that I set my laptop on. I was logged into a VM through my browser and tasked with several simple sysadmin jobs. Unlike this person's Amazon interview, the technical difficulties that I encountered were all my own doing. On my server, I tried to be very disciplined and used 'sudo' sparingly (sudo for each command that I issued that required escalation. No "sudo -i", that doesn't leave quite as nice of an audit trail. Well, I fat-fingered something while in visudo (grant privileges to a user was one of the tasks). I forgot the user's name so just exited but I must've 'ZZ'd instead of :q!'d. visudo puts up big scary banners about the syntax error and I quickly dismissed them because I planned to go right back in fix it in a jif. Well, sure enough, those syntax errors effectively neuter sudo. Of course, that's the right behavior for sudo and I just hadn't thought it through. I couldn't complete the remainder of the exam's tasks without sudo. I thought for sure there's a way for the proctor to reset the system to neutral -- I'll just start the exam over and go through it quickly. No such luck. I can reboot the VM but there's no way to halt the VM during the bootloader. :( I did whatever I could without privileges and wrote detailed text files about what I would have done for the ones that required privileges. The autograder gave me a failing grade and the human that told me to take the exam didn't seem to care about the problem I encountered (or believe me). Lesson learned: leave a terminal open in the background with "sudo -i" for later. You never know when you might need it. [this advice is for exams and not real sysadmin]. And while you're at it, go slowly and heed that warning from visudo. ;)
  • quesera 10y ago
    No disrespect intended, and with the qualification that exam-taking is a stressful environment for many people, but.. You can't make that mistake in production. They were right to fail you. I can see that it was a side effect of being more cautious than usual (so unaware of the effects of your actions), but that demonstrates a different problem. All of which is to say, that you tried and failed, which puts you ahead of the people which didn't try at all, and imparts some hard won learning that will benefit you next time. We've all been there. But you can't overlook a mistake like that. It shows that you were not ready to pass the evaluation in question. The rest of your actions (acknowledgement, discussion of error etc) show that you should be ready next time. But to shortcut it would be a mistake.
• amzn-throw 10y ago
  Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP. edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops. For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
  • nameless912 10y ago
    I'm glad you guys are pissed, it's insane! I just hope you have enough influence to actually change something about it; as it stands this process is horrifying.
  • skaul 10y ago
    Thank you.
  • draw_down 10y ago
    The question is how it got to this point in the first place. I think it says a lot about the organization and how it thinks of its employees.
    • Twirrim 10y ago
      Lets at least pretend to apply Occam's Razor to things first before jumping on a company. It's much more likely those responsible for choosing the ProctorU solution didn't realise everything around what the approach entailed, or necessarily the ramifications. That's especially true if it came out of HR/Recruiting who aren't necessarily the most technical people. They have a very real problem, with thousands of people in the recruitment pipeline (especially during intern interview season), and they saw a way to significantly filter them out, without having to turn half the business over to more of a recruiting pipeline than it already is.
      • draw_down 10y ago
• reacharavindh 10y ago
  All these show what kind of candidates Amazon is looking for. A bunch of desperate people who'd do anything for [money|Amazon brand value|Whatever else Amazon has]. I wouldn't want to work at a place that resembles an irrational hell with such people as coworkers anyway. If someone is really that desperate for a job && believe they are smart to work on things Amazon scale, why wouldn't they find other jobs or heck start a company themselves solving a genuine problem? I do know starting a company is not for everyone to be able to do, but other jobs?
  • skaul 10y ago
    Because not everyone [lives in the US | has a North American passport | can afford to not care about money].
    • parthdesai 10y ago
      To this day, i thank my dad who told me to go study in Canada rather in US since he knew how crazy immigration laws in states are. Graduating from a Canadian uni gives me options to work for any company/start up i like without having visa restrictions.
      • reacharavindh 10y ago
        Just curious. Can someone who graduates from Canadian university work for any startup/company in the US just like that? Never heard of this before..
        • parthdesai 10y ago
          Nope not in US, but i can work anywhere in Canada for 3 years which is enough time for me to get my PR.
          • masterjack 10y ago
            Same in the US with post-completion OPT letting you stay and work freely for three years (including the STEM extension)
• onion2k 10y ago
  If this was an article about a startup I'd write it up as the (quite reasonable) fear of the cost of a bad hire. When you've only got 6 months cash in the bank having someone who isn't up to their job on board could end your business. Amazon need to understand they can afford to make mistakes now so long as their review processes are good.
• radicalbyte 10y ago
  You should come to Holland, you get to work tax free (for 5 years) and there are lots of interesting companies in Amsterdam. We're the #1 place for English speakers in Europe because the local population are smart and bilingual. Oh, and I've never seen douchy things like this (I rejected the Amazon recruiter, not worth taking a pay cut to work for them).
