'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience
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I have this little book next to my desk I use to write down ideas and notes, and then I refer back to it later. Sometimes my boss is standing right there! I get such a rush.
I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!
Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!
I know that my cheating gives me an unfair advantage in the job market. I know this cheating makes me an inferior programmer. And now I know I can never work at Amazon because I can't get past their super scrupulous interview process. Oh well, I guess I'll just try and get by, cheating my way though life.
"In the work world, collaboration and team work are essential to success; in school, it's called cheating."
I would think that students who collaborate on schoolwork or studying are very institutionally fluent and aren't really at risk of the institution stepping over them and calling them cheaters.
I see the college cheating industry as a trade between wealthier cooler kids and the smarter disadvantaged kids, which I suppose is also life in most places, China or US.
--Anyone who's experienced it
Cheating and collaboration are not the same. If you've ever taken an advanced math/cs/STEM class you've collaborated often on problem sets, they are often too hard to do alone. But you shouldn't have cheated.
But how do you then assess whether each individual in the group learned that important concept, or if they just all agreed with the one (and only) student who actually learned/knew it?
Now, I'm well aware that studying things you can already do is not the best way but this was what happened.
Something that worries me is: what if I work for a company that decides that everything I've written on their time belongs to them? If I had all of this in my head there would be no question about it, but writing it down introduces questions of copyright. Should this ever happen it would basically be the equivalent of losing a chunk of my brain, which is a bit of an alarming prospect.
What can you do about it (if you live outside of California)?
Your key weapon here is knowledge. Specifically, the fact that California Labor Code section 2870 exists.
"...shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time..."
Here's what you should do to avoid draconian IP clauses:
* Print out a copy of 2870 and bring it with you when you go to sign your job offer http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3qLjxOo...
* Read your contract. If you don't see similar wording in their contract, hand them your copy of 2870 and ask it to be added to the contract.
* If they try to push back, calmly explain that every resident of California gets this "for free". If Google, Facebook, etc employees all get this, why shouldn't you?
* Be prepared to walk if they refuse.
But what if you're already in a job which has draconian IP clauses?
* Try bringing 2870 to the table the next time you are negotiating for a raise or promotion.
* If you are cheeky, go get a job offer from a competitor, and highlight the fact that they are willing to offer you 2870.
But the best thing you can do is to spread the word about 2870! If enough of us demand this, eventually it will be such a hassle (for employers outside of California) that no one will bother trying to trick their employees into draconian IP clauses.
I should give a hat-tip here to my former employer, uShip (Austin, TX). They include this clause by default for all devs, and I'll make sure I ask for 2870 at every future job.
Generally anything you write on company time or using company equipment belongs to them though.
It gives actual examples of commands, just like a cheatsheet does.
I realize you're being facetious, but do check with your employer that this is OK! Code on StackOverflow is under a CC-SA license, it isn't public domain or even very permissibly licensed.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12527/do-i-have-to-w...
The license [1] says that you are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit...
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!"
I've lost count of the number of (thankfully former) co-workers whose only technical skills were searching Stack Overflow and asking their colleagues for help with a problem. The measure of a programmer is what they are able to do when there _is_ no answer to be had from SO or their colleagues.
I really hope they don't realize that I'm using their code to cheat.
"Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?"
(pro tip; the correct answer is, "fine")
You missed the part where a search engine shows you several links, including the ones from Stack Overflow.
And all of the stack overflow answers that were linked from the top of the google search are "Have you ever heard of Google, N00B?"
edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.
For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
Side note: The most frustrating interview I've ever had was with Microsoft Boulder: they just flat out insulted me in the interview and questioned why anyone would hire me based on not getting their trick question. That said my interviews with Microsoft Redmond were lovely.
Anyway, I got into the interviews, and I could sense something was up. I was answering the questions but they didn't seem... enthusiastic... about them, or me. I like to think I usually interview decently, though of course I can improve.
Eventually someone says, "Hmm, can you wait here a minute?" and a new person comes in with him a few moments later.
"So... I'm not sure why the agency sent you to us." Okay...? "You're definitely over-qualified for this role, and frankly we think you'd be bored." I thought it was a good opportunity to get in the door (and MSFT is a great place to work), so I tried to offer a little placation, when he introduced the other person, "But I know that [name] here has been looking for a PM, so why don't you talk to her."
I walked out that afternoon with a different, better, higher paying job, because someone thought "outside the box".
We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.
Not to mention the turn over. What is that like in most tech depts?
I suppose however, Amazon can simply use the excuse of: we can't find qualified devs so we need more H-1B workers. Heck I am starting to think that this is the plan all along.
