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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

If that's the case, why do they continue to reject candidates based on their automated algorithm test as the first step in the interview?

If they had too many candidates and not enough positions, it makes sense, but in the opposite scenario you just lose our on candidates that hate those tests.

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+1 to this. I will grit my teeth and go through a leetcode/coderpad step (I get it, FizzBuzz and all that) but jumping straight to the technical stuff and not giving me the decency of talking to a human leaves the impression that I'm really just a code-producing machine for the org (Which for Amazon, I no doubt expect I would be).

As a recently posted article here said[0]: "My hunch with those companies was that it wouldn't have been a major issue if I was video-ing in from the State Penitentiary (due to murder charges) as long as I solved the algorithms correctly"

[0]:https://www.joshcsimmons.com/posts/why-i-quit-shopify

I will guess that it's because there are a lot of candidates that will do fine in the more "human" parts of the interview, but cannot solve FizzBuzz. It's just more efficient to screen those out quickly, and save the human interviews for those who have already established a baseline technical capability.

The Amazon pre-screener questions are not FizzBuzz. They are more complicated algorithms with a 45 minute time limit.

Yeah, I'm definitely not into those tests. It's so played out. This means that the only way I'm going to do one is if I want to work for the company just that bad. And Amazon is not it. If my passion was crushing competition in unfair ways, I'd just take steroids and be a professional athlete.

i would guess because thinking of people as interchangeable resources amenable to algorithmic management is deeply embedded in the company's dna.

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