  • mcntsh 10y ago
    Tax free? Are you talking about the 30% ruling? Not exactly "tax free", but a good deal nonetheless.
• apricot 10y ago
  It's weird that so many American schools and so many American companies seem to think the best model for them to follow is the one of a prison, with inflexible, arbitrary rules that dehumanize and disenfranchise. Maybe the fact that America imprisons so many of its citizens is to blame for this.
  • wolfgang42 10y ago
    I suspect (though admittedly without any specific theory behind it) that the cause and effect are the other way around: the mentality of inflexible disenfranchising rules that permeates the American cultural mentality is what causes both the school and corporate models as well as the mass incarceration.
• hartator 10y ago
  Proctor sounds so much dystopian.
• kirykl 10y ago
  Coming soon: Amazon automated testing centers featuring Amazon Go Store tracking AI
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• crististm 10y ago
  The ethics question you asked there is a tough one. I don't know what I would do if I would be forced to make such a choice.
• pfarnsworth 10y ago
  lol what a joke, I'm never going to apply to Amazon if this is the interview experience. If this meant that I could avoid the onsite coding exercise, then I might be okay with it, but my guess is that I'd still have to whiteboard onsite, so what's the point.
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• mempko 10y ago
  Ita not surreal. The word they were looking for is 'Kafkaesque'
• adrenalinelol 10y ago
  How you're treated during the interview is a good indication of how you'll be treated by the company if hired. Unless you really need employment, I'd stay away from Amazon.
• xabotage 10y ago
  Many companies don't understand that hiring on their end is almost as competitive as getting a job on our end. While I was going to school I applied for an internship to Epic Systems and another company. Epic wanted to put me through a proctored, three hour long "assessment" in front of a microphone, camera, etc. before even getting on the phone with me. The other company gave me a couple of 30 minute phone screens followed by an on site interview that gave me far more insight into who they were and what they did. They made the process as smooth as possible for me and were genuinely interested in making the most of my application. Guess who I ended up working for.
  • epmatsw 10y ago
    On Epic's side at least, they are actually overloaded with engineers/applicants now, to the point that they removed their referral incentives because they have more people applying than they can deal with. They're perfectly happy if they lose a few percent of applicants if they avoid some false positive hires.
    • willtim 10y ago
      It's still a process that loses the best applicants. The fact that they don't realise this or don't care, doesn't make a good public impression.
    • GeneralMayhem 10y ago
      >they removed their referral incentives because they have more people applying than they can deal with That's a surprising reaction. The big four (five?) all have referral bonuses despite being beyond flooded with applications, specifically to avoid false positives - they assume that their current employees are more likely to know other people they want to hire.
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• holydude 10y ago
  If you do not want to be at the mercy of these powerful corporations do not contribute to the system. Do not buy from them do, not use their services. Think local. Support small/medium sized businesses. I know it's less convenient and more expensive but you are doing it for yourself and the future. Please do not pretend that this can't affect you because you belong to the "skilled workforce group". Trust me you are just lucky to there for a while but in fact you are nothing more than an average employee in McDonalds.
• skizm 10y ago
  Is this at a specific location or something? From what I can tell, NYC and Seattle just do the standard code test on your own time (and allow you to use whatever external resources you want) then if you pass that, a day of in person interviews.
  • amyjess 10y ago
    Probably a specific department. From everything I've heard about Amazon, the way they treat people depends entirely on your manager. Each manager has so much leeway that every group might as well be a separate company. Which is why you see people tell horror stories about Amazon while other people rebut them and say their experience working there was great. There's no consistency between groups.
• shoefly 10y ago
  This made me think of IOI in Ready Player One.
• newscracker 10y ago
  From the description this sounds very naive and stupid on the part of the hiring company. What exactly are they wanting to test? Is it just a simple aptitude test to reduce (not eliminate) the chances of cheating? Do they also ask to look into the interviewee's ears for tiny bluetooth earpieces? What about the ceiling for hidden microphones and cameras? The "show your room" part reminded me of (older) movies with funny situations where the person hiding is always behind the view of the person looking around. If someone really wanted to cheat, I guess these people would need to do a much better job…or just get the person to an office and do the interview face-to-face.
• markwillis82 10y ago
  I a similar scenario for my "Linux Foundation Certified Engineer" exam. Except I had to show 2 forms of photo ID for the examiner through my webcam and then put them the other side of the room so I couldn't use them as notes. I was repeatedly told off for tapping on the table whilst problem solving. (A hard habit to break after years of doing it)
• module0000 10y ago
  This may not be cost effective, but the way Redhat does remotely proctored exams isn't bad. Granted it's not a job interview, but it is an example of someone monitoring you remotely during an exam. It depends on you living nearby or traveling to one of the remote testing locations though(yes, I see the irony). The experience is: you sit in a room at a standard monitor with a keyboard and mouse. There are video/audio monitors placed: - above your head, roughly 2 feet, looking down - in front of your face, able to observe your eyes - to the left and right of you, about 2 feet - behind you Basically, you are watched from all angles, including what your eyeballs are looking at. I always feel like a probe is about to come whizzing out of the desk and begin prodding me when I begin, but the feeling subsides after awhile. protip: As a male, asking the male proctor to stop looking down my shirt didn't have the humorous reception I intended.