I apologize if I am coming off as negative but this kind of stuff really has to stop. I don't understand how it got to this point and how anyone would be willing to give up their privacy or self-respect like this. How did we get here?
It's not becoming it. It already is.
Doesn't everyone have conversations with their tech friends about how everyone who's been there is trying to go away and interviewing at Amazon was terrible?
I'm not even kidding. That "never work for amazon" is the image we have from amazon, it's to the point it could be a meme.
It very much already is a place no serious tech talent will work. At my last place of employment, we used to crack jokes about working at Amazon.
Find a new job. The reputation of your company is going down the drain.
I, and most people I know have mostly positive Amazon experiences. We are proud of the work we do, and the innovations of the company. I interview a LOT, and I make sure that 100% of my candidates come out with a positive experience, even if they do not get hired.
There are problems at every company, but right now it's fashionable to shit on Amazon, ever since the NYT hit-piece that got a TON of facts straight up wrong, and ever since then every negative Amazon story gets upvoted to the stratosphere. Every company makes mistakes, it's how you deal with them that counts.
Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time. It was still a bad decision, but it wasn't about being cheap.
It's much more likely those responsible for choosing the ProctorU solution didn't realise everything around what the approach entailed, or necessarily the ramifications. That's especially true if it came out of HR/Recruiting who aren't necessarily the most technical people.
They have a very real problem, with thousands of people in the recruitment pipeline (especially during intern interview season), and they saw a way to significantly filter them out, without having to turn half the business over to more of a recruiting pipeline than it already is.
The thing is, one suspects it wasn't "someone in HR" who thought up the idea of using draconian new system that's pissing everyone off, and driving candidates away in droves. But rather, Bezos himself, personally. In fact it seems to represent the very essence of his "everything will be automated" philosophy, to the letter.
reads like the first sentence in most horror stories programmers go through
Source: a friend applied, and they made her use it - except it didn't work, so she ended up not even having a second round screen before getting her onsite invitation.
That said, I have to wonder whether the interviews are really necessary in most cases. For institutions that it is familiar with, I suspect Amazon could do just as well hiring interns purely based on their grades in relevant courses. If you reliably take 100 interns from Berkeley or Waterloo, say, it shouldn't be hard to figure out which courses count.
At worst, doing things this way would be much easier. Who knows, maybe it would work even better, by eliminating unconscious bias or something.
By all means keep the interview path for special cases with odd backgrounds.
If you have thousands of data points, what makes a successful candidate, and possibly, build a model around that?
It's pretty much standing policy that to be hired at Amazon you must be able to write correct code with no aid whatsoever, no documentation, not even a compiler to check your work. If they don't use proctors, they will go back to what they were doing before: having people write code on a piece of paper and then read it back to them over the phone.
Don't get me wrong, I have complaints, but at the end of the day I show up to work to solve hard problems with smart people, and that's very satisfying. I build tools other people build businesses on, and that's a really good feeling. I get paid what I consider to be too much, but that's what it took to get me to relocate from the Midwest (and no one I work with takes the current demand for devs for granted).
And yes, I appreciate the money, the pedigree, and the other opportunities it has opened up for me.
Maybe you just got lucky.
I'd much rather apply to the plenty other companies that has opportunities. Seriously, IMO, this country has so much opportunities for the person that is working hard and willing to try.
Work is a place we spend the majority of our living life in the most active age of our life. It has to be at the least "NOT hell". Don't you think?
You can have your beefs with the company, that's fine. But I'd avoid the wholesale characterization of over 200k people -- it's not a good look.
Also nice way of saying, "50 hour weeks are the norm."
I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't scrutinize who they recruit. Please read the post with an open mind and think for yourself whether they have crossed lines of sensibility or not.
"nothing more than misguided condescension from a bystander" - No one is judging Amazon for its x thousand employees. Only its hiring practices. Which is creepy and stupid. I don't need to know everything about the company or its 230K employees to judge their hiring practice.
> As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse.
Nope. Goodbye.
(Although I wouldn't work for Amazon anyway, but now I don't have to do any research if a company brings up "ProctorU").
I had one right out of college where the office (on energy efficient lightning) looked like some cubicle version of hell. A person in the elevator on the way to the interview mouthed "run away" to me, and really creeped me out.
I got the job, but literally couldn't even handle a full day in that cave-like godawful place.
That the electronic equivalent of preventing someone from leaving the building.
Nope, Goodbye.
