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I like to think I'm halfway decent at my job, and I wouldn't work there once. During undergrad, my landlord working for AMZN on the opposite end of the country

I like to think I'm halfway decent at my job, and I wouldn't work there once. During undergrad, my landlord working for AMZN on the opposite end of the country offered me an interview, but it was during final exam week. I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams, and his arrogance really showed when not only did he refuse, but then insisted my exams are not don't even register on the same scale of importance as the opportunity to work for Amazon. Somewhat related: a recruiter at Google cold-called me a couple months into my first job out of undergrad back in 2016 and was similarly condescending about "the chance" to work for Google compared to everything else. I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview. I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs. That job was great until I got put on a team with a guy who was a former middle manager at some IBM-like company and went from being surrounded by people lightyears ahead of me to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. The messed-up part was that it wasn't even punishment. I was rewarded after completing a project with my choice of which team I joined next, and I joined the wrong one. I assumed that joining a new team to utilize this newfangled "cloud computing" thing would be trailblazing, and I didn't do any diligence on who I would work with. To this day, I still regret not rejoining the first team I worked for, otherwise I would still be at that company and happy about it. Then again, the boredom and discontent while being on that sucky team is the reason I started investing, and now I can buy a house in cash and fund myself to do whatever I want for at least a decade. Hard to complain about the way things turned out.