  • throwaway3893 10y ago
    Thanks for the info. I was seriously considering applying to an interesting role at Red Hat, but it's not interesting enough to go through that. I've gone through many interviews during my career, but this sounds more like them reusing their existing Linux certification exam room for interview job applicants as well. I believe what you say, but I still find it hard to believe Red Hat would do this and that the respected Linux kernel and userland developers went through this without publicly blogging about it.
    • module0000 10y ago
      Hey, wanted to reply because I think I gave the wrong idea! I was suggesting that as an alternative to what the original article described for "remote monitoring". That experience was just to take an exam - their interviewing process isn't like that at all :) But...I can describe it for you if you are interested. My interview process with Redhat started with the normal recruiter phone call, then scheduled some interviews with potential team mates. We used a video conferencing platform called "BlueJeans", which runs fine on windows/macos/linux, and worked through some exercises so they could observe how I solved problems. I feel bad for giving the wrong idea in my original comment, Redhat is definitely not that crazy in their interviews :)
• afloatboat 10y ago
  I had a similar experience when taking Acquia Certification exams for Drupal a couple of months ago. I was required to install an application called 'Sentinel' [1] that monitored my pc, could not have a second monitor or external keyboard attached and had to move my laptop to show that nothing was on my desk. If I remember correctly, I wasn't even allowed to use the built-in camera of my laptop. At some point in the exam the monitor paused the exam because I was holding a pen (I use a wacom as a mouse) and I had to put it away in order to continue. When the exam crashed, they told me to just reboot the application. But you can't login again after a certain time has passed, so they had to reset my schedule. I was able to successfully finish the exams, but it added unnecessary stress to the entire experience and the whole experience felt outdated. [1] https://www.novell.com/training/courseware/ts_proj_info.jsp?pid=40464 https://www.novell.com/training/courseware/ts_proj_info.jsp?...
  • sleepybrett 10y ago
    I choked when i saw 'Drupal Certification'
• gdulli 10y ago
  You'd think a company with massive turnover would try to remove barriers to finding new talent, not create them. http://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employee-turnover-all-fortune-500-companies-1361257 http://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employee...
  • itp 10y ago
    I'm curious and didn't see an answer to this question while reading that link (or the link to the original source) -- how does 'median tenure' distinguish between a company where people are leaving quickly, and a company that is aggressively hiring/growing? A bunch of brand new employees drags down median tenure without necessarily being a sign of massive turnover.
  • vkou 10y ago
    Yes, but the purpose of this is to increase hiring throughput, by reducing the number of SWE hours spent interviewing the average candidate. People who don't want to put up with this bullshit drop out early, so they don't cost the company much time.
• zhte415 10y ago
  This is... the opposite of what I see sensible. An opposite and goal: tl;dr: Don't assume providing stress and isolation makes people work their best. Especially under stress. Taught a course in university, saw response to strict environments take a while for people to break out from. Context: I have the chance to do quite a bit of campus work with local universities while working at a bank. Ops and IT. This usually involves working with final-year students, and can be quite hands-on. Background: Working with a local finance university (top in country), I ran a final-year class on banking for around 40 students (and quite a bit of the faculty in attendance). Mainly banking operations, not technically hard. Visit the university with an AVP or VP expert in a varied function, different visitor and topic each week. Ops, Trade, Finance, HR, Tech, from fund transfer to letter of credit to dormant accounts to labor law. Basic banking and business but at a practitioner level. Finals arrived: Not a member of the university, but asked to design and supervise the assessment. We'd covered a lot, and assigned essay answers for 3 of 10 questions over 2 hours, hand-written answers. Just answer it as fully as you liked. Some questions more numerical, some less. Really something for everyone. I said I was busy with a call I couldn't refuse, and would be in the room next door. I wasn't. One hour later I returned to the room, to see each person hunched over their papers. Books were not open. Phones were not doing checking. I was disappointed, but not unsurprised. To be caught 'cheating' in a university in China can mean the end of your degree. Still an hour to go, I encouraged opening of books (to protest) and full use of internet. This seems the opposite of the Amazon policy. The best papers that came in were a full 10 answers long (more than the required 3), photocopied, with multiple and varied signatures on each, and different handwriting in different paragraphs. Some individually submitted papers were very good. Choice had been achieved. Not only had books been opened, but collaboration had over-achieved. In only an hour remaining. Hopefully this was a small lesson.
• YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  After reading this (and the previously posted piece from the same author) I'm thinking of applying to Amazon, not because I have any particular wish to work for them but because I just thought of a way to cheat their counter-cheating and I want to try it out.
