My Amazon interview experience

When we got around to discussing start date I asked if I could take a few months off between jobs and start in a few months. The hiring manager (who was an engineer, not a recruiter) stopped responding to my emails and returning my calls. Months later, I asked a friend of mine what happened and was told "X is busy". Too busy to spend five seconds responding to an email? Really?

Today, that hiring manager is at ARM and I declined an a chance to interview in his group when I found out who was in charge. I think I dodged a bullet; I can only imagine what working for the guy is like.

By contrast, I applied for a job I was completely unqualified for at another company around the time I interviewed at Intel. I didn't expect to even get an interview, and I didn't. But I still got a nice snail mail rejection notice. Many years later, I now work for that second company.

Like I said, I don't understand why this sort of thing happens. Putting aside kindness and basic human decency, even if you're completely selfish, it costs basically nothing to be polite, and the benefits are pretty large. Conversely, being rude gains you nothing and has noticeable costs.

I have to say that I despise with every fabric of my soul the lunch interview. I wish we didn't do it to people and I decline as many of the lunch interviews I have to give as possible--I don't think I learn much from the candidates as they are starving and tired and trying to put food in their faces. The best candidates tend to answer your questions instead of eating, making you feel rude for eating yourself; the worst candidates take big long thoughtful bites to stall answering.

It is definitely one of the more broken things with the Amazon interviewing system and I wish it would go away.

About three months later, after I'd long written them off, I got a call from them. They'd "been busy" and asked if I could come by the next day. This time, I met with several people working on the projects I'd be helping them with (mostly porting code to platforms I had a ton of experience on). Everything was looking good. Then the HR guy said something like, "you don't seem very excited." Since no talk of an offer of any kind had come up yet, I was severely tempted to remind him that, after the last time I came in, I didn't hear from them again for months.

The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from me, give me a call."

Fuck that. From the moment I left their building, I never gave them another thought. As expected, I didn't hear a peep from them.

Employers like to complain about how hard it is to find talent, but then they behave like this. It's as much our evaluation of them as it is their evaluation of us.

I've been on the other side of it, too. Being made to interview candidates when we have absolutely no need for additional people, or for groups wildly unrelated to anything I do in the company. I wanted to tell the people, "look, you're probably never going to hear from us again because, frankly, we don't need anybody, and nobody in engineering has any idea why we're interviewing you."

This week and next, I've had a young man who I already knew helping me. The restaurant where he works is currently closed for two weeks, so I took that as an opportunity to give him a chance without either of us making any commitments. I already knew that he had a great attitude (well beyond his 20-year-old age), so this was more of a way to see how well he did in my line of work and to let him evaluate what I do and how I like to do things. For both of us, it was a way to confirm that we’d work well together.

In some areas, I've gone out of my way to accommodate him and his circumstances. I asked what he's paid at his current job so I can pay him more than that (by percentage, a good amount, less so when viewed as an hourly rate). I talked through with him paying on a schedule that fit his needs (weekly, it turned out). I took him with me on deliveries to see how I handle customer relations. I had him come along when I spoke to a potential new customer, one that in his presence agreed to receive product from me. I've openly shared my expenses and revenues.

It's articles like the one linked here, along with my own employment history, that taught me there are equitable and forthright ways of treating people. As a business owner, I want to do those things, whether with employees, customers, suppliers, etc.

What I often tell myself, and share with others, is that there are certain things I must do. For example, I have no choice about certain licenses I must have, or tax filings, etc. But everything else is a choice, and I want to make my choices conscientious of the needs of those with whom I work.

I remember two rounds of technical interviews with two people in each. In the first I was okay but in the second I did very well.

Then a director came in and interviewed me. After a good chat about technical things and their overall vision for the future he walked me out of the building and mentioned that after what he'd heard from the interviewers, he'd have HR send me an offer on Monday. I was excited!

After nothing happened for a week I emailed my recruiter (in house) and asked what was going on. She said she'd call me the next day but did not. So I decided to drop it for a while.

A month later I sent yet another follow up email and she finally called. Obviously it was rejection.

