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Amazon recruiter invites CTO of Azure to apply for SDE II
- rektide 5y agoi wonder how many cto's would be totally unable to hack it.
- lolsal 5y agoSurely you understand these roles both use wildly different skillsets?
- rektide 5y agonone the less i think a leader who could & who can understand the current sde II role & hack it if they had to is almost always a better more capable general. that ability to empathize & share perspective helps, if not necessarily the ability to sling stuff together & get it shipped, day by day.
- tssva 5y agoI don't know how many can't but Microsoft Azure's CTO is Mark Russinovich who was responsible for creating the sysinternal tools. He can most definitely hack.
- rubyist5eva 5y agobut can he reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard?
- m0zg 5y agoBut can he solve an obscure dynamic programming problem from the interviewer's PhD thesis in 20 minutes on the whiteboard, with a marker that's almost spent? That's a completely different skill than actual software engineering, that the companies (including Microsoft) continue to inexplicably screen for.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoI bought my own markers recently, just so I would never have to deal with "this marker is almost out, and this one is too light to be able to read, and this one...." bullshit.
- jnwatson 5y agoI recently interviewed with AWS. I still remember one of the questions. It boiled down to: please implement Aho-Corasick in 10 minutes on a virtual whiteboard. Perhaps there are folks in programming competitions that can do that, but not moi.
- danielvf 5y agoThanks for the nerd sniping I'm going to be running down for the next few hours.
- digitalsushi 5y agoIt blows my mind how tricky some of the technical interviews I have been through, and even passed, and even been offered roles for, but this morning I spent thirty minutes failing to update the s3 tags on a bucket literally named 'example-bucket'.
- m0zg 5y agoI kind of wonder if there actually was a systematic study of some sort aimed at quantifying how much time people are wasting on unnecessarily manual wrangling of cloud infrastructure. I know I waste a lot of time on that, even though I try to automate everything I reasonably can, and I don't use three dozen different services. Unbelievably obtuse docs even for the simplest things, dozens of manual yak shaving steps which could be done by a shell script, nobody seems to give a slightest shit - people think that's how it ought to be.
- 8note 5y agoAt some point he could, but maybe not anymore. With some time to get the rust off, yeah though
- TowerTall 5y agoHe still maintains the sysinternal tools.
- rektide 5y agoagreed. i dont know mark or his story well, byt a quick review of systinternals & mark does make me question this situation in another way though. mark had enormous opportunity, just vast. 1994 phd. a year at numega, building winternals for a year. cofounding & chief archtiecting a sysinternals startup. he can clearly hack. i think he still can. he seems to still be the chief blogger/vlogger on sysinternals, an uber-technical tool, serving as a chief information radiator for it; strong technics mixed with great demonstrated communication abilities: a great combo. but still i can varry some doubt. would he have been a good MAANA employee, or other medium-sized tech company? ever? would he have been able to engage in that kind of product development, amid these product development lifecycles? staying good & sharp & beliving in oneself & what one is up to is a question of opportunity, alongside talent & capability. maybe he would have made a shit sde ii. which he probably does hire many smart sharp well trained candidates for.
- WalterGR 5y agoDupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29190224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29190224
- hn_throwaway_69 5y agoGoes to show the value of a good post title. This one (we are commenting on) goes straight to the point and it follows it is more attention grabbing than the linked post.
- saagarjha 5y agoWell, that one straight up violates the guidelines.
- solarkraft 5y agoIt’s another example of the editorialization policy being unreasonably harsh and sometimes better ignored. Many actual article titles are absolutely unfit for submissions, especially with the rise of clickbait or endlessly long content-free sentences in large publications (“They said he couldn’t do X. But then he did Y. His neighbors weren’t impressed. His wife was stunned. What happened next will blow your mind. “) that even change sometimes. Many of the most successful submissions have heavily editorialized titles, sometimes necessarily so - sometimes what’s to be pointed out is something completely different from the page’s title or the page doesn’t even really have one. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. I think this should be more like “only editorialize when necessary”.