le-mark 1y ago
> to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.
- president_zippy 1y ago
  Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart. I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me. The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore. I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade. It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    I'm currently in a place that pays me €100k just to sit on my ass, and I can do that remotely. I've tried actually doing some work, but that backfired. Not sure what to do, because on one hand my skills are evaporating, but on the other if I wanted a job that pays more I'd have to learn a lot and then work substantially more. I'm wondering if maybe sitting here until retirement is a viable option.
    - devnullbrain 1y ago
      You at least need some source of self-actualisation
      - 1y ago
kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.
- mjamil 1y ago
  The coolness peaked before the “the network is the computer” phase, IMO. Late 80s vs mid 90s.
  - at-fates-hands 1y ago
    This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was. Yeah, man, good times. My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester. I still giggle when I tell that story.
    - netdevphoenix 1y ago
      > I still giggle when I tell that story. Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
- ghaff 1y ago
  I'd note that a huge amount of the work at those companies was hardware (and a lot of theory in the case of Bell Labs)--though there was, of course important software as well, a lot of it related to Unix. Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
  - kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
dangus 1y ago
I have done a round one interview and I don’t see how it can be interpreted to do anything but turn away people with a brain. Memorize Amazon’s insane company values and relate your resume experience to it. And that I mean every single bullet point. Interviewers were all run by robotic people. Coding test had zero flexibility, you had to just write code in a special barebones text editor that had zero feedback besides pass/fail. You’d have to solely care about Amazon RSUs to consider that job. They are self-selecting for the worst kinds of candidates. The dumb thing is that it should be a job that doesn’t burn people out because they basically own the market and haven’t needed to do any sort of innovation. Amazon’s corporate culture just has a burnout fetish.
- awill 1y ago
  I interviewed in 2015. The recruiter told me to read the Amazon Leadership Principles, but I thought it was ridiculous to prep for something so specific to a single company, especially as I was interviewing at other companies too. I got the job, and I think being natural helped. I've interviewed thousands of people at Amazon since, and too many people just say the buzz words with no meat, and it gets them nowhere i.e. I showed customer obsession when I.....(and then gives a bad example)
  - dangus 1y ago
    I interviewed much later and there was definitely no getting around it, the interviewer refused to let me go on further without hitting every single value in the list and talking about a unique example of my experience for each value. One entire experience story/project example per value, completely insane cult behavior. I felt like I was interviewing for Scientology.
  - nxor 1y ago
    So which is true, your comment or the one above? Is it 'natural' to not prep, or to do what's expected of you, as described in the comment above?
atlintots 1y ago
> I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams Ha, my interview for an Amazon internship was an hour after a 3-hour final exam :-) But the job market right now is quite bad, and after hundreds upon hundreds of internship applications I would've been stupid to give up this chance. I would work for Amazon in a heart beat.
- president_zippy 1y ago
  Well pardon my saying so, but why don't you?
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Are they even hiring?
  - bluecheese452 1y ago
    Well usually you have to get hired first. Can’t just show up without an offer.
gkanai 1y ago
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.
- makeset 1y ago
  Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.
    - op00to 1y ago
      IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.
    - Croak 1y ago
      I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s. Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.
foxglacier 1y ago
If you had been born early enough, you probably wouldn't be a programmer at all because far fewer people were. Conversely, everybody is born at the right time to join in the heyday of something amazing. You just have to identify that something and be lucky enough and/or try hard enough to become one of the few future-gandalfs. There are companies today making flying cars and dexterous humanoid robots ffs! Or SpaceX! Amazing engineering work never stopped, it just didn't linger on in the same fields.
- president_zippy 1y ago
  Fair enough, but in my estimation that next big thing is gene therapy, and the best way to get involved with it is to become a medical geneticist. I'm sorry to be a buzzkill, but I just can't get excited about privately-funded space rockets or Japanese girlfriend robots, not even if there were an 8 figure stock compensation package in it for me. To me, it's all just "do something grandiose for the venture capitalist bucks, and then maybe figure out how it helps people in 20 years." "My sister killed her baby because she couldn't afford it and we're sending people to the moon. September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time. Now he's doing horse. It's June. Is it silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes And everyone still wants to fly Some say a man ain't happy truly Til he truly dies Sign o the times" -Prince
  - zem 1y ago
    the prince song reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
  - foxglacier 1y ago