  • gaius 10y ago
    You mean like in Cryptonomicon? ;-)
• nobleach 10y ago
  I do not want to hire a developer that knows everything off the top of her head. In my industry, best practices can change. One who is able to work without any research is probably not using the best methods... they're using the last greatest thing they learned. This isn't completely bad, I do like knowing how people solve problems... but I hate the "invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" mentality.
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  • WhiteWanderer 10y ago
    Exactly, if an engineer isn't continually updating his knowledge of best practices and isn't using all the resources available at his disposal then he probably isn't gonna produce better results than someone who does use every resource they can get.
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• noonespecial 10y ago
  The worst part about all this is that even if you did submit to all of this garbage, all you'd earn is the right to work with a bunch of people who are either desperate/clueless enough to also submit or managers that think this sort of behavior is a-OK. Maybe there was no training video. The test was to see if you'd surrender all privacy, your whole computer and let them waste your whole day on pointless bs. There was no spoon, Neo.
  • cheeze 10y ago
    Playing devils advocate here... If they only hire a subset of interns this way, how would a full-time candidate have any clue? If a manager doesn't get an intern that had this happen, how would they know? Okay now most poeple know, it's on HN (and people are pissed apparently according to another commenter here). Do you expect the current employees to up and quit? I think it's easy to say that "you'd just earn the right to work with a bunch of clueless people", but Amazon is a huge company. Do you expect that all MSFT/GOOG/AAPL/ETC employees keep close tabs on programs that recruiting are using (potentially even testing?) And do you expect that people with mortgages, families, commitments are just going to walk out as soon as they hear about something like that? I'm not defending Amazon at all here. Something may be wrong if this shit keeps happening (there isn't a faces of google website, for example), but I don't think the burden here is on a lowly SDE or whatnot who is powerless, and in most cases has no clue of the situation.
    • noonespecial 10y ago
      >And do you expect that people with mortgages, families, commitments are just going to walk out as soon as they hear about something like that? No, I'm expecting that the people with the most options will start drifting away. You know, the ones they most need. And now we know they won't be hiring any stellar replacements any time soon either.
• joncp 10y ago
  This seems like an excellent interviewing technique if you invert the results. If someone actually lets you install spyware on their machine, they fail. If they raise no concerns about access to reference materials, they fail. The ones that pass would be security conscious and outspoken about how good software is written. ... well, except that it would be exceptionally adversarial.
• retube 10y ago
  This cannot be real. Seriously, every candidate asked to submit to this should tell the recruiter/employer to get f*cked. Totally unacceptable, unreasonable, patronising.
• FussyZeus 10y ago
  I don't mean this in an offensive way at all, but for me and a lot of my coworkers this would be extremely abnormal. About the time they asked to take full control of my machine I would've told them politely that there was no way on God's green Earth they were getting no holds barred access to my machine for any duration of time, especially with someone who I did not know, and if the security restrictions were so tight they were more than welcome to Fedex me a laptop on which I could take my interview tests. Maybe it's just my privilege showing, I don't know. But employers need to have boundaries too. Just because you're giving me a paycheck (or at this point, just considering it) doesn't give you carte blanche to my fucking life.
  • Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    "Maybe it's just my privilege showing, I don't know" This is part true, and is partly your morals and outlook on life. The truth is that if you need the money, it is harder to enforce those boundaries or to fight against them. This is why more people can't have blue hair or visible tattoos: It can get you suspended, fired, or make you un-hireable. It is why some of the health insurance incentives really aren't a choice if you can't afford the extra 40% premium from your employer. It is why some folks can't avoid pre-employment drug tests (or random ones at work) on purely moral grounds. But once you get past some of the crappy money ranges, not taking some of this stuff proves life outlook. You can choose not to work for the prestigious company because you disagree with their methods. And so on.
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 10y ago
    It is definitely privilege. There are plenty of life situations where people would have to just suck it and take what comes their way. For example, when you are on a visa that only gives you a couple months to find a job or gtfo.
• dudul 10y ago
  I'm impressed by the author's patience. I usually slam the door shut after "we need you to spend 5 hours on this take-home exercise", or "here is a link to coderank for you to show how well you know how to implement bubble-sort and quick-sort".
• ianai 10y ago
  My alma mater had an interesting way of dealing with cheating. They would allow every kind of reference material you thought you may need. The test was just going to be that difficult and have questions no cheating (outside of copying) would help. There was one final in particular that averaged 17 hours to complete.