I feel in that case, it was acceptable. Students were encouraged to get a cheap "burner" windows machine and use it only for the proctored tests, and we were warned in advance of all the restrictions.
> ProctorU currently supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X 10.4 or newer version of those systems. At this time, ProctorU does not support any Linux operating systems such as Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.
edit: but I'd like to see them muck around with my linux.git .config to make sure I'm not cheating.
But it didn't even occur to me that Amazon might be using an interview service that can't handle Linux. One of the best programmers I knew in school was exclusively on Debian, and spent a semester on a cheap Arch machine when his main laptop died. An interview process that completely excludes him is a jaw-droppingly bad one...
Also note windows 10 isn't explicitly on that list. There were problems early on.
To which I would reply "Fuck you and your institution".
Run a binary on my machine ? I think the interview should be over right there and not from my side. If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk.
Is it really so dry out there that people are willing to go through this bullshit to work for Amazon ?
I know some of you are young and inexperienced, but know that you always have the choice to say 'No'. If people mistrust you from the get go - this is the environment you're signing up for. Don't settle for this.
Don't work for Amazon, don't let them establish this bullshit as the norm in the industry.
Trust me, the dream job will come if you know your value.
Absolutely. I'm not surprised the Amazon SDEs are fuming about this.
I love my job, but reading HN makes me feel like I should hate it. This is a place that told me to "take as much time as I need" when I got married, told me the same thing again when my dad was taken to the hospital two months later, and again when my father-in-law had a heart attack a month after that. I will never forget the kindness I've been shown in one of the most difficult years of my life.
I know that my experience doesn't align with everyone's. But this broad categorization of Amazon employees as "desperate" or "corporate drones" is just false.
People here are criticizing the management, not the engineers.
If Amazon has the wisdom to hear all this criticism, then the company culture should improve and you will all be happier as employees.
If it doesn't, then you'll eventually see it yourself and it will be easier for you to quit.
Note that we actually work for our bosses - and they work for theirs. We don't do company work, we do what our bosses decide we should do. So a corporation is a group of people working on goals set by others.
If you follow the recursion, you'll notice that these changes need to come from the very top, so that's where you need to knock if you want to improve your company's image.
Maybe there was no training video. The test was to see if you'd surrender all privacy, your whole computer and let them waste your whole day on pointless bs. There was no spoon, Neo.
If they only hire a subset of interns this way, how would a full-time candidate have any clue? If a manager doesn't get an intern that had this happen, how would they know?
Okay now most poeple know, it's on HN (and people are pissed apparently according to another commenter here). Do you expect the current employees to up and quit?
I think it's easy to say that "you'd just earn the right to work with a bunch of clueless people", but Amazon is a huge company. Do you expect that all MSFT/GOOG/AAPL/ETC employees keep close tabs on programs that recruiting are using (potentially even testing?) And do you expect that people with mortgages, families, commitments are just going to walk out as soon as they hear about something like that?
I'm not defending Amazon at all here. Something may be wrong if this shit keeps happening (there isn't a faces of google website, for example), but I don't think the burden here is on a lowly SDE or whatnot who is powerless, and in most cases has no clue of the situation.
No, I'm expecting that the people with the most options will start drifting away. You know, the ones they most need. And now we know they won't be hiring any stellar replacements any time soon either.
If Amazon wants complete control over the interview experience, maybe there's room for a service that rents out small office spaces, like ZipCar or AirBnB, but for a desk/small office with just a Chromebook, for this express purpose.
Amazon or any other company could say they need a desk close to some place on some date, and the service could make one available that meets the requirements (laptop, multiple camera feeds, etc).
Or maybe this already exists?
The "disruptor" here is ProctorU and similar services. They are cheaper, generally more convenient, easier to schedule and manage.
Maybe you can come up with a better "test center" (perhaps a van?) but most people don't care at all about what ProctorU does with their computer.
And this is why I cringe whenever I hear people talking about "disruption" like it's a good thing.
I once heard someone seriously suggest that higher education should be disrupted by newer education systems that don't have to be accessible to the disabled because universities are "wasting" too much money on accessibility services. See also: AirBNB encouraging landlords to set up unregulated hotels and causing nasty externalities for the whole neighborhood. It seems to me that "disruption" is code for "figure out how to cut corners in a way that makes everybody's life worse to increase your profit margins".
Most people might not, but I suspect many of the best people for many tech, especially -- but also many other knowledge work jobs -- do care, quite intensely.
Epic wanted to put me through a proctored, three hour long "assessment" in front of a microphone, camera, etc. before even getting on the phone with me.