    Huh? Computers were privately funded and you could have called them pornography machines if you wanted to be dismissive of the technology. I understand you're not excited by those technologies but no need to mischaracterize them. I'm not excited about curing cancer because it's just not something I think about much, but I still recognize it's a good thing, even if some big-pharma company ends up owning all the IP and overcharging for it.
coderatlarge 1y ago
i’ve interviewed with aws and received offers twice over the years. the first time they made me pay for my own lunch. the second time no lunch break was afforded. i didn’t accept the offers though i know several truly excellent people who work there.
- neilv 1y ago
  When I interviewed at a Google outpost, a good-cop employee they mistakenly thought had a connection to me took me to lunch (message: forget about the bad-cop interviewer you were just with, you're among friends, loosen your tongue so our spy can report back) in their cafeteria (message: look at the free food perks you'd enjoy), and initiated a conversation with an visiting economist there who then spoke of something oddly relevant to my research interest at the time (message: look at the interesting people and collaborations you will bump into every day). Your interview lunch experience sounds like message: this is what it's going to be like, and we don't care if you join us.
  - coderatlarge 1y ago
    yes, i definitely walked away with that impression. maybe they reserve the better experience for mire desirable candidates :)
  - eythian 1y ago
    I've been on the other side of that (not google), taking people to lunch who are interviewing. Usually you're picked because they're from the same country as you or something like that. At least where I work it's not like those messages. Instead it's lunch because food is good to have, and if you were lunching with them you weren't involved in the interview process at all, and it gave them a person to ask questions of and get an unbiased-as-reasonable response. If there were real red flags I'd probably raise it, but otherwise I had no contact with anyone in the hiring process regarding that person at all.
    - neilv 1y ago
      I don't know what percentage of companies use the lunch in an on-site interview for evaluation, but definitely some do. Either with express feedback into the process, or because it's the hiring manager taking the person to lunch, and this is shaping their opinion. I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).
akoboldfrying 1y ago
> gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview Although I doubt it was really their intention to be passive aggressive, I have to say: That was a Flawless Victory of passive aggression.
- blitzar 1y ago
  the dummies guide to java might have topped it into active aggressive
pjmlp 1y ago
I got interviewed twice for Google, the first one I made it to the second round of phone calls, the second one only the first phone call. The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences. Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way. I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.
- chipsrafferty 1y ago
  I'm not saying this is the case, but isn't it possible that you weren't a "great engineer that they would love to have at any price" in the past, and you developed your skills and knowledge? Or even if you've always been a great engineer, since you were born, why take personal offense to not getting a job before? Interviews are mostly luck, anyways, so the previous interviews have no relation to the 3rd one.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Of course I have my limitations, what I don't accept is the snake oil lip service of Google HR trying to meet their KPIs of candidates. Followed by an interview process that is designed to get those that want to work there at any price.
- wiredfool 1y ago
  I've had two first round phone interviews with Google, separated by about 5 years. Both times they contacted me. Both times they asked me the exact same tricky question. First time didn't do so well, second time I knew the 'correct' answer. They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.
  - MarioMan 1y ago
    > They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time. Most places will appreciate if you tell them before you work on the problem. That gives them a chance to give you a different problem instead. Likewise, they won't appreciate if you tell them afterwards since it makes it harder for them to judge any semblance of problem solving skill.
thinkharderdev 1y ago
I interviewed with Amazon a few years back. The whole thing turned me off. A recruiter reached out and I was interested (it was late 2020 and the money was tempting). But before the first phone screen I had to have a call with the recruiter again, where she gave me a list of things I needed to "study" and was told that "successfully candidates usually spend 5-10 hours preparing for the interview". The study list was the usual list of CS101 topics. I didn't bother preparing and it was a good thing because on the phone screen the guy just asked me some a fairly mundane coding question and then some more general stuff (it was actually a very reasonable interview). Based on that they wanted to proceed to a final interview which was an all-day affair (on zoom of course because this was during the pandemic). But first I had to do ANOTHER 1h call with the recruiter where she gave me ANOTHER list of things I needed to "study" and reminded me that I should spend 5-10h preparing. That was too much for me and I politely declined the opportunity.
- gedy 1y ago
  I refuse on principle any interviews that expect you to study or "prepare" for an interview. I'm sure I've missed out on some money, but they've also missed out on a pretty good engineer and teammate :-)
  - 4ggr0 1y ago