  • Balgair 10y ago
    Horse Crap. 17 hours?! Who in the hell would let their grad students out of lab for that long? :)
    • ianai 10y ago
      it's ok, test room was technically in the lab
• delegate 10y ago
  “Clean your desk, please. Your institution [Amazon] has mandated that there cannot be any written material next to you while you take the exam.” To which I would reply "Fuck you and your institution". Run a binary on my machine ? I think the interview should be over right there and not from my side. If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk. Is it really so dry out there that people are willing to go through this bullshit to work for Amazon ? I know some of you are young and inexperienced, but know that you always have the choice to say 'No'. If people mistrust you from the get go - this is the environment you're signing up for. Don't settle for this. Don't work for Amazon, don't let them establish this bullshit as the norm in the industry. Trust me, the dream job will come if you know your value.
  • camtarn 10y ago
    "If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk." Absolutely. I'm not surprised the Amazon SDEs are fuming about this.
• plandis 10y ago
  Amazon: Where we are all terrible and we kill puppies (probably, I don't know, I think I read it in an article somewhere) ^ I've summarized the comments
• swehner 10y ago
  Just avoid amazon. It's really not that difficult.
• throwaway3893 10y ago
  Serious question. Given the US laws (compared to Europe) of easily hiring and firing employees regardless of probationary periods, do they really have so many "con artist" applicants who turn out to not deliver (skill or motivation lacking) that they void the trust during the interview phase by monitoring the applicant's machine? I've interviewed a small and large places, and if they really want to be sure about this part, they have you come onsite and sit in the same room with you. Whenever I was asked to code something as the 2nd step of the interview process like homework assignment, I'm always glad if it's not a site like hackerrank with a timer running out and JavaScript monitoring what tabs I navigate to. Especially, if they already know and have seen my public code and revision history, I feel like I'm applying for public office of some sort when they remove trust and make your go through that in addition to spending your personal time to work on some little project for the interview. The biggest paradox here is that industry regularly complains about the lack of qualified engineers while ignoring probationary periods and trying to replace them with a 4 or 6 step interview/examination process. In many European countries both parties can walk away from the partnership with zero hurdles during the probationary period. It varies from 1 month to 6 month in Europe and if the company fails to assess the employee in that time, you cannot blame the employee and make him go through increasingly more distrusting interview process. One has to consider that not everybody lives in San Francisco and has potential jobs lining the streets, so it's time inefficient for applicants to go through many interviews.
  • thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    i got an offer from them without ever interviewing in person. Frankly, i suspect a lot of people attempt to cheat because it's the difference between a life at a big name company making six figures and whatever their alternatives are. Especially for people like the poster who aren't american. We have all seen how much indians cheat on standardized tests.
    • throwaway3893 10y ago
      > i got an offer from them without ever interviewing in person. May I ask what the process was (steps) and what kind of accolades you have?
• metaphorm 10y ago
  honest question, I don't mean to be provocative, I'm just trying to understand. what the hell is wrong with Amazon's company culture? I feel like I can't go three months without reading about some story about something with Amazon related to hiring, working conditions, or management style that is deeply offensive and alarming. why does this keep happening over and over again? it's so notorious that the NYTimes has written magazine articles about it. it's so notorious that Bezos has to go write apologias in the annual newsletter. what's going on? I'm asking because 4 or 5 times a year I get an offer from an Amazon recruiter to come in and interview for a position that otherwise looks appealing. I say NO every single time because of these issues I keep reading about.
  • jtolmar 10y ago
    Amazon's culture is strictly hierarchical and all the mechanisms designed to protect lower-level employees are busted. You're supposed to be able to transfer to a new department, but many directors and VPs work to block transfers. You're supposed to be able to report problems to HR, but they ignore everything that can't get Amazon sued. So nothing removes or punishes dysfunctional leaders, and every branch of the org chart is the sum of all the different ways the people above you are flawed. Each branch of the org structure is a nightmare in its own way, but they all eventually become some nightmare somehow because the psychopaths don't mind and the actual humans eventually leave.
    • metaphorm 10y ago
      sounds like they've created their own special hell. guess I won't be interviewing with them any time soon.
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• squeaky-clean 10y ago
  Jesus Christ! Even when I entered programming competitions, which were supposed to be arbitrarily constrained, we were allowed any printed material, as long as it fit in a 1 foot-square cube. The world-finals disallowed printed material, but still let you write notes during the event and the documentation for each allowed language's standard library is pre-installed on each machine. There is no possible scenario where this is useful.
  • hood_syntax 10y ago
    > documentation for each language's standard library is pre-installed I've never entered a programming competition but I'm glad to hear there is still some sanity left in this world.
• bborud 10y ago
  If this had been me it would have been a really short setup mostly consisting of me saying "go fuck yourself" and then writing an angry email telling Amazon to go fuck itself too.
• a3n 10y ago
  Smith, Winston! Recite quicksort into the telescreen!
• cannonpr 10y ago
  Amazon is doing many great things, however the way they are going about it is starting to freak me out a little bit. This is how we end up in the corporate dysutopias described in Neuromancer and Snowcrash... Don't we somehow have to take a step back and try to avoid this, rather than keep trying to optimise our hiring processes ?
