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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed at how far you tolerated it. This is probably how I would have handled it:

> 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.

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Well it's good that someone tolerated it; now I have another couple names for my job black list. Thanks! :)

(Although I wouldn't work for Amazon anyway, but now I don't have to do any research if a company brings up "ProctorU").

Holy cow.. I've got an Amazon SRE headhunter sitting in my inbox right now. I am sorely tempted to decline and send a link to this article as reason why.

Please do

I think that would be good feedback, if you're turning it down --hopefully it will incentivize them to change. If you're taking it, of course not.

Do it.

Same here. It was for lab126, I was excited about it until I read this article..

Some other commenter up there says he worked at lab126 and it's sane there.

Save the link, you'll use it again and again.

I bit at an Amazon posting 5 years ago, but declined to do the Seattle interview when a local (and more attractive) position opened up.

Despite repeatedly telling Amazon's headhunters that I'm not interested, I hear from them about every 6 months.

You have to really watch those interview red flags. They're super important.

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.

It gets worse -- when he wanted to leave the interview, the proctor couldn't disconnect those systems and kept making him wait until he finally gave up, cut off the call, and tried to purge it all himself.

That the electronic equivalent of preventing someone from leaving the building.

How else they would buy themselves the time to steal all his porn? ;-)

I would probably have tolerated it for a bit longer than that (On an old laptop or something). Up until the 'Clean your desk'.

Nope, Goodbye.

The clean your desk stuff is fine, but all of this should have been sent well ahead of the interview. Why they waste the time of two people to get ready for the interview is beyond me.

Yeah, I agree. Might have been willing to go through all that hassle. IF they had warned ahead of time the restrictions it might have been acceptable. I would pick another location, like the dining room or something, instead of having to 'clean' the desk. I tend to have an organized mess on my desk, and if I have to 'clean' it will drive me nuts for weeks. But, without heads up that is such a waste of time for everyone involved its crazy. And that's why it was the turning point for me.

"Hold on a second (while I spin up this virtual machine to install this software on...)."

That's when you should just start taking off your clothes just to make sure you're in even more compliance. (Might be writing on clothes)

I've got a server in my basement running VMware Workstation. That's how id approach it.

I'm sure your VM doesn't have a webcam though. How do you prove that you are not cheating like this?

You can pass a USB device to the Hypervisor with nomachine then pass it to the VM with VMware.

You're gonna do all that work just so that you can take an hour long interview for an Amazon internship?

What work? It is just a VMWare knob.

just what are you to do if you don't have a webcam? go buy one?

Yup. You can get a camera that is good enough with a built in mic for like $20 these days.

They won't let you continue if their software detects a virtualized system. Source: I used ProctorU for remote exams with Georgia Tech.

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.

Oh yeah that's standard procedure for an interview, "I got an interview this afternoon, better build a new machine"

Yeah as a student they gave us about a month warning.

Seriously? Was this a professional program or something? Maybe I was a particularly poor undergrad, but I can't imagine being able to afford a separate computer, even a shitty one, with a month's morning. Nor could I justify the expense -- "oh that's just my test-taking computer."

It didn't have to run any real software except a browser and maybe a PDF reader. Also, yeah it was a remote grad program, so it was a bit of an experiment with how you do testing remotely at scale. I think they were trying to reach a fair compromise that didn't involve rewriting course content to include more open exams.

If you could use a virtualbox I would be totally ok with this, the fact that they exclude exactly that makes it 10 fold shittier.

If you consider the purpose is to monitor the entire computer to see if you have notes pulled up, you can see why they have this requirement.

I thought the entire premise of proctorU and proctorTrack (which gatech is now using instead of proctorU) was ridiculous though. A cheap hdmi splitter and a long cable would be all you needed to pipe the test out to a second monitor in another room where someone could scoop up the whole test for later. Or maybe even feed back answers to some tiny headphones hidden behind the ear. Impossible to detect.

Seems a bit unreasonable to ask students (who likely already have tons of debt) to purchase an additional laptop just to take exams.

Yes, it does. On the other hand, though, you can get a cheap Windows laptop for less than some college text books.

Well, that's not saying very much, considering the whole thing with college text books. My last gaming rig literally cost less than my wife's textbooks last year.

Some universities loan students laptops for free for like a week.

You might be a bit out of date here. Textbooks are absurdly expensive these days relative to computers; Stewart's "Calculus" is $289[0], for example. That's about the right range for a new low end laptop or a used mid-range laptop.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/1285740629/

Perhaps. But 1) you can rent that book for a fraction of the price (Amazon currently shows it for ~$60) and 2) just because students have to pay for expensive books doesn't mean they have extra money to spend on a second computer.

Pretty sure that guaranteed-detection of virtualization is currently an unsolved problem, or we'd be hearing about breakthroughs on the "is the universe a simulation?" question.

In principle you are correct; in practice the commonly-available emulation environments don't do anything to hide the fact that they're emulations. If you ask the OS for the name of the graphics card and get "VirtualBox Graphics Adapter for Vista and Windows 7"...

My thoughts exactly. If I was reeeeally invested in getting that job, I would have found another laptop lying around, and powerwashed it after I was done.

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