8 ms·

This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every

• kowsheek 6y ago
  I'm sorry you had to experience that, I know how you might feel :( That data structures and algorithm book and course is the root of so much distasteful smugness in the tech world, it's really bizarre. [Edit]: It's almost like it was the first course we found very difficult so we should that imprint of challenge on everyone else.
  • zamfi 6y ago
    The word I think you’re looking for is “hazing”
• emerged 6y ago
  Sounds like my Google interview. By the end I had absolutely no interest in working there. Such a toxic environment. The guy they had take me to lunch also seemed completely miserable. Dunno if that was representative of Google or big companies in general but it turned me off forever.
  • dastbe 6y ago
    I think it says a lot more about the individual interviewer than anything about the company. I've had great interviews with a company, and then I've had one where the person was looking for me to say 'base64" (which I wasn't actually aware of at the time!) even though I was explaining the same exact concept from the same company. The whole process is capricious.
    • johnbcoughlin 6y ago
      If the whole process is capricious, it says a lot more about the company than about any individual interviewer.
      • pmiller2 6y ago
        IMO, "capricious" is a word that could be used to describe any interview process that isn't a structured, formalized process. You don't get a good signal out of ad hoc interviews, you can't calibrate across interviewers, and you can't compare accurately across candidates, so why bother?
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    I don't think this is representative. I did about 20+ technical interviews at Google/Facebook over the last 2 years. Overall, the interviewers were competent. Sometimes you could tell that they didn't really enjoy interviewing people but it was ok. I only had one interviewer I'd consider bad (gave confused advice to lead me to his solution), but maybe it was just a personality mismatch. I had better experience with more senior interviewers too, and I found Facebook better than Google (although similar), on every respects (choice of questions, team matching process, more interesting projects...). My main complaint is that I've found the whole process random. Right now I'm in the team matching phase at Google, but not sure it'll go through (and it's not the best time).
• callmeed 6y ago
  Sorry about that bad experience. It sounds like the interviewer wasn't good at communicating. To be fair, it also sounds like you were conflating popular hash functions like md5 with the general concept of a hashing data structure and underlying function. Knowing that modulus operation is one approach and knowing common approaches for dealing with collisions are part of that. See: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/hashing-data-structure/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/hashing-data-structure/
  • finnthehuman 6y ago
    >Knowing that modulus operation is one approach and knowing common approaches for dealing with collisions are part of that Yes, expecting them to know that is reasonable. Expecting them to regurgitate that factoid unprompted is bullshit. Don't inquire on a topic and expect a canidate speaking in generalities and off the cuff to overlap with your toy facts. I'm fighting the urge to rant in the comments here on how to competently conduct a useful technical interview; but I'm more and more convinced it's a competitive advantage.
• ng12 6y ago
  I had a similar experience with Amazon many years ago but my takeaway was "don't work at Amazon" not "don't do technical interviews". I've had great technical interviews (Google, Square) and terrible ones (Amazon, Stripe). Companies you want to work for are cognizant of this and spend time developing their process and training their interviewers to make sure their experience is one of the good ones.
  • FireBeyond 6y ago
    Certainly. I had a really good interview recently that was entirely technical, but none of this. It was a "this service is down, walk me through your process of isolating and debugging". If I said "I'd check these logs or services" then I'd get answers. And I'd get architecture described. Was more a technical problem solving and thought process exercise than "prove you know the same technical trivia I do".
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    I cannot relate to, after two miserable phone interviews with Google I told them on their third request, that if my CV looks so great (by their own words why they were reaching out to me) and yet I had to deal with such interview processes better not bother me ever again.
    • erikpukinskis 6y ago
      It’s a stochastic process. Some percentage of Google interviews are bad. As a job-seeker you are drawing a few samples from each company and you make a judgement. The bigger the company the more variability in experiences. So you make a decision with imperfect information. But it doesn’t really matter because even if you have perfect information through the interview that’s still an imperfect measure of how the job will be. It’s all stochastic so the only way to get a good outcome is to iterate—guess, evaluate, try again until you find something you like.
• umvi 6y ago
  I don't take crap like this from interviewers. One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?" I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number). I just rolled my eyes and laughed and said "Huh, good one, but how would you go about counting the ridges of a foreign coin assuming it's freshly minted and the number of ridges is unknown?" The interviewer shifted uncomfortably and just said "yeah, I'd probably do something like what you said - count the ridges in an arc and multiply..." (i.e. "if you are going to give me bogus lateral thinking puzzles to test my competence I'm going to fire them back to see how you handle them")
  • jbay808 6y ago
    I don't think googling is even a valid answer. If he asked "how would you find out how many ridges are on a quarter" then yes (and I think Google it would be everyone's first answer). But counting, as a verb implies the act of measurement, not just obtaining the final number. Assuming that he used that word, it sounds like a trick question.
    • phkahler 6y ago
      I was once asked how many golfballs could fit in a school bus. I blathered on about measurements of the bus, volume of a ball, the average due to gaps between balls, are the seats still there, etc... bottom line we could spend a lot of time getting an ever more precise estimate. The guy seemed satisfied. Later at home I realised that my test engineer friend may have suggested doing an actual experiment - rent a bus and a few tons of balls. The later would be easy since there is a local company here that recovers lost balls from golf courses (even from the water), repaints the and sells to driving ranges. You can buy them in bulk. Which answer is better? Which were they looking for? Who knows.