The other company gave me a couple of 30 minute phone screens followed by an on site interview that gave me far more insight into who they were and what they did. They made the process as smooth as possible for me and were genuinely interested in making the most of my application. Guess who I ended up working for.
That's a surprising reaction. The big four (five?) all have referral bonuses despite being beyond flooded with applications, specifically to avoid false positives - they assume that their current employees are more likely to know other people they want to hire.
I installed LogMeIn, let them poke around my laptop, showed some ID and did a sweep of my room with my webcam. I did not quit however, and ended up taking a ~3 hour SAT-like test.
I don't dislike the idea of setting up a standard environment for a candidate to take an assessment, but this process feels a bit inhumane and intrusive, imho.
I guess they feel that if they can be inhumane and intrusive towards their minimum wage employees in the warehouses, they might as well treat everyone that way.
It's a demonstration of our privilege on HN that we rally against these interviewing practices, yet they are a mainstay for a huge percentage of the USA.
I'm not sure I'm getting my point across well, but I think there's going to be a point where this becomes more and more normal across more and more companies. They'll hire people to abstract the very difficult parts of computers away, and bring people in en-masse to fill in the blanks.
They also made you do some strange IQ test, but I think they stopped that.
In chatting with people while I was there, it sounded like it was very expensive to fly everyone in for the entirety of the computer interviews, so they started outsourcing the first part to weed people out.
For what it's worth, I did have to do a "logic" assessment that felt very IQ test like, though I have never actually taken an IQ test
Isn't enough to have total access to your computer, you also have to leave them enough time to clean up (?) any copyrighted material they might have downloaded on your equipment...
Interesting that you'll never know if they have uploaded some material from you, be it documents, photos or whatever.
Not because I actually think they're stealing data, but because I don't trust their competence to not collect something personal while doing their system profile. And, of course, because I'm opposed to surrendering ownership of a system I care about on sheer principle.
The experience is: you sit in a room at a standard monitor with a keyboard and mouse. There are video/audio monitors placed:
- above your head, roughly 2 feet, looking down
- in front of your face, able to observe your eyes
- to the left and right of you, about 2 feet
- behind you
Basically, you are watched from all angles, including what your eyeballs are looking at. I always feel like a probe is about to come whizzing out of the desk and begin prodding me when I begin, but the feeling subsides after awhile.
protip: As a male, asking the male proctor to stop looking down my shirt didn't have the humorous reception I intended.
But...I can describe it for you if you are interested. My interview process with Redhat started with the normal recruiter phone call, then scheduled some interviews with potential team mates. We used a video conferencing platform called "BlueJeans", which runs fine on windows/macos/linux, and worked through some exercises so they could observe how I solved problems.
I feel bad for giving the wrong idea in my original comment, Redhat is definitely not that crazy in their interviews :)
The hell is this, really...
I would have terminated it. I'm not a privacy nut, but I am a respect nut... and if your level of respect for your engineers allows you to enforce such a ridiculous policy of "testing" in the interview process, well, you don't have much respect for the engineers... or their time, or their own privacy (on their own machine).
I wont work for a company who installs "screen watching" software on your machine. I wont work for a company who middle-man's the SSL cert. I wont work for a company who drug tests. (I smoke MJ, but a lot of companies state MJ doesnt fail, but I still refuse to take a drug test, its principle)
We aren't cattle. When you're treated as such in the interview process, you can strongly infer that you will be treated as such in your position.
The reason I suggest this is not that I am interested in the rest of their computer: I don't want keyboard or mouse control, and our rubrics have absolutely nothing to do with what else is running your box. What I am interested in is letting the candidate work with their favorite tools. It's your computer, with your favorite editor, with whichever bindings you have, and whichever libraries added to your project as you like to use. In our interviews you can also check language docs and stack overflow if you like: In fact, it's pretty common for people that pass the interview to do so.
Interviewing is stressful, and other than letting people work on a longer interview project on their own time, the best thing I can do for my candidates is to make them be at ease in every other way possible. In case people worry about privacy, I am happy if they just share a window, especially if it's for an IDE that lets them both see the code and show me test results at the same time.
So In my employer's case, a preference for screensharing is not really about treating people like cattle. We discuss all those pros and cons with candidates prior to screening, and accommodate them in almost every case. While I'd agree 100% that the ProctorU plan wound not be something I'd find acceptable, there's a great case for wanting access to your screen that is for the candidate's benefit.
My main 'concern' was about "The proctor then proceeded to shut down all my running applications for me" - the fuck is this? Pardon my language.
