6 ms·

I'm glad you're fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon

by leeter 10y ago

I'm glad you're fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon again. It was the second most frustrating interview I've ever been in. It was clear to me that 4 of my interviewers had no intention of even considering me. Side note: The most frustrating interview I've ever had was with Microsoft Boulder: they just flat out insulted me in the interview and questioned why anyone would hire me based on not getting their trick question. That said my interviews with Microsoft Redmond were lovely.

amzn-throw 10y ago
Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too. We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.
- tubasaur 10y ago
  Not mandatory? In my time at Lab126 (a couple of years ago now), you had to take Making Great Hiring Decisions before you were ever included on an interview loop.
  - amzn-throw 10y ago
    Some orgs make it mandatory. Some don't. There's no global policy
    - ncallaway 10y ago
      Huh. I had no idea. When I was there, it was mandatory in each org I was in. I had just assumed it was a company-wide policy.
  - foota 10y ago
    I just had to chuckle at the name of the interview prep course name, of course it would be that.
- leeter 10y ago
  This was in 2013 so it's out of date now, but it was very clear from the line of questions and the attitudes of the interviewers that they were being made to be there and saw no point. They were in general completely disengaged with me. Of the interviewers all but the last were fairly professional. The last pair I had were more junior and made it clear that I was wasting their time as far as they were concerned. To be fair I interview poorly, but I would would have much preferred for the person managing the interviews to cut off the process as soon as they were sure that I wasn't a fit. By failing to do so it just created an awkward and frustrating situation.
  - amzn-throw 10y ago
    Sorry to be a broken record, but can you give some specific examples? I ask because elsewhere on this thread you have people bitching that they were asked some low level CS questions about inverting binary trees and the like, and how insulting they found that. While I sympathize, it's not going to change the fact that the company does want to hire engineers that are equally competent at contributing to some sexy new high-scale AWS services as some boring business reporting features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all do exactly the same thing. On the other hand, if you had people that were actively rude, did not give you hints when you got stuck, and made you feel unwelcome, that would definitely warrant feedback. Though, as you said, it's too late since it's 2013. I advise anyone in the future who runs into this kind of situation to contact your recruiter with feedback, and be very clear if you had a bad experience. Amazon takes customer feedback super seriously, and when we interview, the candidates are customers.
    - leeter 10y ago
      I wish I could, but it's been three years so I don't recall specifics. I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question. While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library. EX of good question: Facebook has their own COW C++ string with small string optimization because libstdc++ didn't used to have that. It can also provide massive speed improvements on multi-threaded code, what are some ways to implement this? Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.
- rublev 10y ago
  >We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate. That's funny. I don't know a single person who enjoyed interviewing at Amazon, and the one guy that did who got in quit a few weeks later and still won't stop talking about how bad it was until he's blue in the face. It was such a bad experience it seems to have partially fused with his identity! Seems like every once in awhile there's some article taking a crap on Amazon, and then these types of green comments coming to the rescue.
  - camtarn 10y ago
    Ex-Amazonian here. Amazon is big enough that there are actually a lot of people in the org who enjoy their jobs, think the company's generally doing the right thing (albeit possibly with caveats), and don't mind defending it. The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team. Addressing your experience directly - I really enjoyed my Amazon interview in Edinburgh eight years ago. Lots of interesting free-form problem solving, with the whiteboard there to jot down notes rather than to produce working code. I'm guessing there are teams or entire orgs which just don't take interviewing as seriously, though - again, with Amazon's scale, it's not surprising.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      >>>The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team. Presumably so that said PR team can create throw-away accounts and defend Amazon.
      - camtarn 10y ago
        Well, possibly. I can't prove that that's not the case :) All I can say is that I've always taken them in good faith, because they match up with the temperament of some of the people I know and like inside the company. That's really the problem with the social media policy. On the one hand, it protects the company from the worst possible outcomes of letting untrained employees loose on social media - and given the size of the company and the diverse views held by its employees, I could imagine those outcomes being pretty dire! But on the other hand there's a chilling effect on positive impressions of the company.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate. Was that not in the mandatory one?
- nojvek 10y ago
  I was going to interview for amazon. The recruiters were so disorganised, I just gave up.
chncdcksn 10y ago
I'm curious, what was the trick question given to you by Microsoft Boulder?
- leeter 10y ago
  I don't recall the exact question, but I recall they were only looking for the answer that used bit manipulation. Which was not necessarily intuitive in the context.
  - ekoontz 10y ago
    Hm, perhaps counting number of bits set to 1 in a multi-byte array?
    - leeter 10y ago
      no, bit wise is logical there. I'm thinking it was duplicates or primes or some such.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    I know a common one is how to switch the values of two variables without using a temporary third variable. One way (method 2 here [1]) is to use repeated bitwise XORs. Does that sound like it could be the one? [1] http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/swap-two-numbers-without-using-temporary-variable/ http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/swap-two-numbers-without-using-...
FireBeyond 10y ago
I went for an interview in Redmond, for which the recruiting agency had clearly 'oversold' the job description (I should have known better, too) - it was billed as more of a PM position than what it was - line / UAT testing. Anyway, I got into the interviews, and I could sense something was up. I was answering the questions but they didn't seem... enthusiastic... about them, or me. I like to think I usually interview decently, though of course I can improve. Eventually someone says, "Hmm, can you wait here a minute?" and a new person comes in with him a few moments later. "So... I'm not sure why the agency sent you to us." Okay...? "You're definitely over-qualified for this role, and frankly we think you'd be bored." I thought it was a good opportunity to get in the door (and MSFT is a great place to work), so I tried to offer a little placation, when he introduced the other person, "But I know that [name] here has been looking for a PM, so why don't you talk to her." I walked out that afternoon with a different, better, higher paying job, because someone thought "outside the box".
- foota 10y ago
  That's a funny story, thanks for sharing.
- jedmeyers 10y ago
  > because someone thought "outside the box". That's "thinking for the company" which I had rarely seen during my 10 years working for a large company. "Thinking for myself / department" approach is much more common, unfortunately.
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    True, true, too. But I just appreciated that could have so easily been a 'thanks for your time', handshake and leave, with no-one satisfied.
- jackhack 10y ago
  I'm suspicious based on something you said about the interviewers being disinterested and unenthusiastic. I am cynical, having seen this process played out many times, and having wasted more than a few days interviewing for jobs I had zero chance of earning because the employer had already (yet unofficially and potentially illegally) chosen a candidate. Let me explain: What you've described sounds to me like a setup for hiring an H1B employee. The employer is legally required to interview everyone who meets the requirements, and must hire qualified domestic employees if they are available for work, but the employer will look for any reason to disqualify domestic candidates. A whole industry of consultants popped up a decade ago that coached companies on how to use this "loophole" to favor H1B over domestic employees (which is on it's face, illegal. If a US employee is available, the employer must hire him so the trick is to find a way to disqualify this domestic candidate.) Or maybe they already had an internal candidate and were required by HR to interview some additional people (e.g. you) before they discover, to everyone's surprise, the internal candidate is the very best one for the job. "Going through the motions" to interview others when their mind was made up before the job description was even written. EDIT: Just so it's clear, I'm not saying Amazon does these things; and I don't know anything about this particular case. I am saying this sort of faux-interview happens in the industry, and has the same "feel" of the interviewers simply going through the motions.