- easton 5y agoHe should go interview and see how far he gets before someone notices. I bet he gets an offer letter before some middle manager goes “oh crap”.
- maxk42 5y agoRejected for not answering the interviewer's comp sci 101 brainteaser using their pet technique.
- azth 5y agoCan he write code to invert a binary tree on a google docs sheet?
- samfisher83 5y agoHe probably could. He wrote some really cool pieces of software back in the day.
- TowerTall 5y agoHe still maintains that software (if you refer to the sysinternals tools)
- the_only_law 5y agoAmazon seems to be hurting for hires. Many people I know including myself who large tech companies normally would not go near got several Amazon recruiters reaching out during our last job hunts.
- voidfunc 5y agoThe amount of bad press AWS had racked up regarding bad WLB is not lost on anyone
- toomuchtodo 5y agoI spoke with an AWS recruiter last week for an infosec role and they were surprised I was not interested. Sent them links to the nytimes and other pieces showing it’s a grind house. The comp premium is just not there imho for the hit to quality of life (at least for the roles I’d be eligible for).
- sushsjsuauahab 5y agoI think in my last interview I implemented my LRU cache and BFS graph code too quickly. They are desperate for a certain kind of engineer :)
- HWR_14 5y agoCan I ask why that is? Just WLB issues? Moral concerns?
- sgerenser 5y agoPresumably a combination of WLB and Amazon’s tendency to PIP/fire employees much more readily than other tech companies.
- the_only_law 5y agoI’m guessing it’s mostly bad press around work environments. I personally didn’t bother going through because A) I wasn’t prepared and B) I was locked into a new lease and after some research the relocation benefits they offered wouldn’t be worth it. I believe at the time they weren’t overly flexible on work location.
- p0rkbelly 5y agoWe are all about junior people making a mistake, but, heaven forbid it's a recruiter and not an engineer (recruiting for an SDE II would be a junior recruiter). It's sort of a dick move for a CTO post that, since the "NN" still potentially identifies the recruiter. This recruiter will be at a minimum the subject of ridicule or worse, let go.
- silisili 5y agoRecruiters have well, one job. A great recruiter actually takes time to research people and find good fits. They are incredibly rare, but worth their weight in gold IMO. The vast majority of recruiters just do lazy keyword searches and spamming. He or she obviously didn't even bother to read the title or profile of who they were bothering. Spamming is more of a dick move than calling out spam, IMO.
- wuunderbar 5y agoWhat's to say this isn't an automated email?
- gkop 5y agoWhat’s your point? A junior recruiter out to prove themselves will need to cut corners just like all the other recruiters do. Give them an opportunity to make mistakes, I guarantee you the great recruiters have made and learned from their fair share. Plus, if this is that bad of a mistake, the organization is partly responsible for not having safeguards in place to prevent it.
- p0rkbelly 5y agoexactly. Everyone has "one job". E.g. Engineers write code -- they also make mistakes and write bad code.
- jlawer 5y agoYeah and I have written bad code, and I expect to cop a few jabs if I do something stupid and my PR manages to brake something important. I don't have a problem with my co-workers saying I did something dumb. That's not the same as saying I am dumb. You should be a little embarrassed if you screw up. You only get embarrassed if you care. Its part of the motivation to improve.
- al_biglan 5y agoAh recruiters. Several years ago I recall the story of one of the creators of a programming language who was asked how many years of experience they had with the language and the response "all of them" was perfect. I can't recall if this was Gosling/Java or Van Rossum/Python (or someone else entirely).
- templeosenjoyer 5y agoA similar and absurd story[1] I remember from last year: "I saw a job post the other day. It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI. I couldn't apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created that thing." [1] https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830 https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830
- keyle 5y agoThat's a funny mistake,... but that could also be the sickest burn of the year.
- dvnguyen 5y agoIronically it’s highly likely that the CTO was recommended to the sources by a LinkedIn “AI”, a Microsoft company.