I'm also a bit against tests of this sort, beyond just the privacy issue - in the real world, if you're not looking up things you're unsure of, you're making a mistake. Denying someone even written resources seems like setting them up for failure. But the privacy issue is a big one, and would likely cause me to quit before even allowing access to my machine.
This. Why would I want to work in a company that labels me as a some sort of cheater before proven otherwise?
I'm a pretty private person, and giving anyone access to either of these is a dealbreaker. Hell, I don't even let my friends in my house, much less an employer.
One of the last times I dealt with a recruiter, he wanted me to have a Skype interview with him before he passes my contact information on to the employer (for a job I really didn't want, but I was unemployed so I didn't have a choice if I didn't want to lose my unemployment). I tried to argue him out of it, and I ended up doing the interview in my backyard because there's no way in hell I'd ever turn a camera on in my house.
* Actually I do have one-or-the-other (D)SLR, but these are "dumb", not networked, and can positively not take pictures without somebody noticing - clack.
ProctorU does similar things for universities. I've taken a few, they're not always this intrusive, but I understand the sentiment. People cheat. It's hard to stop that and even harder to do remotely.
Attempting to take over a person's own computer in order to prevent cheating on a test is simultaneously an egregious invasion of privacy and completely insecure. Are we really supposed to believe that you wouldn't be able to hide some cheating materials from your own webcam?
As a software developer - I alwasy kind of cheat. I use Stackoverflow and infinite google search abilities :)
To be fair, those people are very likely to be successful!
Whenever I was asked to code something as the 2nd step of the interview process like homework assignment, I'm always glad if it's not a site like hackerrank with a timer running out and JavaScript monitoring what tabs I navigate to. Especially, if they already know and have seen my public code and revision history, I feel like I'm applying for public office of some sort when they remove trust and make your go through that in addition to spending your personal time to work on some little project for the interview.
The biggest paradox here is that industry regularly complains about the lack of qualified engineers while ignoring probationary periods and trying to replace them with a 4 or 6 step interview/examination process. In many European countries both parties can walk away from the partnership with zero hurdles during the probationary period. It varies from 1 month to 6 month in Europe and if the company fails to assess the employee in that time, you cannot blame the employee and make him go through increasingly more distrusting interview process. One has to consider that not everybody lives in San Francisco and has potential jobs lining the streets, so it's time inefficient for applicants to go through many interviews.
May I ask what the process was (steps) and what kind of accolades you have?
I remember going through the degrading 6-hour IQ-tests, silly white-board interviews, etc. at a bunch of companies when I was first looking for a job, but even then there were a few companies that did a pretty good job. I had an interesting conversation about IoC and clean code at a consulting company, after which I interviewed with the company president and talked business. That interview stuck in my mind as being very respectful, and I'd seek the company out again if I moved back to the state.
My Amazon interview (which I got an offer from) was a quick round of 4 interviews with some tired engineers (they had been marathon interviewing on the road). I was asked some softball applied algorithms and data-structures problems, mostly to make sure that I didn't make easy problems too complicated from what I can tell. The reject rate on those interviews in very high, and there are probably a lot of false-negatives (and there is a lot of money at stake), so I think it's understandable that emotions can run pretty high about them.
A few years in: I turned down the last job that gave me an offer after a very silly whiteboarding session because I lost a lot of respect for the company after going through their interview process. Something like this "ProctorU" bullshit would cause me to quit the interview immediately and send a terse but polite message to HR at the company that their interview process was a non-starter for me, and that I would not consider working for a company that did not treat me as a professional.
Maybe the fact that America imprisons so many of its citizens is to blame for this.
what the hell is wrong with Amazon's company culture? I feel like I can't go three months without reading about some story about something with Amazon related to hiring, working conditions, or management style that is deeply offensive and alarming.
why does this keep happening over and over again? it's so notorious that the NYTimes has written magazine articles about it. it's so notorious that Bezos has to go write apologias in the annual newsletter. what's going on?
I'm asking because 4 or 5 times a year I get an offer from an Amazon recruiter to come in and interview for a position that otherwise looks appealing. I say NO every single time because of these issues I keep reading about.
So nothing removes or punishes dysfunctional leaders, and every branch of the org chart is the sum of all the different ways the people above you are flawed. Each branch of the org structure is a nightmare in its own way, but they all eventually become some nightmare somehow because the psychopaths don't mind and the actual humans eventually leave.
This has nothing to do with quality (of candidates) only to do with HR person ticking another interview done.
Being contractor, I don't accept any HR involvment for some time, if company insists on running stupid tests they can't count on me. I have never seen any HR like approach with hiring that made ANY sense.