    every job process i went through so far has been applying -> if they like me a call with the usual job interview questions -> if both want to proceed a meet-and-greet with the actual team -> if both still are interested, sign a contract. crazy how much time is wasted in US/VC tech.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    I am absolutely sure that the money you missed out on had a bigger affect on you than them missing out on hiring you. Every large tech company or any tech company that pays decent money requires preparing for coding interviews *if you are trying to get hired as a developer*. I personally didn’t do much prep for my Amazon loop accept practice answering behavioral questions in STAR format. But I also had to thread the needle of having experience to get into the Professional Services department as someone who knew cloud, how to talk to people, architecture and leading projects. If I came out of college post 2012 instead of 1996 with path dependencies in 2012, you damn well better believe I would have been “grinding leetcode” to make BigTech money.
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
>I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview. Is this a common Google practice? Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. On how many different levels does this insult work?! I'm just very interested in this tidbit of information.
- siva7 1y ago
  Next level misogyny a la google :)
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    yeah maybe they only do it for the women they interview, as a form of negging pickup technique
    - president_zippy 1y ago
      My first instinct is that the Google interviewers were just so full of themselves that they think they're doing you a favor and would do it to anybody, regardless of gender. If I were turned down for a job that involved writing FreeBSD kernel code and the hiring manager gave me a free book on FreeBSD kernel programming, I'd think they were cool people and try again in 18-24 months. It's not the act of giving a a rejected candidate a textbook, the insult is that it was a supplemental text book for the very first CS class most undergrads take. Going back to the interviewers, there are going to be jerks in any organization with more than 20 employees, but the fact that their culture sees this kind of patronizing behavior as "saving the world" and "making a difference" is a red flag for me.
- travelalberta 1y ago
  >Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. 2nd edition of Kleppmann comes out in a few months... if I flunk a DE interview think I can request it?
dotnet00 1y ago
I think you can still find those kinds of workplaces if you focus on research-oriented companies in "deep tech" (meaning those designing and building cutting edge hardware rather than advertising/social media). I too had the pleasure of interning under some former Bell Labs employees, it really was a great experience.
- Gormo 1y ago
  Oxide looks like it may be that sort of company.
trollbridge 1y ago
I interviewed there and got an offer a number of years ago (in 2006 or 2007, for the then-nascent AWS team). In retrospect, it would have been a great career move. I also was interviewing somewhere else and told the recruiter. His response was to be verbally abusive and say the other place "sounded boring", and then went off on how if I turned down an offer, Amazon would never talk to me again and I'd basically ruined my career. I decided I didn't want to work at a place with that sort of culture. They reached out to me in 2013 for an interview and again in 2024.
- president_zippy 1y ago
  What about just accepting the job, faking a medical problem that requires extended time away from work not to keep the paycheck, but just to officially remain on staff for the purposes of future background checks, and meanwhile apply to other companies. You could just take an unpaid extended medical leave for cancer treatment and bribe an MD to make a phony "sick note" similar to playing hookey back in grade school. You wouldn't be defrauding anybody if you're not getting paid. You could take a sabbatical for 6-9 months and tell better companies you were working for Amazon that whole time.
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    In retrospect, that might have been a crafty idea. At the time, I was a naïve 25 year old, and dishonesty/conniving wasn't really part of my personality, or at least not when it came to work. I'm more than happy to tell better companies I've received offers from Google and Amazon and declined them, though.
    - achenet 1y ago
      I think the solution you went for was better, you don't want to be accused of fraud, that would really look bad. Honesty is generally the best policy, imo :)
- hamdingers 1y ago
  Their recruiters still reach out to me at least annually despite me bailing on an interview midway through due to a similar experience to yours in 2014. I used to (rather rudely) tell them off but recruiter turnover there is just as bad as every other department so it never stuck.
code_for_monkey 1y ago
I had a very similar experience with an amazon interviewer over an even dumber reason: I was going on vacation. Seems dumb, but in your early 20's, with everything booked, I was excited, and frankly didnt see why it was worth insulting me (Its pretty normal to be too busy to do a first round interview on a given week, sometimes things get pushed back 7 days.)
cool_man_bob 1y ago
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I feel the same, and especially about video games. I would never work in the modern video game industry. It seems really miserable to be overworked and underpaid to work on some design-by-committee game that I don’t even care about. But I hear stories of some Of the companies back in the 90s that seemed to magically muster the capital to sit down and put out effectively what was a passion project, but also commercialize it.
thimkerbell 1y ago
"every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs." Thanks for this.
MarioMan 1y ago
> they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview. That's surprising. I've never seen any major tech company provide any sort of feedback, let alone handing you a book, even if it does feel condescending.
jjav 1y ago
> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs. That's great imagery and a good description of how it felt! I was lucky to work at two of those three and those were awesome years. Going to work with people who created Unix and had commands named after them and later at Sun with all the magic, those were the days. Post-Sun I've only done startups and while that has been a lot of fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as special.