- dimatura 5y agoEh, it happens. As a PhD student in robotics at CMU I got calls from an agressive recruiter for Uber ATG, asking if I was interested in being a test driver for their cars, a job which didn't really require any kind of degree and with pay fairly close to minimum wage, iirc. I politely declined, as I wasn't qualified - I don't have a valid US driver's license.
- musicale 5y agoI also expect most of their other drivers had actually completed their Ph.D. degrees. It does sound like a good job, since minimum wage would be more than what you are making per actual work hour as a graduate research assistant.
- sdo72 5y agoNot sure why this is offended, but I actually think he may have some chances failing the interview if he goes through. I do think he's definitely capable and knowledgeable of doing a principal/fellow engineer job. I went through a few interviews myself recently and I got very puzzled with the interview process. It's quite brutal. And I just went through a 5 technical rounds after passing the first 2 rounds (1 technical and 1 behavioral) for a senior position. The 5 rounds include: architecture design, model/object algo design, refactoring/optimization, build a complete CRUD api with tests. I know how to build these things and I would take time to do it, but I couldn't do it with the very fast speed that I was limited to during the interview.
- smilekzs 5y agoEven if we accept CS101-styled timed coding questions as a necessary evil to weed out the fakers, having recently been on the receiving end of some of the "system design" questions recently, I must say it's a really really bad idea to (1) having these subject to a tight time limit, and/or (2) treat this as if it's a standardized test. The worst offenders (according to myself): - Expected me to "design a xxxxx-ing system" (topic redacted but it's really broad) in 25 minutes. This is barely enough to get to narrow down the scope and clarify the requirements. - Presented me with a specific problem using almost exclusively domain-specific jargon, without explaining any of it. Time limit is 30 min. Not wanting to "waste" all my time budget clarifying, but apparently (1) they did not like anything about what I hacked up (2) wouldn't give any feedback on why they didn't like it either. Ended up really awkward. - Presented me with a more normal, self-contained design problem (finally!). Time limit is 45 min (seemed reasonable?). So I proceeded normally. However after the interview I was informed that during this 45 min I did not cover a certain topics "A, B, or even C", and therefore scored really low. Apparently, lack of a signal for them is an anti-signal. The list can go on and on; point being, while the coding questions have been thoroughly calibrated, esp. w.r.t. what is a reasonable time to solve each question, more likely than not a "system design question" is poorly designed. Even from an employer's perspective, I'd be confused about what kind of signal these interviews are designed to extract. Yet, our industry as a whole is increasingly more keen on gatekeeping "Senior+" positions with them (alongside with other draconian measures). My take on how they can be improved, if not abolished altogether: 1. Relaxing the time limit to say 75 minutes; better to have some people "finish" early; 2. Train the interviewers to help with setting expectations on the pace 3. Either have the interviewer nudge the candidate when the open-ended question receives an unexpected take, or be ready to evaluate them fairly.
- ryandrake 5y agoIt's funny how mistakes like this always go in one direction (senior candidates being recruited for much more junior jobs). Often a recruiter E-mails me with: "I'm looking to fill a 6 month temp position, 2 years of experience required." (I'm happily employed at a BigTech company and have 20 years of experience.) Or, at best it's "We are impressed with your background doing ABC, and would like to know if you're willing to explore... doing exact same ABC, but at our company instead!" Sorry but no. What I never seem to get is: "Hi, I see you have a great background with a lot of experience! How would you like to be Senior VP of Engineering at this medium sized company?" That would get my attention! Recruiters seem to use the query WHERE candidate_level >= job_level, where they'd get more hits if they used WHERE candidate_level < job_level
- ripvanwinkle 5y agoI get these too and used to wonder what about my profile made me seem like a relatively new to industry person and how I could make myself seem more experienced and qualified. Suddenly I don't feel so bad anymore
- lightbendover 5y agoI always wondered this as well until I saw firsthand how rudimentary most sourcing strings are. The only good interaction I have ever had with recruiting was when I had them run their sourcing string against my entire VP org on LinkedIn to demonstrate that they excluded 90% of current engineers because they were insisting on Java and actively selecting against DevOps. It became less positive when they didn’t change their practices.