That's a fair point. There are certainly people who apply to Amazon after having made a couple websites, thinking that Amazon is just a website so they're qual

That's a fair point. There are certainly people who apply to Amazon after having made a couple websites, thinking that Amazon is just a website so they're qualified. What they don't see is all of the intense engineering that happens to keep that website running. A very small portion of our engineers ever write HTML. Amazon does have a reputation of being cheap (and it's well-deserved), which is probably causing a lot of great devs to avoid the company entirely. That would skew the numbers in favor of less talented devs. However, I don't believe our rejection rate is higher than the industry average. 80% rejection at phone screens is pretty standard. Edit: Also, for your particular example, Microsoft was _way_ better benefits than Amazon and a better office environment. I can't comment on pay, since I don't know their typical payscale.