le-mark 1y ago

> to being surrounded by Dilbert characters. As a real life Wally I appreciate this comment.

president_zippy 1y ago
Wally is the one Dilbert character I can tolerate in the workplace. He's honest about who he is and what he does. When you know you're in a bloated company run by buffoons, all you can do for your sanity is work to rule and not upset the apple cart. I was Wally for the last 2 1/2 years of that previous job until I started to realize I'm becoming more and more like a Dilbert character myself. Something in my brain just told me it wasn't sustainable, call it fear of God or paranoia, but letting my skills atrophy in a place like that for 20 years didn't seem like it would end well for me. The only problem was that I stayed so long, and it made me hate software engineering so much that I didn't even want to be a software engineer anymore. I put up with it just long enough so I could avoid selling stock and drawing cash out of my portfolio, and now I'm back at square one as a post-bacc student getting my applications in order for MD and PhD programs where I'll most certainly wind up drawing hundreds of thousands out of my portfolio to pay rent and eat dinner for about a decade. It's sad, I really enjoyed systems programming, but it seems like finding interesting systems programming and distributed computing projects that have significant economic value is like squeezing blood out of a stone. Maybe LLMs or future progress in bioinformatics will change that, now that finding ways to shovel a lot of data into and out of GPUs is valuable, but I'm so far into physiology, genetics/proteomics, and cell biology that I'm not sure I would even want to go back.
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  I'm currently in a place that pays me €100k just to sit on my ass, and I can do that remotely. I've tried actually doing some work, but that backfired. Not sure what to do, because on one hand my skills are evaporating, but on the other if I wanted a job that pays more I'd have to learn a lot and then work substantially more. I'm wondering if maybe sitting here until retirement is a viable option.
  - devnullbrain 1y ago
    You at least need some source of self-actualisation
    - 1y ago

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.

mjamil 1y ago
The coolness peaked before the “the network is the computer” phase, IMO. Late 80s vs mid 90s.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was. Yeah, man, good times. My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester. I still giggle when I tell that story.
  - netdevphoenix 1y ago
    > I still giggle when I tell that story. Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
ghaff 1y ago
I'd note that a huge amount of the work at those companies was hardware (and a lot of theory in the case of Bell Labs)--though there was, of course important software as well, a lot of it related to Unix. Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
- kaladin-jasnah 1y ago

dangus 1y ago

I have done a round one interview and I don’t see how it can be interpreted to do anything but turn away people with a brain. Memorize Amazon’s insane company values and relate your resume experience to it. And that I mean every single bullet point. Interviewers were all run by robotic people. Coding test had zero flexibility, you had to just write code in a special barebones text editor that had zero feedback besides pass/fail. You’d have to solely care about Amazon RSUs to consider that job. They are self-selecting for the worst kinds of candidates. The dumb thing is that it should be a job that doesn’t burn people out because they basically own the market and haven’t needed to do any sort of innovation. Amazon’s corporate culture just has a burnout fetish.

awill 1y ago
I interviewed in 2015. The recruiter told me to read the Amazon Leadership Principles, but I thought it was ridiculous to prep for something so specific to a single company, especially as I was interviewing at other companies too. I got the job, and I think being natural helped. I've interviewed thousands of people at Amazon since, and too many people just say the buzz words with no meat, and it gets them nowhere i.e. I showed customer obsession when I.....(and then gives a bad example)
- dangus 1y ago
  I interviewed much later and there was definitely no getting around it, the interviewer refused to let me go on further without hitting every single value in the list and talking about a unique example of my experience for each value. One entire experience story/project example per value, completely insane cult behavior. I felt like I was interviewing for Scientology.
- nxor 1y ago
  So which is true, your comment or the one above? Is it 'natural' to not prep, or to do what's expected of you, as described in the comment above?

atlintots 1y ago

> I asked if I could schedule the interview after my final exams Ha, my interview for an Amazon internship was an hour after a 3-hour final exam :-) But the job market right now is quite bad, and after hundreds upon hundreds of internship applications I would've been stupid to give up this chance. I would work for Amazon in a heart beat.

president_zippy 1y ago
Well pardon my saying so, but why don't you?
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Are they even hiring?
- bluecheese452 1y ago
  Well usually you have to get hired first. Can’t just show up without an offer.

gkanai 1y ago

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. For each of those firms there was a 'golden era' and then a time when the company coasted on their laurels, and then the slide to irrelevancy.