• binaryapparatus 10y ago
  At some point in history we, as a programmers, allowed that HR 'professionals' insert themselves between us and employers. Approach used in this interview is nothing that any half-decent programmer would choose as a reliable test. This has HR written all over it. This has nothing to do with quality (of candidates) only to do with HR person ticking another interview done. Being contractor, I don't accept any HR involvment for some time, if company insists on running stupid tests they can't count on me. I have never seen any HR like approach with hiring that made ANY sense. If you need and want job done call me. If you want agile/scrum pretending to work its not for me...
• g051051 10y ago
  How is this even a point of such outrage? No one is compelling you to interview with Amazon. If you don't like their conditions, just don't do it. Why write about it as if it was such a huge burden? It's their job, their rules, their conditions. If you don't like it, simply move on.
  • alpb 10y ago
    It could be perhaps because most people around here think Amazon is a decent place to work as developers (and it probably is) but posts like this bring recruiting issues at Amazon to our attention and awareness. Now if I were to interview with Amazon and given ProctorU, I know I should turn it down immediately.
  • MiddleEndian 10y ago
    I didn't previously know about this. Now I won't ever have to waste my time interviewing at Amazon just to get to this point and have to quit.
  • metaphorm 10y ago
    it's an outrage because workers can and should demand better treatment. there is an industry wide standard of how developers ought to be treated and Amazon is well below it. yes, of course nobody is compelled to interview at or go work for amazon. however, working conditions anywhere matter for workers everywhere.
• JulianMorrison 10y ago
  Honestly, I'd have simply told them to bleep off. That is so far beyond acceptable behaviour that it would make me certain the company itself was bureaucratic beyond satire. If you don't have a level of basic trust in my probity, we can't negotiate.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  The funny thing about this type of bullshit is that it's really similar to the stuff that Civil Service exams do -- quantitative evaluations of your reactions to workplace events, exams of your subject matter expertise. Except when fast-mover companies like Amazon or their lobbyists show up to peddle their products to governments, the conversation ultimately moves to this topic. They usually get to a point where they're telling the government employees how dumb they are, and that they don't have archaic processes like exams for jobs, etc.
• NotQuantum 10y ago
  What happens if you don't have a webcam? Do they just deny you the position? I don't have a webcam or mic on my desktop currently... I guess I'm never going to work for Amazon :/
  • no_flags 10y ago
    Supply and demand. Most companies are willing to accept some false negatives in the hiring process to avoid the false positives.
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• wcummings 10y ago
  Does this software work on Linux?
• notyourwork 10y ago
  I am sorry but this saga is tiresome. I have taken online certifications before and had similar trouble with my FIRST one. The proctor paused my test and called me to confirm everything was clear from my desk, my floor, etc. Even had to stand up and walk around. At the end of the day I had no choice which made me feel wronged but in hindsight this is their process for certifying you didn't cheat on a test. They are allowed to have that process, if you don't like it don't use it. Better yet, if you don't like it how about brainstorming better solutions instead of being overly dramatic on the internet about someone closing your applications on your computer for you?
• foota 10y ago
  I recently also interviewed with Amazon, the experience, as the blog states, was surreal. I was very surprised when I received an offer email without actually having any interaction with a human that worked at Amazon.
• jknoepfler 10y ago
  I think this is interesting. Most of my interviews with other companies since I became a software engineer (with a "pedigree" at a big name company) have been informal chats on the phone or in person with 3-4 people about a combination of technical and professional matters. I remember going through the degrading 6-hour IQ-tests, silly white-board interviews, etc. at a bunch of companies when I was first looking for a job, but even then there were a few companies that did a pretty good job. I had an interesting conversation about IoC and clean code at a consulting company, after which I interviewed with the company president and talked business. That interview stuck in my mind as being very respectful, and I'd seek the company out again if I moved back to the state. My Amazon interview (which I got an offer from) was a quick round of 4 interviews with some tired engineers (they had been marathon interviewing on the road). I was asked some softball applied algorithms and data-structures problems, mostly to make sure that I didn't make easy problems too complicated from what I can tell. The reject rate on those interviews in very high, and there are probably a lot of false-negatives (and there is a lot of money at stake), so I think it's understandable that emotions can run pretty high about them. A few years in: I turned down the last job that gave me an offer after a very silly whiteboarding session because I lost a lot of respect for the company after going through their interview process. Something like this "ProctorU" bullshit would cause me to quit the interview immediately and send a terse but polite message to HR at the company that their interview process was a non-starter for me, and that I would not consider working for a company that did not treat me as a professional.
• alfanick 10y ago
  Alright, so I had one HR smalltalk, a one technical over the phone with the manager, I am having onsite soon - none of these funny proctor stuff, but yeah your mileage may vary.
• roystonvassey 10y ago
  I've interviewed twice with Amazon and came away both times with bizarre stories to tell. Some great people work there but I wouldn't want to with the folks that interviewed me!