If you need and want job done call me. If you want agile/scrum pretending to work its not for me...
http://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employee...
People who don't want to put up with this bullshit drop out early, so they don't cost the company much time.
I was required to install an application called 'Sentinel' [1] that monitored my pc, could not have a second monitor or external keyboard attached and had to move my laptop to show that nothing was on my desk. If I remember correctly, I wasn't even allowed to use the built-in camera of my laptop.
At some point in the exam the monitor paused the exam because I was holding a pen (I use a wacom as a mouse) and I had to put it away in order to continue. When the exam crashed, they told me to just reboot the application. But you can't login again after a certain time has passed, so they had to reset my schedule.
I was able to successfully finish the exams, but it added unnecessary stress to the entire experience and the whole experience felt outdated.
[1] https://www.novell.com/training/courseware/ts_proj_info.jsp?...
... well, except that it would be exceptionally adversarial.
If Amazon can't spring for a $15 stick of memory it's probably not going to be a great work experience.
I also wouldn't want to work with engineer who asked BS questions like that. Waste of time.
Being able to save 10M means much more that $15 for a single die.
Taking your "$15" stick of memory comment, that's a cost of $1.5m dollars when you start talking about a hundred thousand servers. You could pay the salary of a number of SDEs for the lifetime of that generation of servers for that much money.
Working in a memory constrained approach can lead to lower latency and faster applications, and make the difference between a service being profitable or not.
Without going in to details that would put my NDA at risk, when I worked on an AWS team, there was a change went through that improved the efficiency of the service by about a third. The original code was well written, extremely logical, and exactly what almost anyone would write when presented with the problem. You could have shown it to developers anywhere and they wouldn't have found fault with it.
Stopping and thinking very carefully about largely fictitious constraints revealed a potential other approach, one that was somewhat left-field, but both worked and came without any risks.
When your service is operating on many tens or hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide, or more, being able to retire up to a third of your servers is far from negligible in annual costs.
Given https://aws.amazon.com/iotbutton/, that hardly seems arbitrary.
Me, in a meeting: "Hey Kate, that's a great idea! How about you code it up on the whiteboard right now."
Kate: "Sorry, what?"
Me: "Write it, on the board, right now. No bugs."
Kate: "Can I use my laptop?"
Me: "Of course not. Here's your pen. Hope you like drawing curly braces."
But this... this is absolutely horrific. Clean your desk?? Do you expect people to not use paper in the real world, or what exactly?
Except, in my case, this damn thing kept blocking up every few minutes, and I had no idea why. Contacting the proctor, having them diagnose it, and getting them to reset it, wasted a few minutes every time.
I finally realized what the 'problem' was. It was firing the 'navigate away' event every time the mouse went outside the boundary of the page. Since I often play with my mouse, moving it around the screen, it would block me any time the pointer left the page. I eventually figured it out, but it took me 3–4 block-contact-reset cycles.
All in all, a pretty annoying experience.
I was logged into a VM through my browser and tasked with several simple sysadmin jobs. Unlike this person's Amazon interview, the technical difficulties that I encountered were all my own doing. On my server, I tried to be very disciplined and used 'sudo' sparingly (sudo for each command that I issued that required escalation. No "sudo -i", that doesn't leave quite as nice of an audit trail. Well, I fat-fingered something while in visudo (grant privileges to a user was one of the tasks). I forgot the user's name so just exited but I must've 'ZZ'd instead of :q!'d. visudo puts up big scary banners about the syntax error and I quickly dismissed them because I planned to go right back in fix it in a jif. Well, sure enough, those syntax errors effectively neuter sudo. Of course, that's the right behavior for sudo and I just hadn't thought it through. I couldn't complete the remainder of the exam's tasks without sudo. I thought for sure there's a way for the proctor to reset the system to neutral -- I'll just start the exam over and go through it quickly. No such luck. I can reboot the VM but there's no way to halt the VM during the bootloader. :(
I did whatever I could without privileges and wrote detailed text files about what I would have done for the ones that required privileges. The autograder gave me a failing grade and the human that told me to take the exam didn't seem to care about the problem I encountered (or believe me).
Lesson learned: leave a terminal open in the background with "sudo -i" for later. You never know when you might need it. [this advice is for exams and not real sysadmin]. And while you're at it, go slowly and heed that warning from visudo. ;)
You can't make that mistake in production. They were right to fail you.
I can see that it was a side effect of being more cautious than usual (so unaware of the effects of your actions), but that demonstrates a different problem.