makeset 1y ago
Some 20 years ago I started a job at Google in Mountain View, and they were paying for a rental car, so Enterprise sent a driver to pick me up to do the paperwork. On the way I was chatting with him, telling him how amazing life at Google was, all the restaurants and the stocked kitchens and massage rooms on every floor of every building etc etc. He said "Do you know what this campus used to be before Google?" I said "Yeah, they told us at the orientation, it was SGI." The driver said, "Yes, and ten years ago it was exactly like that at SGI, too. I was an engineer there."
- mschuster91 1y ago
  I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.
  - op00to 1y ago
    IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.
  - Croak 1y ago
    I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s. Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.

foxglacier 1y ago

If you had been born early enough, you probably wouldn't be a programmer at all because far fewer people were. Conversely, everybody is born at the right time to join in the heyday of something amazing. You just have to identify that something and be lucky enough and/or try hard enough to become one of the few future-gandalfs. There are companies today making flying cars and dexterous humanoid robots ffs! Or SpaceX! Amazing engineering work never stopped, it just didn't linger on in the same fields.

president_zippy 1y ago
Fair enough, but in my estimation that next big thing is gene therapy, and the best way to get involved with it is to become a medical geneticist. I'm sorry to be a buzzkill, but I just can't get excited about privately-funded space rockets or Japanese girlfriend robots, not even if there were an 8 figure stock compensation package in it for me. To me, it's all just "do something grandiose for the venture capitalist bucks, and then maybe figure out how it helps people in 20 years." "My sister killed her baby because she couldn't afford it and we're sending people to the moon. September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time. Now he's doing horse. It's June. Is it silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes And everyone still wants to fly Some say a man ain't happy truly Til he truly dies Sign o the times" -Prince
- zem 1y ago
  the prince song reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
- foxglacier 1y ago
  Huh? Computers were privately funded and you could have called them pornography machines if you wanted to be dismissive of the technology. I understand you're not excited by those technologies but no need to mischaracterize them. I'm not excited about curing cancer because it's just not something I think about much, but I still recognize it's a good thing, even if some big-pharma company ends up owning all the IP and overcharging for it.

coderatlarge 1y ago

i’ve interviewed with aws and received offers twice over the years. the first time they made me pay for my own lunch. the second time no lunch break was afforded. i didn’t accept the offers though i know several truly excellent people who work there.

neilv 1y ago
When I interviewed at a Google outpost, a good-cop employee they mistakenly thought had a connection to me took me to lunch (message: forget about the bad-cop interviewer you were just with, you're among friends, loosen your tongue so our spy can report back) in their cafeteria (message: look at the free food perks you'd enjoy), and initiated a conversation with an visiting economist there who then spoke of something oddly relevant to my research interest at the time (message: look at the interesting people and collaborations you will bump into every day). Your interview lunch experience sounds like message: this is what it's going to be like, and we don't care if you join us.
- coderatlarge 1y ago
  yes, i definitely walked away with that impression. maybe they reserve the better experience for mire desirable candidates :)
- eythian 1y ago
  I've been on the other side of that (not google), taking people to lunch who are interviewing. Usually you're picked because they're from the same country as you or something like that. At least where I work it's not like those messages. Instead it's lunch because food is good to have, and if you were lunching with them you weren't involved in the interview process at all, and it gave them a person to ask questions of and get an unbiased-as-reasonable response. If there were real red flags I'd probably raise it, but otherwise I had no contact with anyone in the hiring process regarding that person at all.
  - neilv 1y ago
    I don't know what percentage of companies use the lunch in an on-site interview for evaluation, but definitely some do. Either with express feedback into the process, or because it's the hiring manager taking the person to lunch, and this is shaping their opinion. I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).

akoboldfrying 1y ago

> gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview Although I doubt it was really their intention to be passive aggressive, I have to say: That was a Flawless Victory of passive aggression.

