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Comment by leeter | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you're fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon again. It was the second most frustrating interview I've ever been in. It was clear to me that 4 of my interviewers had no intention of even considering me.

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.

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I went for an interview in Redmond, for which the recruiting agency had clearly 'oversold' the job description (I should have known better, too) - it was billed as more of a PM position than what it was - line / UAT testing.

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".

That's a funny story, thanks for sharing.

> because someone thought "outside the box".

That's "thinking for the company" which I had rarely seen during my 10 years working for a large company. "Thinking for myself / department" approach is much more common, unfortunately.

True, true, too.

But I just appreciated that could have so easily been a 'thanks for your time', handshake and leave, with no-one satisfied.

I'm suspicious based on something you said about the interviewers being disinterested and unenthusiastic. I am cynical, having seen this process played out many times, and having wasted more than a few days interviewing for jobs I had zero chance of earning because the employer had already (yet unofficially and potentially illegally) chosen a candidate. Let me explain:

What you've described sounds to me like a setup for hiring an H1B employee. The employer is legally required to interview everyone who meets the requirements, and must hire qualified domestic employees if they are available for work, but the employer will look for any reason to disqualify domestic candidates.

A whole industry of consultants popped up a decade ago that coached companies on how to use this "loophole" to favor H1B over domestic employees (which is on it's face, illegal. If a US employee is available, the employer must hire him so the trick is to find a way to disqualify this domestic candidate.)

Or maybe they already had an internal candidate and were required by HR to interview some additional people (e.g. you) before they discover, to everyone's surprise, the internal candidate is the very best one for the job. "Going through the motions" to interview others when their mind was made up before the job description was even written.

EDIT: Just so it's clear, I'm not saying Amazon does these things; and I don't know anything about this particular case. I am saying this sort of faux-interview happens in the industry, and has the same "feel" of the interviewers simply going through the motions.

That's a perfectly acceptable concern to have. Especially with Microsoft, and its use of the big three agencies, H1B in general, perma-temps, etc.

However, there was a bit more to the story - one, that I'd started discussions with them and the agency prior to moving from Australia to Seattle, and they'd been willing to sponsor a visa (that wasn't needed), and sure enough, a couple of weeks after, my team had some new testers who weren't H1B who'd filled the position.

And it might be a little misleading on my part, there wasn't a sense of absolute, outright apathy. But just a growing more deflated tiredness, perhaps.

This is a common misunderstanding about H-1B. For hiring someone on H-1B, the employer need not prove that they made attempts to hire a citizen or permanent resident first. But to sponsor an employee on H-1B for green card, they have to provide such a proof. What you describe happens during that process - you have an employee you are happy with, want to sponsor her for permanent residency in the country, and are willing to go through the expenses, but state insists that you have to try find another person first.

The right solution for this is to keep employers out of the skill-based immigration process.

Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too.

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 mandatory? In my time at Lab126 (a couple of years ago now), you had to take Making Great Hiring Decisions before you were ever included on an interview loop.

Some orgs make it mandatory. Some don't. There's no global policy

Huh. I had no idea. When I was there, it was mandatory in each org I was in. I had just assumed it was a company-wide policy.

I just had to chuckle at the name of the interview prep course name, of course it would be that.

This was in 2013 so it's out of date now, but it was very clear from the line of questions and the attitudes of the interviewers that they were being made to be there and saw no point. They were in general completely disengaged with me. Of the interviewers all but the last were fairly professional. The last pair I had were more junior and made it clear that I was wasting their time as far as they were concerned.

To be fair I interview poorly, but I would would have much preferred for the person managing the interviews to cut off the process as soon as they were sure that I wasn't a fit. By failing to do so it just created an awkward and frustrating situation.

Sorry to be a broken record, but can you give some specific examples?

I ask because elsewhere on this thread you have people bitching that they were asked some low level CS questions about inverting binary trees and the like, and how insulting they found that.

While I sympathize, it's not going to change the fact that the company does want to hire engineers that are equally competent at contributing to some sexy new high-scale AWS services as some boring business reporting features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all do exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, if you had people that were actively rude, did not give you hints when you got stuck, and made you feel unwelcome, that would definitely warrant feedback. Though, as you said, it's too late since it's 2013.