• makecheck 10y ago
  Sometimes you need to prioritize yourself. This is one of those times: tell them “no”. Assuming they aren’t robotic enough to hang up on you immediately for refusing, politely educate them on how no other company on Earth has asked you to do anything remotely similar to this, and suggest that their process is way out of line. If they won’t listen, send a polite letter to someone else (heck, even the CEO). They deserve a clue, at least. Remember that there are a ton of companies out there and you owe it to yourself to explore as much as possible before submitting to any one company’s ridiculous process. Heck, years ago I used to look elsewhere just for being asked to format my résumé in a particular way.
• d3ckard 10y ago
  Sorry for my language but this is just fucked up. I honestly don't get how Amazon got so successful at what they're doing(I mostly mean cloud services), if this is the corporate culture they promote. Something just doesn't add up.
• akerro 10y ago
  Hah, he wasn't asked to drink a verification pill that Amazon sent him 2 week earlier.
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  When I worked at a $BigCo about 3 years ago I used to joke about what it'd be like if we worked like we required candidates to interview. Me, in a meeting: "Hey Kate, that's a great idea! How about you code it up on the whiteboard right now." Kate: "Sorry, what?" Me: "Write it, on the board, right now. No bugs." Kate: "Can I use my laptop?" Me: "Of course not. Here's your pen. Hope you like drawing curly braces."
• kinkrtyavimoodh 10y ago
  I've also had the annoyance of being 'interviewed' using this ProctorU method. They have this 'feature' where you are not allowed to navigate away from the webpage that has the test, and if you do, it 'blocks' you from doing anything until you message the proctor and have them reset it for you. Except, in my case, this damn thing kept blocking up every few minutes, and I had no idea why. Contacting the proctor, having them diagnose it, and getting them to reset it, wasted a few minutes every time. I finally realized what the 'problem' was. It was firing the 'navigate away' event every time the mouse went outside the boundary of the page. Since I often play with my mouse, moving it around the screen, it would block me any time the pointer left the page. I eventually figured it out, but it took me 3–4 block-contact-reset cycles. All in all, a pretty annoying experience.
• ne01 10y ago
  That's why I only work for myself and rather fail at my company until I die, than to work for someone else and be treated like this! This is the main reason I quit university to start my own company and the main reason I will never look for investors. If I had no choice I would work part-time at a non-tech company for as long as it took for my company to take off.
• warrenm 10y ago
  wt bloody f?! There is no way I'd go through the first steps of this stupidity, let alone as far as the OP did
• SonicSoul 10y ago
  I can't help but wonder, what was the test like that you could prepare cheat sheets for? most dev interviews are problem solving that you can't simply lookup in 5 seconds just curious why they are so paranoid about that. i do phone screens where i can hear people type to google for answers but it's usually pretty easy to tell that they don't know something and then they come back with textbook answer. but most questions are not the kind you can just ask google.
• kawaiiru 10y ago
  Universities are moving towards using software like proctor u and other computer lockdown programs for online education. It's absolutely absurd and every single work around get patched up real quick.
• kawaiiru 10y ago
  Universities are moving towards using software like proctor u and other computer lockdown programs for online education. It's absolutely absurd and every single work around get patched up real quick.
• brilliantcode 10y ago
  Amazon SDE interviews were some of the biggest shit shows I've ever been through personally so this article really hits home. The furthest I was qualified for with Amazon was in their warehouse, walking 10 hours every day from 8pm to 6 am with two 20 minute for eating and resting. We were not allowed to sit or stop at any point, even going to the bathroom to take a piss or shit were being factored into time. There were cameras everywhere, something like out of 1984. I was treated like a criminal when I had new pair of steel toe boots they paid for in a box and I couldn't represent a receipt. I was scanned with metal detectors, told to take off my shoes, and all in all it was a dehumanizing experience after 10 hours of work consistently. I felt like HR and everybody else who were sitting around were looking down at us. One time, when a bunch of pickers were walking up stairs, one of the HR guys had a microphone and shouted "both hands on the rails" as he followed right behind the group of workers. All while I couldn't get Jeff Bezo's smiling face laughing in my head. Fuck Amazon, seriously, except AWS.
  • andai 10y ago
    "except AWS" I've been thinking about things like this, where for example, if you only buy vegetarian food at McDonalds you are still supporting deforestation and inhumane treatment of animals. If you buy AWS you are supporting the inhumane treatment of humans.
  • jackgolding 10y ago
    Draws parallels with Google's Scan Ops - check this interview out here: http://aperture.org/magazine-2013/andrew-norman-wilson-with-laurel-ptak-scanops/ http://aperture.org/magazine-2013/andrew-norman-wilson-with-...
• monksy 10y ago
  This sounds like a perfect opportunity to outsource this job to a webcam guy/girl. Just pay the person to pretend to get off on this kind of humilation.