by leeter 10y ago

amzn-throw 10y ago

Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too. We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.

tubasaur 10y ago
Not mandatory? In my time at Lab126 (a couple of years ago now), you had to take Making Great Hiring Decisions before you were ever included on an interview loop.
- amzn-throw 10y ago
  Some orgs make it mandatory. Some don't. There's no global policy
  - ncallaway 10y ago
    Huh. I had no idea. When I was there, it was mandatory in each org I was in. I had just assumed it was a company-wide policy.
- foota 10y ago
  I just had to chuckle at the name of the interview prep course name, of course it would be that.
leeter 10y ago
This was in 2013 so it's out of date now, but it was very clear from the line of questions and the attitudes of the interviewers that they were being made to be there and saw no point. They were in general completely disengaged with me. Of the interviewers all but the last were fairly professional. The last pair I had were more junior and made it clear that I was wasting their time as far as they were concerned. To be fair I interview poorly, but I would would have much preferred for the person managing the interviews to cut off the process as soon as they were sure that I wasn't a fit. By failing to do so it just created an awkward and frustrating situation.
- amzn-throw 10y ago
  Sorry to be a broken record, but can you give some specific examples? I ask because elsewhere on this thread you have people bitching that they were asked some low level CS questions about inverting binary trees and the like, and how insulting they found that. While I sympathize, it's not going to change the fact that the company does want to hire engineers that are equally competent at contributing to some sexy new high-scale AWS services as some boring business reporting features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all do exactly the same thing. On the other hand, if you had people that were actively rude, did not give you hints when you got stuck, and made you feel unwelcome, that would definitely warrant feedback. Though, as you said, it's too late since it's 2013. I advise anyone in the future who runs into this kind of situation to contact your recruiter with feedback, and be very clear if you had a bad experience. Amazon takes customer feedback super seriously, and when we interview, the candidates are customers.
  - leeter 10y ago
    I wish I could, but it's been three years so I don't recall specifics. I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question. While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library. EX of good question: Facebook has their own COW C++ string with small string optimization because libstdc++ didn't used to have that. It can also provide massive speed improvements on multi-threaded code, what are some ways to implement this? Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.
rublev 10y ago
>We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate. That's funny. I don't know a single person who enjoyed interviewing at Amazon, and the one guy that did who got in quit a few weeks later and still won't stop talking about how bad it was until he's blue in the face. It was such a bad experience it seems to have partially fused with his identity! Seems like every once in awhile there's some article taking a crap on Amazon, and then these types of green comments coming to the rescue.
- camtarn 10y ago
  Ex-Amazonian here. Amazon is big enough that there are actually a lot of people in the org who enjoy their jobs, think the company's generally doing the right thing (albeit possibly with caveats), and don't mind defending it. The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team. Addressing your experience directly - I really enjoyed my Amazon interview in Edinburgh eight years ago. Lots of interesting free-form problem solving, with the whiteboard there to jot down notes rather than to produce working code. I'm guessing there are teams or entire orgs which just don't take interviewing as seriously, though - again, with Amazon's scale, it's not surprising.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>>The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team. Presumably so that said PR team can create throw-away accounts and defend Amazon.
    - camtarn 10y ago
      Well, possibly. I can't prove that that's not the case :) All I can say is that I've always taken them in good faith, because they match up with the temperament of some of the people I know and like inside the company. That's really the problem with the social media policy. On the one hand, it protects the company from the worst possible outcomes of letting untrained employees loose on social media - and given the size of the company and the diverse views held by its employees, I could imagine those outcomes being pretty dire! But on the other hand there's a chilling effect on positive impressions of the company.
serge2k 10y ago
> We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate. Was that not in the mandatory one?
nojvek 10y ago
I was going to interview for amazon. The recruiters were so disorganised, I just gave up.

