Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Ok since we are talking Amazon, let me share my interviewing experience with them. I was talking to an AWS team.

Had a phone interview scheduled. They forgot about me. Ok, it happens in a big company. Had another one, went pretty well. They invited me over.

I show up and my contact person (my future manager) wasn't there that day. They had me wait for 30min, I guess until they scrambled to find a replacement. Except 2 people I talked to that day, everyone else seemed like they didn't expect to be interviewing anyone and were pulled in last minute. Needless to say that made for a pretty bad experience.

Oh and they promised lunch, ok, I wasn't hungry but they actually forgot about me during lunch. I was just sitting there in the conference room by myself.

I thought, ok, this is pretty bad. But no, that's not all, they promised "we'll get back to you with an answer in 2 days". Took almost 3 weeks. At that point I was just curious how long they would take and just waited.

So anyway, I hear people like working there. But judging by me experience, there are some red flags. I think it points to how things are run internally.

My experience was polar opposite. I interviewed with AWS. The entire process was very well organized and very professional. The recruiters were very professional, everyone showed up as promised, manager took me to lunch - overall a very pleasant experience. The HR rep took me thru the benefits, comp. package etc before the interview.

The only thing I hated was the "bar raiser". He was a guy who came in made up his mind for sure. I could see it in his face. He was not pleasant, did not smile. And he started with "I have a lot of questions to ask, and I want to get through all of them in our time. So give me short straight answers and dont take too much time". At that moment I knew I was a goner. Just to compare, I have 12 years of experience in areas of open source, big company, big university research on large systems. A few patents and a ton of publications. Either he walked in feeling insecure and wanted to crush me with his power or feeling that I am full of shit and he is going to let me know about it. The bar raiser has veto on the candidate and I think it was abused severely. He did not like any answer I gave, and keep in mind that the questions he asked are not the kind that have black and white answers but the answers vary on your background and experience. Since I signed an NDA saying I wont reveal any questions, let me give a simple example:

What have you ever done for a customer that was not planned?

Now if you come from a hardware product development background, there is nothing you can do without it being POR. Engineers cannot randomly decide to change specs or features without the entire supporting organizations knowing about it. If an engineer decides to add some feature to help some customer, who is going to test it, document it, train the support organization, tell the factory about the changes in the process etc? You can't do stuff without anyone approving it. yes, you can affect change and try to get buy in from the rest of the organization but thats all you can do.

If you come from a web dev company, maybe there is more leeway in what an anyone can do individually.

So there is no black and white answer here and he just said "thats not satisfactory". Shortly after that the hiring manager came in and said the process wasnt going well and basically told me to go home.

One would think someone who is given that much veto power is more professional and objective and unbiased.

Someone seriously said: "that's not satisfactory" in an interview? That's so unnecessary. The strongest language I've ever said when interviewing is "I think there might be some perspectives that you've not considered". Interviewing is a two-way street. You'd want to hire good candidates and usually good candidates have multiple options, so you'd also want to make the candidate want to work for you too.

> you'd also want to make the candidate want to work for you too.

My interview experience with Amazon tells me they don't give two shits about whether you want to work there or not. I can only assume they have a line of candidates that goes around the block. To make a long story short, they made it feel like I was inconveniencing them by even being there. It worked out well, confirming that I did indeed not wish to work there.

They do have such a line. There are a couple of big recruiters I got contacts from which advertised nothing but Amazon positions. Those same recruiters were still calling me over a year after I took a job somewhere else. They were also totally useless so I can only assume they had piles and piles of candidates.

Wow. Yeah, I hate interviewers who treat the process as a one-way process. When on an interview, I am interviewing them as much as they're interviewing me.

surprisingly, I got 5 or 6 callbacks after that and I rejected every single one of them.

I work at Amazon, I interview a lot, in fact I teach an internal course for conducting interviews. What you experienced is 100% against our policies, and what we teach interviewers. You don't give candidates negative feedback like that.

And you never ever EVER end an interview loop early. EVER. You finish the day. You collect as much data as you can. And you let the recruiters reject candidates if and only if everyone has submitted their feedback into an internal tool (without being able to see other people's feedback first), and then discussed it.

I kind of want to see if I can reach out to you another way to find out your info so that I can find what bar raiser/hiring manager you had and have a word with him.

I am curious on your choice to post this on a throwaway account. From the details - works in AWS, interviews a lot, teaches internal course for conducting interviews I would imagine that it would be easy for people within AWS to reasonably guess your identity.

I think you underestimate how many thousands of people work on AWS

Wow, didnt realise the division was that big.

Amazon has 150,000 employees. Granted most of those aren't in IT, but it's a pretty big place. Take a look at all the services they provide, and think about what it takes to deploy and support them. Their cloud computing As-A-Service effort offers load balancers, SQL clusters, VMs, archive/backup storage, DNS, network topologies, AV transcoding, Hadoop, machine learning, etc. Each of those paid offerings has a develop, test, deploy and maintain effort associated with it, as well as effort to maintain the authentication & authorization components, and provide consistent user interfaces across technology designed by a plethora of vendors.

When you factor in management overhead and unreleased products, it seems like a few thousand is reasonable.

Seems unlikely. Based on what he revealed, there are probably at least a few hundred possible candidates.

Plausible deniability is a beautiful thing.

this was few years ago and I still remember all the names. But no, I am not interested in sharing their names or mine.

My own Amazon interview experience went smoothly, but when I showed up in Seattle for my first day of work, they were all like "Your manager's not in today and nobody booked you into orientation, so we decided your start date is actually next week, can you just pause your life for a week while we don't pay you?"

The next week happened to roll over to the next month, which meant that my benefits were postponed. They direct-deposited my starting bonus for the original month, and then yanked it out of my bank account without notifying me. Then they deposited it again at the end of the next month.

I had a similar experience. My new manager (not the hiring manager I was supposed to work for, it was a bait-and-switch they announced on my first day) was on vacation for 2 weeks and unreachable via email. Since no one else could give me the access permissions I needed to do anything, I had to literally twiddle my thumbs for the next 2 weeks--I couldn't even complete the SDE bootcamp. It was a comically terrible onboarding experience that made me seriously question my decision to join.

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