• setq 10y ago
  The moment they suggested installing remote control software on my kit, the interview would have been over.
• andrewguenther 10y ago
  I'm getting really sick of HN's attitude toward Amazon employees. Not Amazon, hate all you want on the company, but I really think the the "only a desperate moron would work at Amazon" type comments don't belong here. I love my job, but reading HN makes me feel like I should hate it. This is a place that told me to "take as much time as I need" when I got married, told me the same thing again when my dad was taken to the hospital two months later, and again when my father-in-law had a heart attack a month after that. I will never forget the kindness I've been shown in one of the most difficult years of my life. I know that my experience doesn't align with everyone's. But this broad categorization of Amazon employees as "desperate" or "corporate drones" is just false.
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    Then work to change your company's culture. Speak out against those doing what makes headlines here. It's not on us to make sure that Amazon employees are positively represented. It's on you to make sure that Amazon employees deserve to be positively represented.
    • andrewguenther 10y ago
      I do what I can, but any opinion that contradicts the HN hivemind makes me a corporate shill. At this point, Amazon could save a truckload of puppies and HN would find a way to make it evil.
    • user5994461 10y ago
      Agree. I'd like to see more spam in favor of Amazon if that's your experience.
      • andrewguenther 10y ago
        But that's not the content that the HN echo chamber wants to see. Amazon is a terrible place to work, so we can only upvote stories that support that opinion. The last time I saw a positive Amazon article on the front page, the comments were filled with absolute vitriol. Amazon could cure cancer and HN would bemoan how terrible the on-call must be for whoever ran the protein folding servers.
• quantumtremor 10y ago
  I'm very glad people are speaking up about this. This is horrifying. Good job on stopping the process when you felt uncomfortable, we should all be doing this.
• werber 10y ago
  At my last job a candidate was hired after having done their interview by moving their mouth on camera while someone off screen was actually talking. I believe they did the spin the computer around thing too, no system is foolproof
• BigChiefSmokem 10y ago
  Amazon recruiters contact me all the time because I've worked with some big name companies and movie studios in and around the LA area. I immediately tell them I only have an associate's degree so they stop calling, texting, and emailing me. That tells me everything I need to know about working for that company. I just wish they would just blacklist me and pass it around to their outsourced headhunters. Wells Fargo is another one that has a love/hate relationship with my resume.
• amai 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be possible to start a VM and connect to the proctor using the VM? Then the software you have to download would only be able to get control of the VM, but not the whole laptop.
• russelluresti 10y ago
  My Amazon interview experience consisted of scheduling a time for a recruiter to call and having them not call, then reaching out to them to see if they needed to reschedule and set up a second time to call and having them (surprise!) not call a second time. Fuck Amazon for the collective amount of wasted time they've caused.
• isaacremuant 10y ago
  I'm honestly shocked that someone would give them such access to their machine. More than the absurd test rules, which seem quite common in some educational or testing environments, the fact the he would relinquish so much of his privacy and security makes me think he doesn't know his own worth. It's OK to indulge them in some things but it's not OK to lose perspective and forget it's a negotiation. If you surrender to every demand, how can you negotiate later on? With what?
• unsignedint 10y ago
  I would argue if the candidate is taking their security light enough that they would submit to such invasive software to be installed on their machine, they should be automatically disqualified but I guessed Amazon has different opinion about it...
• givinguflac 10y ago
  Watching Amazon reps try to sugar coat everything in this thread is hysterical. I've heard bad things from several people I know who worked there briefly. Good to see this article and confirm I'll never apply there.
• tmaly 10y ago
  This reminds me of a case when we were hiring for a programming slot. I have a simple set of tests on paper that you take in person. This guy came in, looked at the tests, handed them back to me and said he looks stuff up in books. He was a consultant, but he refused to take simple tests and just walked out.
• WalterBright 10y ago
  I wouldn't let anyone remotely take over my machine. I'd just go get a cheap used laptop from the pawn shop and use that for the interview.
• jedisct1 10y ago
  I went through the AWS interview for an SDE position. And the whole experience wasn't that bad. The online test didn't use ProctorU. I was told that a working webcam was required, but it actually wasn't. I didn't had to give them full control of my laptop. I received clear explanations about every step of the process. The onsite interview was well organized, although very impersonal and predictable.
• fatjokes 10y ago
  Why would you do this to yourself, in this market for engineers? If you're going to work at a BigCo, go for one that doesn't abuse you. Otherwise, work at a startup where at least you'll learn a ton and maybe get some equity. I can't see any advantage to working at Amazon.
• ljk 10y ago
  1. could the user run this in a VM and avoid some of the hassle? 2. part of the hate should go toward the proctorU company too right? they're the company who made the software
• savagebritt2261 10y ago
  Y
• berserkpi 10y ago
  Amazon mostly sucks at interviewing from what I'm told.