I was at Amazon over 10 years and did several hundred interviews. I tried my best not to contribute to the problem, but here’s my experience: First, the interv

I was at Amazon over 10 years and did several hundred interviews. I tried my best not to contribute to the problem, but here’s my experience: First, the interviewing culture optimized for fresh computer science college grads, and specifically Indian nationals who excel (from my experience) at memorizing specific patterns and applying them decently in interviews. It doesn’t mean they’re better employees or better engineers, but it does mean you can hire someone as an H1B. And they’ll work pretty damn hard and out in more hours, because otherwise they fear getting managed out and with their visa situation, they have to leave the country. Secondly, we’ll hire H1Bs from other companies. They often times don’t pass our hiring bar and fall significantly short. But as an Indian national, there are plenty of other Indian SDMs, Senior SDMs, and directors who will still give you an offer and bring you on board. It’s sort of a nepotism, and there are ways you can extend an offer without even going through an interview loop. So… a culture of engineering talent who look great on paper, but you end up building a lot of mediocre products and services, or simply using this “talent” to keep existing, well designed services up and operationally sane. Mostly ticket loads. And that’s really just it. The system is designed that way to extract a certain amount of labor. The skill doesn’t matter. Certain nationality brings in more of its own people. We talked a lot about diversity, but we hired practically zero Hispanic, black, women, or other (tech) minority groups. Our damn HR didn’t even bring them into interview loops. If you worked at Amazon, you’d think that only Indian people graduate with CS degrees. If you get rejected by Amazon, trust me as a 10 year veteran who finally abandoned ship late last year - you’re better off not being there. I regret the 10 years of my life I gave to that company. I regret the relationships I abandoned, the toll it took on my physical and mental health.