All of which is to say, that you tried and failed, which puts you ahead of the people which didn't try at all, and imparts some hard won learning that will benefit you next time. We've all been there.
But you can't overlook a mistake like that. It shows that you were not ready to pass the evaluation in question. The rest of your actions (acknowledgement, discussion of error etc) show that you should be ready next time. But to shortcut it would be a mistake.
Considering these kinds of mistakes happen all the time in production: what exactly do you mean?
If such a mistake actually can't be tolerated, there is no way sysadmins would be allowed to log into a production system and run the risk of mucking it up in the first place. They'd be forced to do the responsible thing and implement changes in a test environment, and use configuration management to replicate the change into production. Possibly in a maintenance window, certainly with a rollback strategy.
Paradoxically, the no-mistakes-ever environment makes the parent poster's fuckup as even less of a red mark than it otherwise would be. In a more flexible shop, there is some level of chance he made the mistake on a live box, in a controlled shop there is none (excluding some phases of disaster recovery ofc).
shrug I kinda agree, sorta. It's certainly not what I would imagine is the intent of the test. But I definitely made it so I could not complete the test objectives.
> But you can't overlook a mistake like that.
I dunno, would you fire me if I'd done it at Amazon? Seems like a simple recovery. Note that the position I was interviewing for was not a support or sysadmin job. I'm a design engineer. I'd have been designing the tests most likely! I even imagined how I could spin it into a feature I could work on to recover/reset the system, scoring that event however they deemed appropriate.
Where I've worked, if anyone ever bork'd a system you reload it and move on. We're not supporting customers, so there's never any discipline that would result. The worst you could do is brick a $1-2k devboard or a limited-run early prototype production unit. The latter could cause delays but it's always chalked up to mistakes and that's why they build more than one prototype.
When I took the RHCE exam, someone made an extremely simple mistake similar to this that led to the machine (a VM) being unusable.
They knew exactly what they'd done, they knew how it could be fixed, etc - and the instructor sympathized and was apologetic, but it was just not allowed for them to restart that portion of the cert exam over, and it was impossible to pass without this section.
The person in question had to pay to re-take the exam at a later date.
There is no possible scenario where this is useful.
I've never entered a programming competition but I'm glad to hear there is still some sanity left in this world.
What exactly are they wanting to test? Is it just a simple aptitude test to reduce (not eliminate) the chances of cheating? Do they also ask to look into the interviewee's ears for tiny bluetooth earpieces? What about the ceiling for hidden microphones and cameras?
The "show your room" part reminded me of (older) movies with funny situations where the person hiding is always behind the view of the person looking around.
If someone really wanted to cheat, I guess these people would need to do a much better job…or just get the person to an office and do the interview face-to-face.
We're the #1 place for English speakers in Europe because the local population are smart and bilingual.
Oh, and I've never seen douchy things like this (I rejected the Amazon recruiter, not worth taking a pay cut to work for them).
17 hours?! Who in the hell would let their grad students out of lab for that long? :)
An opposite and goal:
tl;dr: Don't assume providing stress and isolation makes people work their best. Especially under stress. Taught a course in university, saw response to strict environments take a while for people to break out from.
Context: I have the chance to do quite a bit of campus work with local universities while working at a bank. Ops and IT. This usually involves working with final-year students, and can be quite hands-on.
Background: Working with a local finance university (top in country), I ran a final-year class on banking for around 40 students (and quite a bit of the faculty in attendance). Mainly banking operations, not technically hard. Visit the university with an AVP or VP expert in a varied function, different visitor and topic each week. Ops, Trade, Finance, HR, Tech, from fund transfer to letter of credit to dormant accounts to labor law. Basic banking and business but at a practitioner level.
Finals arrived: Not a member of the university, but asked to design and supervise the assessment. We'd covered a lot, and assigned essay answers for 3 of 10 questions over 2 hours, hand-written answers. Just answer it as fully as you liked. Some questions more numerical, some less. Really something for everyone.
I said I was busy with a call I couldn't refuse, and would be in the room next door. I wasn't. One hour later I returned to the room, to see each person hunched over their papers.
Books were not open. Phones were not doing checking. I was disappointed, but not unsurprised. To be caught 'cheating' in a university in China can mean the end of your degree. Still an hour to go, I encouraged opening of books (to protest) and full use of internet.
This seems the opposite of the Amazon policy.
The best papers that came in were a full 10 answers long (more than the required 3), photocopied, with multiple and varied signatures on each, and different handwriting in different paragraphs. Some individually submitted papers were very good. Choice had been achieved. Not only had books been opened, but collaboration had over-achieved. In only an hour remaining.