I felt the whole thing could've been handled better.

We were graduating from a very reputed institute and we were supposed to go through a screening test. So there was a programming test.

We assembled in the building where their HR lady was supposed to co-ordinate. Since the AC had some issues we all were sitting close to the window instead of the front row.

First she shouted - Guys I want to you'all to sit in the front and not at back. (Since it was a live randmized programming test there was no fear of "groupwork").

We said we do not want to do that to which she responded with this :

"You guys want a job or not ? If you want a job and want to answer the test you will come and sit here else you will walk out of this room."

Then she told us the common password. We requested her to write it on the board. She refused. I will tell it one more time and you guys will have to listen else forget the test she said.

I realized that I dont want to work for Amazon.

Another friend of mine (who was rejected twice) was told to do the same thing - but at the end of it, the interviewer captured the photo of the code from his cellphone to properly evaluate it later. REALLY? You are not able to even evaluate the 'production ready' code someone else wrote, and you ask others to write it!

The thing is, 5 minutes into that first on-site interview I knew I was wasting my time. They hired a new East Coast Sales VP. He started the week prior. When you get hired as a sales VP what you do is bring in all your old cronies from previous jobs. You don't ever make your first hire somebody you don't know. Even though I nailed the interviews (they told me I handled the case study as well as anybody does) I knew there was no way in hell I would get an offer.

I was right, although I did at least get a polite rejection email a week later.

BTW, I probably had my lunch interview at that same sandwich shop.

First I was brought into a giant conference room with 12 other candidates and the recuirter gave us the overview of the company and gave us the itinerary for the day.

Then we had our interviewers come into the conference room and call out people's names to take them to indivisual rooms for interviews. After each interview we were brought back to the conference room and given a 10ish mins break to have snacks etc.

After the 3rd interview the recuirter took all 12 candidates to a very informal lunch, which basically acted like a sale pitch for the job.

Every single interview I had, had been working for the company for 10+ years and was extremely humble about their work. I especially liked the fact that they openly accepted their past mistakes and told me how they were fixing them.

After the final interview the recuirter passed around a sheet where we filled out our available times in the next 2 days to talk to the recuirter about our results.

I interviewed on a Friday and I got a call from the recuirter on the next monday with an offer.

Here's an example:

"Sorry, we decided to not move forward with your application. Best of luck in your future endeavors".

Very canned, very corporate. But it's real easy to copy and paste, then email. Brings closure to the candidate and frees them up to move on. Also, it's just plain kindness.

Did well on the phone interview, got an email the next day saying they'd like to schedule an in-person interview. Emailed them right back with my schedule, radio silence for two weeks. No response to further emails or phone calls from me.

By the time they got back to me two weeks later with an interview date, I had two offers from other companies that I interviewed with in the interim. Ended up having to cancel the Amazon interview.

There are some companies that have this process WIRED. Hiring managers respond immediately to any email and actively work to find the right place for good candidates, an offer gets made a day or two after the interview, or they tell you they're not interested. It's very difficult to not want to work there when you see that.

Friendly advice to entrepreneurs: don't be the Amazon in this story. There are some really good people I know that are turned off to working there from similar experiences.

To make things even worse, the interviewer had trouble understanding my english. How do I know? Because when he told me the answer to one of the questions I had gotten wrong, he repeated back the answer I had just given him.

It was really frustrating.

A thing that stuck out at me was ego. There was a lot of ego on the other side of the tables I sat at.

I had one guy interviewing me say he had been recruited by the CIA but chose Amazon. It seemed important to him that he tell me how good he was at his job.

My lunch interview was totally fine and not awkward.

At the end I spoke with a department head who's job was apparently to make sure I wanted to work for the company. I kind of needed work then, so it was a pretty boring end to the day.

My understanding was that Amazon was using an interview model style similar to Microsoft's, where you can be 'let go' from the process at any point during the day. If you make it to the 'closer' type person toward the end of the day, then you've done well. I don't know if this is true.

Ultimately, I wasn't offered the job, but I did get good closure and apart from some of the personalities I encountered, I was pleased overall with the experience.