I advise anyone in the future who runs into this kind of situation to contact your recruiter with feedback, and be very clear if you had a bad experience. Amazon takes customer feedback super seriously, and when we interview, the candidates are customers.

I wish I could, but it's been three years so I don't recall specifics.

I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question.

While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library.

EX of good question: Facebook has their own COW C++ string with small string optimization because libstdc++ didn't used to have that. It can also provide massive speed improvements on multi-threaded code, what are some ways to implement this?

Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.

>While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library.

Seriously, you're bothered because someone asked you to solve a toy problem? Most interview problems are things one wouldn't do in the real job; that's because all real job problems take more than an hour to solve.

Implementing a stringbuilder is a bad question because there's not much depth to it (after you get the basic implementation down, where do you take the question next?), not because there's a stringbuilder in the stdlib.

> I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question.

Allow me to respectfully disagree.

Even if they ask you something you or they don't think you can do, it's not just about really solving it but at looking at how you approach such a problem.

No one can really solve important, long term problems in an interview but you sure can reason about them and talk/try toy solutions.

> Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.

You can always say "I probably wouldn't do this unless I had a good reason but, If i had to roll my own, I'd approach it this way:"

> Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.

We used to ask people to implement standard date-related functions. "That's stupid, all the date functions are already written, and they handle all the weird edge cases for you!" That's right - we want to see if you can think about all the weird edge cases.

It's not about the obvious functions, it's about whether or not you can plan reasonable interfaces and think about edge cases.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I think implement a string builder is a GREAT interview question.

The point is to have a discussion. Why? What are the benefits of a string builder? When is it necessary? What performance characteristics should it have. What kind of questions do you ask, what kind of edge cases do you consider?

It's an interview - if you are not sure why the interviewer is asking you to re implement a standard library, ASK.

This is not unusual for Amazon - most tech companies these days ask these kinds of questions

How about escalating to Bezos?

>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.

That's funny. I don't know a single person who enjoyed interviewing at Amazon, and the one guy that did who got in quit a few weeks later and still won't stop talking about how bad it was until he's blue in the face. It was such a bad experience it seems to have partially fused with his identity!

Seems like every once in awhile there's some article taking a crap on Amazon, and then these types of green comments coming to the rescue.

Ex-Amazonian here. Amazon is big enough that there are actually a lot of people in the org who enjoy their jobs, think the company's generally doing the right thing (albeit possibly with caveats), and don't mind defending it. The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team.

Addressing your experience directly - I really enjoyed my Amazon interview in Edinburgh eight years ago. Lots of interesting free-form problem solving, with the whiteboard there to jot down notes rather than to produce working code.

I'm guessing there are teams or entire orgs which just don't take interviewing as seriously, though - again, with Amazon's scale, it's not surprising.

>>>The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team.

Presumably so that said PR team can create throw-away accounts and defend Amazon.

Well, possibly. I can't prove that that's not the case :) All I can say is that I've always taken them in good faith, because they match up with the temperament of some of the people I know and like inside the company.

That's really the problem with the social media policy. On the one hand, it protects the company from the worst possible outcomes of letting untrained employees loose on social media - and given the size of the company and the diverse views held by its employees, I could imagine those outcomes being pretty dire! But on the other hand there's a chilling effect on positive impressions of the company.

I'd think they should have a few non-green accounts lying (no pun intended[0]) around by now at Amazon HR PR.

[0] that was a lye[1]

[1] removing the stain on my reputation

I don't doubt what you say is true, but Amazon is the only big-3-ish company that I regularly hear some story like this about.

I think every company has a mix of horribleness and goodness, and based on the data I have, it seems like the mix at Amazon is more skewed towards horrible than other major companies.

(disclaimer: Amazon employee)

I've made the same observation as you, but I think there are other factors at play. It seems that Amazon has become the new "cool" company to hate, just like Microsoft was a few years ago. I've personally heard a mix of positive and negative stories from all the big 3, but Amazon seems to be the only one that makes headlines.

