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Comment by adamredwoods | Hacker News Reader

I have had opposite experiences. Many of my interviews were straight evaluations on technical ability, many of which I failed.

Amazon in particular, I had told the interviewer that my day-to-day was in C#, but they continued to ask rigorous javascript questions, of which I could explain most of the answer, but failed to find the very specific javascript answer they were looking for. As a result, I was blocked by Amazon from any further interviews for one year. (And at the time, incredibly disheartening in my job search...)

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The most scarring interview experience I've ever had was with Amazon, when I was very young, where they exhibited a similar amount of not listening to me at all and evaluating skills that I never claimed to have.

Ultimately Amazon is too big and too popular to listen or care to candidates. They're going to do whatever they're going to do, regardless of what you say, and that'll naturally filter out a ton of candidates.

>evaluating skills that I never claimed to have

Interesting thought. I had an interview experience a few months ago that went fairly poorly and it was in large part because the interviewer pressed me on topics that I forwardly stated I was not well versed on (microservices). I ejected from the interview process afterwards because of my displeasure with the interviewer. He was not someone I wanted to work with in the long term.

It happens all the time. The last time I was looking for a new job, I interviewed at a bigger tech company in my area (SF based though). In the first screen I was open about not having recent JVM experience and 0 experience with JVM optimization/tuning. The hiring manager said it was no big deal and they hire and train people that are new to that space all the time. I was then given a take home challenge that required Java. Then, during the technical assessment, all of the questions were around JVM optimization. I just kind of laughed and skipped a lot of questions until the interview ended, where I emailed the hiring manager withdrawing from further interviews.

Interviewing suck. Sometimes it to them, not you.

Very similar experience at a consulting firm. No Matlab on CV. At interview

- do you use Matlab? "No".

- show me where the errors are in these Matlab code samples.

hard to respect an attitude like that.

With regards to the “block”- my understanding at most companies is that if you don’t pass the interview, but still had some positives, they’ll tell you to try again in a year.

Did you apply for a C# or javascript job?

IIRC, entry-level developer, including javascript. I don't believe I applied to any jobs that were strictly javascript.

I accept the failed interview, but this doesn't explain why I was banned for failing a technical interview. Amazon is a big place.

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