Also, spending a whole day interviewing in Seattle and not meeting any of the team you would be working with ? WTF ?

Edit: I forgot some other points:

The interview process is supposed to be about building trust and getting a feel for whether you would be a good fit for the company and vice-versa.

This process sounds very asymmetrical: they only cared about whether he satisfied their criteria. This is further proven by finding an NDA to be signed on the morning of the interview. Couldn't they have sent it in advance so he would have time to read it ? What super secret details might have accidentally been revealed by their carefully planned interview process ?

Now, I can describe a binary sort in pseudo-code pretty well, but it's been a long time since school (a lot longer for me than for the interviewer, I suspect) and I suggested I just describe what a binary sort was and we could move on, but he stubbornly insisted that I do the scripted exercise.

I then asked, is this type of coding a requirement of the job, because that's not really my strength, and he seemed to become rather irritated. I terminated the interview, and sent a complaint about this kid to the Amazon recruiter who set up the interview (never heard back, obviously).

I'm terrible at writing code in interviews or answering quiz type questions. I'm much more comfortable with top-down types of scenarios--how would you approach this problem, what tools would you use, what languages, sketch out a solution for us, how would you test, what's your documentation style, what version control system do you like to use, etc. I like telling war stories from previous jobs--weird problems I've had to solve, interesting challenges, and so forth. I enjoy talking to people, and usually in these sorts of open ended interviews, I do pretty well.

The OP seemed uncertain about going to this interview in the first place; he had a pretty good situation, he doesn't really like the interview process and is not that comfortable with that type of social situation. He didn't like breaking his routine, either. Therefore, it's not too surprising if his lack of enthusiasm came across.

What's inexcusable is for him to have invested all that time, and for them to have invested all that time, and not to give him the courtesy of a one liner email followup, especially after a verbal offer was made. Annoying, but not at all uncommon. It's happened to me, too; I remember in particular an all day interview at GTE, a verbal offer, then nothing. The only thing you can do is just shrug it off and move on.

(If it's any consolation, I've cut back on Amazon orders since they started charging state sales tax where I live. I philosophically disagree with the "use tax" concept (a whole debate for another time) so I just switch to buydig or ebay or newegg or whoever else is still tax-free. As it turns out, though, AMZN still has the lower price in many cases, so I might still order from them, though sometimes I can get it from an Amazon Marketplace Seller for less.)

If they were more honest, they would have to give offers to only two. The others candidates are likely to move on while the recruiter waits for a response. If the two formally offered jobs don't accept, the recruiter finds the other eligible candidates have moved on and has to go interviewing more people.

Also, since you believe your verbal communication skills are lacking, you should work on improving them.

My experience wasn't great. I was put in a small window-less cell and quizzed by people who didn't prepare and I ended up answering the same questions about myself and my background for almost every interviewer. I had a real hard time with a manager-type person who kept on asking me the same non-technical question over and over even when I tried to prod for clarification. He didn't explain why my answer wasn't cutting it, he just kept re-asking it. Like he was taunting me as my answers harmlessly bounced off his bureaucratic shield bubble.

I felt I did pretty well given the circumstances but I guess the manager spiked it because I wasn't offered the position.

I hear that it's tough to find talent, and I also hear that it's tough to find a gig. Something doesn't add up.

At the time I found it quite amusing, but this can be a real problem, since probably most people don't check their spam folder regularly.

I assume the sweet positions for algorithm tweaking and HTML/CSS development from scratch are already taken by core Amazon engineers. Well protected holy grail. Perhaps they are looking for is a junior expendable wheel in some sub-project, and not a person actually capable of re-creating Amazon from scratch.

Jay's qualifications seem for me quite senior. He appears to be more suitable for IT lead of a startup or a member of a think tank of a more intimate company.

My prep sheet always reminds me, with a few choice options, to subvert my inclination to duck.

When I had my "full-day" interview it left a bad taste in my mouth. (I ended up not accepting the offer)

> and asked me to write the HTML/CSS for the whole page.

Yowza.

I would've given up after 2.

What a broken process.