I'm not trying to say that Amazon is perfect, or even better than Microsoft or Google, I'm just saying that maybe it is better to trust the opinions you hear from people you know rather than what makes the front page of HN, wherever that happens to take you.

During my Microsoft internship, I watched a male coworker verbally harass a female coworker to tears while she was giving a presentation and no one batted an eye. A friend told me to come check out Amazon, and I've never looked back. I would never go back to Microsoft, but I don't fault people for going there because I know that it is a huge company and that my experience isn't representative of the whole.

Which other big company have you heard of using interview technique described in the OP? The fact that Amazon thought up the process as described here says something about the as a company which you can't explain away as the "new cool company to hate".

Many are doing it - see the rest of this thread.

Anyways the difference here is HR/recruitment was too "ambitious".

The SDEs have found out and we have put a stop to it.

Glad to hear it!

Glad to hear that the practice has been stopped. The fact that SDEs can bring up such bad PR to the attention of management and get it rectified gives one good impression about Amazon.

My wife recently went through the hiring process at Amazon. She completed an online programing test, then went through an interview where a recruiter asked basic CS questions over the phone, and was then invited for an onsite interview. She took a day off from work, and spent about 4 hours doing the interview at Amazon's SF office. The interviewers had come from Seattle. This happened over 3 months ago, but she has not heard anything from her Amazon recruiter about the interview outcome. The recruiter had earlier promised to get back no later than 2 days after the onsite. My wife's emails to the recruiter were unanswered.

We understand why things are this way - the recruiter wants to utilize her time on candidates who convert; any time spent on a rejected candidate is time "wasted". But when a candidate takes a day off from their current place of work to attend an onsite to get treated without common courtesy is sad state of affairs. Imagine if the situation was reversed - once the interview was arranged, and my wife agreed to do it, how would all those interviewers who flew in from Seattle have felt had she not turned up?

You seem to be interested in fixing things at Amazon. I mentioned this incident to point out that recruiting at Amazon can do with much course correction. Take time to look in the mirror and understand why it is that only Amazon among large tech employers attracts such negative attention. Sweeping all of that under the "we are now the cool company to hate" category is dishonest. Again, I am glad that this particular incident posted by the OP has caused a positive change in the recruiting practices.

Microsoft's hyper-aggressive culture has contributed to its organizational dysfunction IMO, and frankly I am still having to recognize and deal with its effects on my interpersonal relations.

> The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team.

So, they are wading into discussions of Amazon, just in a way that's not directly linked with an existing nym? Following neither the letter nor the spirit of the rule?

I've only heard bad things as well. I respect them as a company but it's clear they don't care about employee wellbeing. Everyone I know thats worked there said the hours and deadlines were unreal.

Hi. Not a green comment, though admittedly I'm not using my real name here.

I worked at Amazon for many years and enjoyed it. Nice to meet you.

It's a huge company with a wide variety of teams and experiences. It's not for everyone. But I am still friends with lots of my former co-workers. Lots of them liked it and, believe it or not, many of them are still there. Some for over 10 years.

I interviewed at Amazon and it was fine. The questions were interesting (albeit maybe a few too many graph questions). One of the interviewers showed up in a bathrobe or something I think, due to a bad oncall the previous night or something.

Given that Amazon interviews by team, I think it depends on what team you end up interviewing with...

I didn't take the offer because it was like $20k or more less than another offer, but the process was fine.

There's also going to be selection bias, in that most people who have reasonable interview process aren't going to write blog posts about it...

> 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.

Was that not in the mandatory one?

I was going to interview for amazon. The recruiters were so disorganised, I just gave up.

I'm curious, what was the trick question given to you by Microsoft Boulder?

I don't recall the exact question, but I recall they were only looking for the answer that used bit manipulation. Which was not necessarily intuitive in the context.

Hm, perhaps counting number of bits set to 1 in a multi-byte array?

no, bit wise is logical there. I'm thinking it was duplicates or primes or some such.

I know a common one is how to switch the values of two variables without using a temporary third variable. One way (method 2 here [1]) is to use repeated bitwise XORs.

Does that sound like it could be the one?

[1] http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/swap-two-numbers-without-using-...

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