blitzar 1y ago
the dummies guide to java might have topped it into active aggressive

pjmlp 1y ago

I got interviewed twice for Google, the first one I made it to the second round of phone calls, the second one only the first phone call. The third time a Google recruiter reached out to me with the sales pitch that I was a great engineer that they would like to have at any price, I berated him if that was the case why the previous two experiences. Never heard from Google HR ever again, and I am not sorry, I am happier this way. I had better experiences in interviews for EA and SCEE than Google, which again I also am an happier person not managing to get an offer, and endure the crunch lifecycle of the industry as reward.

chipsrafferty 1y ago
I'm not saying this is the case, but isn't it possible that you weren't a "great engineer that they would love to have at any price" in the past, and you developed your skills and knowledge? Or even if you've always been a great engineer, since you were born, why take personal offense to not getting a job before? Interviews are mostly luck, anyways, so the previous interviews have no relation to the 3rd one.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Of course I have my limitations, what I don't accept is the snake oil lip service of Google HR trying to meet their KPIs of candidates. Followed by an interview process that is designed to get those that want to work there at any price.
wiredfool 1y ago
I've had two first round phone interviews with Google, separated by about 5 years. Both times they contacted me. Both times they asked me the exact same tricky question. First time didn't do so well, second time I knew the 'correct' answer. They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time.
- MarioMan 1y ago
  > They didn't seem to appreciate me telling them that they'd asked this question the last time. Most places will appreciate if you tell them before you work on the problem. That gives them a chance to give you a different problem instead. Likewise, they won't appreciate if you tell them afterwards since it makes it harder for them to judge any semblance of problem solving skill.

thinkharderdev 1y ago

I interviewed with Amazon a few years back. The whole thing turned me off. A recruiter reached out and I was interested (it was late 2020 and the money was tempting). But before the first phone screen I had to have a call with the recruiter again, where she gave me a list of things I needed to "study" and was told that "successfully candidates usually spend 5-10 hours preparing for the interview". The study list was the usual list of CS101 topics. I didn't bother preparing and it was a good thing because on the phone screen the guy just asked me some a fairly mundane coding question and then some more general stuff (it was actually a very reasonable interview). Based on that they wanted to proceed to a final interview which was an all-day affair (on zoom of course because this was during the pandemic). But first I had to do ANOTHER 1h call with the recruiter where she gave me ANOTHER list of things I needed to "study" and reminded me that I should spend 5-10h preparing. That was too much for me and I politely declined the opportunity.

gedy 1y ago
I refuse on principle any interviews that expect you to study or "prepare" for an interview. I'm sure I've missed out on some money, but they've also missed out on a pretty good engineer and teammate :-)
- 4ggr0 1y ago
  every job process i went through so far has been applying -> if they like me a call with the usual job interview questions -> if both want to proceed a meet-and-greet with the actual team -> if both still are interested, sign a contract. crazy how much time is wasted in US/VC tech.
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  I am absolutely sure that the money you missed out on had a bigger affect on you than them missing out on hiring you. Every large tech company or any tech company that pays decent money requires preparing for coding interviews *if you are trying to get hired as a developer*. I personally didn’t do much prep for my Amazon loop accept practice answering behavioral questions in STAR format. But I also had to thread the needle of having experience to get into the Professional Services department as someone who knew cloud, how to talk to people, architecture and leading projects. If I came out of college post 2012 instead of 1996 with path dependencies in 2012, you damn well better believe I would have been “grinding leetcode” to make BigTech money.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago

>I already had a low opinion of them when they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview. Is this a common Google practice? Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. On how many different levels does this insult work?! I'm just very interested in this tidbit of information.