      • MrLeap 6y ago
        If we live in a world where reality is on deck, and not the seemingly arbitrary and capricious one that folks sometimes weave, I think you can determine what answer is "better" with more context. Renting a bus and filling it with golf balls is significantly more effort intensive than calculating, but it might give interesting, real world insights if the values differ. For the purpose of running a business, the choice, to my mind, hinges on how much your revenue / customer satisfaction / product depends on the real world intelligence such an endeavour might bring. The situation illustrated is contrived, so it's hard to contrive an answer to that question. There's hybridized approaches. Here's a 3D/AV interactive developer's contribution to your approach list: I've used lidars and depth cameras as a hammer quite a bit over the last year, so I'd do thus - Realsense D435 capture the inside of a bus. Use meshlab to align and stitch all your pointsets. Perform reconstruction on it so you get a 3d mesh. Use your tool of choice to perform a physics simulation on golf balls (I'd probably use Unity3d, because customers love simulations they can play with.) Run your simulation a ton of times with epsilon changes to initial conditions. Maybe even do it with an evolutionary algorithm that tries to maximize the count! Either way, report back with a distribution. Also capture frames every once in a while so you can give them a timelapse. God customers love timelapses.
• rdiddly 6y ago
  OK even ignoring the (in my opinion very strong) possibility this interviewer was completely ignorant of the subject matter, how do you manage to miss the connection between the word "fingerprint" in the desired answer, and the word "unique" in the actual answer? Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701625
• ra7 6y ago
  > but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. This is also one indication that the person is an inexperienced interviewer and their whole line of questioning is focused on tripping up the candidate into making mistakes. A good interviewer thinks along with you, helps you and is fairly satisfied if you articulate a concept "well enough".
• bsder 6y ago
  > The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. One thing that shocked me in discussions is that apparently interviewing incoming candidates at FAANGs has now become a mandatory performance review objective. This is going to produce a lot of interviewers who really don't know what they are doing and don't care. I don't know what idiot came up with this brain-damaged scheme to totally sabotage interviewing and what moron actually propagated it between companies, but I hope they die a horrible, slow, painful death.
  • sigstoat 6y ago
    when i interviewed at google a few years ago the guy told me they were starting to require everyone who’d taken the relevant training to interview candidates. unsurprisingly, he didn’t seem enthusiastic, couldn’t manage to say “yes” when i asked if he liked google, and didn’t know python.
• gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  > We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He asked me to elaborate, so I sorta... talked more? I had a similar experience at Apple where my experience lined up well with the position. I felt like the interviewers were hostile - repeatedly asking weirdly pointed questions about hashing too!
• fizixer 6y ago
  Respond with "then you could phrase your question a bit better and ask about the relationship or connection b/w hashing and fingerprinting". If you're not throwing the keyword you're a 12-year-old fanboy of in the question, you can go eat a carrot for all I care.
• tootie 6y ago
  Same. Worse is when they ask open-ended design questions. Like "How would you design 1-hour shipping?" which I was asked. I've done many, many new product designs and the process is deliberately meant to take weeks. I have, in real life, been asked to design a system on a 45-minute call and my professional answer was "no". I have no idea if they're looking for brainstorm, process, architecture or my ability to question. But honestly it's not enough time for even one of those.
• maxlamb 6y ago
  Had the exact same experience interviewing for Amazon way back in 2005. I was still in college, and the answer he was looking for involved some obscure Linux/Unix command. I really felt defeated and thought “well I guess I’m just not enough of a hard core coder.” I still remember his smug attitude as well. Looking back it seems ridiculous, deciding a college student was not fit for a software engineer position because he didn’t know an obscure Linux command off-hand? Bizarre. But I guess back in 2005 there was much less demand for software engineers so they could afford to be absurdly selective.
  • mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Much less demand, way back in the olden days of… 2005? Just after the horse and buggy. :-D
• seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  I’ve heard amazon interview experiences are all over the map, just like their teams are. Some are really good, some are really bad at it. Google and Facebook seem to be a bit more of a consistent experience, but interviews are done generically and not by the team that would hire you.
  • minot 6y ago
    I waited for the last of my four(?) interviewers for like fifteen minutes in their garbage nih Amazon chime thing and disconnected. I failed my Google interview as well but at least it went better simply because the interviewer wasn't a no show.
• rvz 6y ago
  > His smugness in the way he concluded each topic was just a giant turn off of ever seeking further work with companies like Amazon (giant & highly competitive software conglomerates). I feel like everyone is trying to one up or appear to be king shit in some way, it left a bad taste. (For the record, I did a couple interviews of this style before totally writing the experience off. Others were better, but this experience always stuck with me) Well this is the typical behavior towards those who cannot interview properly and has to introduce pedantic point scoring to bring people down. It would take an experience of resentment, denial or some sort of impactful rejection from the interviewer to be at the point to certainly enjoy this ego trip as an interviewer at somewhere like Amazon. Now it seems everyone and the whole tech industry thinks they're Amazon, Microsoft or Google by asking about implementing efficient algorithms, libraries or the like yet they continue to use the slowest languages, spinning up multiple VMs or clusters at higher runtime costs and choosing Electron for software development. Unless they are also contributing to writing a production grade compiler or systems software, companies who ask these data structures and algorithms questions are doing it simply 'because of reasons'.
• jokethrowaway 6y ago
  It's because they don't know the answer, the first round is a recruiter asking you trivia to separate you from people who know nothing, in the hope of not wasting their engineers' time. To be honest, I don't think money is a good reason enough to tolerate that kind environment, I'd rather work in a smaller company paying less and build a small business on the side to increase your passive revenue streams. Maybe things will change with faang going remote because of COVID (given one perk of small companies was their flexibility) but it looks like your salary at big companies will also scale according to your location, so I'm not too hopeful.
• blackflame7000 6y ago
  If its Amazon they are probably looking for you to say the worlds “LRU Cache” in any context during the interview to receive full points /s