Hopefully this was a small lesson.
It would make it easier to avoid them, and maybe send a message.
I was repeatedly told off for tapping on the table whilst problem solving. (A hard habit to break after years of doing it)
Remember that there are a ton of companies out there and you owe it to yourself to explore as much as possible before submitting to any one company’s ridiculous process.
Heck, years ago I used to look elsewhere just for being asked to format my résumé in a particular way.
More than the absurd test rules, which seem quite common in some educational or testing environments, the fact the he would relinquish so much of his privacy and security makes me think he doesn't know his own worth.
It's OK to indulge them in some things but it's not OK to lose perspective and forget it's a negotiation. If you surrender to every demand, how can you negotiate later on? With what?
Seriously, though, that is one of the most surreal things I've ever read about our industry. I would have quit the interview too, but probably earlier in the process.
This is the main reason I quit university to start my own company and the main reason I will never look for investors.
If I had no choice I would work part-time at a non-tech company for as long as it took for my company to take off.
If you're going to work at a BigCo, go for one that doesn't abuse you. Otherwise, work at a startup where at least you'll learn a ton and maybe get some equity. I can't see any advantage to working at Amazon.
Which is why you see people tell horror stories about Amazon while other people rebut them and say their experience working there was great. There's no consistency between groups.
Except when fast-mover companies like Amazon or their lobbyists show up to peddle their products to governments, the conversation ultimately moves to this topic. They usually get to a point where they're telling the government employees how dumb they are, and that they don't have archaic processes like exams for jobs, etc.
just curious why they are so paranoid about that. i do phone screens where i can hear people type to google for answers but it's usually pretty easy to tell that they don't know something and then they come back with textbook answer. but most questions are not the kind you can just ask google.
That tells me everything I need to know about working for that company. I just wish they would just blacklist me and pass it around to their outsourced headhunters.
Wells Fargo is another one that has a love/hate relationship with my resume.
The online test didn't use ProctorU. I was told that a working webcam was required, but it actually wasn't. I didn't had to give them full control of my laptop.
I received clear explanations about every step of the process.
The onsite interview was well organized, although very impersonal and predictable.
Fuck Amazon for the collective amount of wasted time they've caused.
I have a simple set of tests on paper that you take in person. This guy came in, looked at the tests, handed them back to me and said he looks stuff up in books. He was a consultant, but he refused to take simple tests and just walked out.
It's really not that difficult.
But seriously, what?
They are allowed to have that process, if you don't like it don't use it. Better yet, if you don't like it how about brainstorming better solutions instead of being overly dramatic on the internet about someone closing your applications on your computer for you?
2. part of the hate should go toward the proctorU company too right? they're the company who made the software
There is no way I'd go through the first steps of this stupidity, let alone as far as the OP did
The furthest I was qualified for with Amazon was in their warehouse, walking 10 hours every day from 8pm to 6 am with two 20 minute for eating and resting. We were not allowed to sit or stop at any point, even going to the bathroom to take a piss or shit were being factored into time. There were cameras everywhere, something like out of 1984. I was treated like a criminal when I had new pair of steel toe boots they paid for in a box and I couldn't represent a receipt. I was scanned with metal detectors, told to take off my shoes, and all in all it was a dehumanizing experience after 10 hours of work consistently.
I felt like HR and everybody else who were sitting around were looking down at us. One time, when a bunch of pickers were walking up stairs, one of the HR guys had a microphone and shouted "both hands on the rails" as he followed right behind the group of workers.
All while I couldn't get Jeff Bezo's smiling face laughing in my head. Fuck Amazon, seriously, except AWS.
If you buy AWS you are supporting the inhumane treatment of humans.
Maybe it's just my privilege showing, I don't know. But employers need to have boundaries too. Just because you're giving me a paycheck (or at this point, just considering it) doesn't give you carte blanche to my fucking life.
This is part true, and is partly your morals and outlook on life.
The truth is that if you need the money, it is harder to enforce those boundaries or to fight against them. This is why more people can't have blue hair or visible tattoos: It can get you suspended, fired, or make you un-hireable. It is why some of the health insurance incentives really aren't a choice if you can't afford the extra 40% premium from your employer. It is why some folks can't avoid pre-employment drug tests (or random ones at work) on purely moral grounds.
But once you get past some of the crappy money ranges, not taking some of this stuff proves life outlook. You can choose not to work for the prestigious company because you disagree with their methods. And so on.
yes, of course nobody is compelled to interview at or go work for amazon. however, working conditions anywhere matter for workers everywhere.
^ I've summarized the comments