siva7 1y ago
Next level misogyny a la google :)
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  yeah maybe they only do it for the women they interview, as a form of negging pickup technique
  - president_zippy 1y ago
    My first instinct is that the Google interviewers were just so full of themselves that they think they're doing you a favor and would do it to anybody, regardless of gender. If I were turned down for a job that involved writing FreeBSD kernel code and the hiring manager gave me a free book on FreeBSD kernel programming, I'd think they were cool people and try again in 18-24 months. It's not the act of giving a a rejected candidate a textbook, the insult is that it was a supplemental text book for the very first CS class most undergrads take. Going back to the interviewers, there are going to be jerks in any organization with more than 20 employees, but the fact that their culture sees this kind of patronizing behavior as "saving the world" and "making a difference" is a red flag for me.
travelalberta 1y ago
>Can you choose the book you want, or does it have to be introductory Java. 2nd edition of Kleppmann comes out in a few months... if I flunk a DE interview think I can request it?

dotnet00 1y ago

I think you can still find those kinds of workplaces if you focus on research-oriented companies in "deep tech" (meaning those designing and building cutting edge hardware rather than advertising/social media). I too had the pleasure of interning under some former Bell Labs employees, it really was a great experience.

Gormo 1y ago
Oxide looks like it may be that sort of company.

trollbridge 1y ago

I interviewed there and got an offer a number of years ago (in 2006 or 2007, for the then-nascent AWS team). In retrospect, it would have been a great career move. I also was interviewing somewhere else and told the recruiter. His response was to be verbally abusive and say the other place "sounded boring", and then went off on how if I turned down an offer, Amazon would never talk to me again and I'd basically ruined my career. I decided I didn't want to work at a place with that sort of culture. They reached out to me in 2013 for an interview and again in 2024.

president_zippy 1y ago
What about just accepting the job, faking a medical problem that requires extended time away from work not to keep the paycheck, but just to officially remain on staff for the purposes of future background checks, and meanwhile apply to other companies. You could just take an unpaid extended medical leave for cancer treatment and bribe an MD to make a phony "sick note" similar to playing hookey back in grade school. You wouldn't be defrauding anybody if you're not getting paid. You could take a sabbatical for 6-9 months and tell better companies you were working for Amazon that whole time.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  In retrospect, that might have been a crafty idea. At the time, I was a naïve 25 year old, and dishonesty/conniving wasn't really part of my personality, or at least not when it came to work. I'm more than happy to tell better companies I've received offers from Google and Amazon and declined them, though.
  - achenet 1y ago
    I think the solution you went for was better, you don't want to be accused of fraud, that would really look bad. Honesty is generally the best policy, imo :)
hamdingers 1y ago
Their recruiters still reach out to me at least annually despite me bailing on an interview midway through due to a similar experience to yours in 2014. I used to (rather rudely) tell them off but recruiter turnover there is just as bad as every other department so it never stuck.

code_for_monkey 1y ago

I had a very similar experience with an amazon interviewer over an even dumber reason: I was going on vacation. Seems dumb, but in your early 20's, with everything booked, I was excited, and frankly didnt see why it was worth insulting me (Its pretty normal to be too busy to do a first round interview on a given week, sometimes things get pushed back 7 days.)

cool_man_bob 1y ago

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I feel the same, and especially about video games. I would never work in the modern video game industry. It seems really miserable to be overworked and underpaid to work on some design-by-committee game that I don’t even care about. But I hear stories of some Of the companies back in the 90s that seemed to magically muster the capital to sit down and put out effectively what was a passion project, but also commercialize it.

thimkerbell 1y ago

"every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs." Thanks for this.

MarioMan 1y ago

> they gave my then-girlfriend an introductory O'Reilly book on Java after she failed their interview. That's surprising. I've never seen any major tech company provide any sort of feedback, let alone handing you a book, even if it does feel condescending.

jjav 1y ago

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I had a ton of graybeard wizard coworkers from these places, and they were all a pleasure to learn from and even better friends. For the first 2 years of my first job, every day of work was like walking into the Shire and talking magic spells with 20 Gandalfs. That's great imagery and a good description of how it felt! I was lucky to work at two of those three and those were awesome years. Going to work with people who created Unix and had commands named after them and later at Sun with all the magic, those were the days. Post-Sun I've only done startups and while that has been a lot of fun in its own way, it is nowhere near as special.