chncdcksn 10y ago

I'm curious, what was the trick question given to you by Microsoft Boulder?

leeter 10y ago
I don't recall the exact question, but I recall they were only looking for the answer that used bit manipulation. Which was not necessarily intuitive in the context.
- ekoontz 10y ago
  Hm, perhaps counting number of bits set to 1 in a multi-byte array?
  - leeter 10y ago
    no, bit wise is logical there. I'm thinking it was duplicates or primes or some such.
- SilasX 10y ago
  I know a common one is how to switch the values of two variables without using a temporary third variable. One way (method 2 here [1]) is to use repeated bitwise XORs. Does that sound like it could be the one? [1] http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/swap-two-numbers-without-using-temporary-variable/ http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/swap-two-numbers-without-using-...

FireBeyond 10y ago

I went for an interview in Redmond, for which the recruiting agency had clearly 'oversold' the job description (I should have known better, too) - it was billed as more of a PM position than what it was - line / UAT testing. Anyway, I got into the interviews, and I could sense something was up. I was answering the questions but they didn't seem... enthusiastic... about them, or me. I like to think I usually interview decently, though of course I can improve. Eventually someone says, "Hmm, can you wait here a minute?" and a new person comes in with him a few moments later. "So... I'm not sure why the agency sent you to us." Okay...? "You're definitely over-qualified for this role, and frankly we think you'd be bored." I thought it was a good opportunity to get in the door (and MSFT is a great place to work), so I tried to offer a little placation, when he introduced the other person, "But I know that [name] here has been looking for a PM, so why don't you talk to her." I walked out that afternoon with a different, better, higher paying job, because someone thought "outside the box".

foota 10y ago
That's a funny story, thanks for sharing.
jedmeyers 10y ago
> because someone thought "outside the box". That's "thinking for the company" which I had rarely seen during my 10 years working for a large company. "Thinking for myself / department" approach is much more common, unfortunately.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  True, true, too. But I just appreciated that could have so easily been a 'thanks for your time', handshake and leave, with no-one satisfied.
jackhack 10y ago
I'm suspicious based on something you said about the interviewers being disinterested and unenthusiastic. I am cynical, having seen this process played out many times, and having wasted more than a few days interviewing for jobs I had zero chance of earning because the employer had already (yet unofficially and potentially illegally) chosen a candidate. Let me explain: What you've described sounds to me like a setup for hiring an H1B employee. The employer is legally required to interview everyone who meets the requirements, and must hire qualified domestic employees if they are available for work, but the employer will look for any reason to disqualify domestic candidates. A whole industry of consultants popped up a decade ago that coached companies on how to use this "loophole" to favor H1B over domestic employees (which is on it's face, illegal. If a US employee is available, the employer must hire him so the trick is to find a way to disqualify this domestic candidate.) Or maybe they already had an internal candidate and were required by HR to interview some additional people (e.g. you) before they discover, to everyone's surprise, the internal candidate is the very best one for the job. "Going through the motions" to interview others when their mind was made up before the job description was even written. EDIT: Just so it's clear, I'm not saying Amazon does these things; and I don't know anything about this particular case. I am saying this sort of faux-interview happens in the industry, and has the same "feel" of the interviewers simply going through the motions.