Anecdotal evidence: I know some new grads who took this test when Amazon rolled out this automated form of hiring 2 years back. There were several crazy things with this process.. the questions in the test were changed only once a week and they did actually make offers to new grads after just the 3 hour online test. In dorm rooms where a bunch of students are applying for jobs at the same time, news travels fast. In short, there are a whole bunch of people working at Amazon who got their jobs by just typing out answers to questions they memorized.

This seems nuts, but it would explain some things.

Somehow I saw "fully automated hiring" and couldn't believe it - I just assumed it would be automated until the onsite part. If you're hiring 100% automated, I can definitely see why you'd be paranoid about cheating, but you'd better have an answer to memorization!

Maybe they are starting a new service to spin up engineers on demand as part of AWS.

Ex amazonian here. About 5 years ago I was invited to beta test an online automated coding system, the stated goal of which was that upon passing, you would be given an offer for an SDE1 position. No webcam stuff, just checking your coding solutions. I don't believe that ever rolled out in that state.

As a proponent of work-sample tests over whiteboards, that would've been a positive step, honestly. Too often the actual coding project is just another hurdle to weed people out before the real test (whiteboarding); actually making offers on the basis of work-samples is pretty progressive.

> without ever needing to speak to a human engineer

That would be one way to remove bias from the process.

I've often thought college admissions should be done in a blind manner. Applications go to a subcommittee that removes all race/gender clues from it, then the scrubbed applications go to the admissions committee.

Although I understand the desire to scrub race from applications, if a candidate has overcome some form of discrimination, that isn't something we should necessarily just write off or actively ignore. Acknowledging the unfair treatment they may have received in life helps level the playing field.

Do they talk to a human anybody other than the recruiter? Interviews aren't just for the company to evaluate the engineer, it's vice versa as well.

Oh that is great, robots hiring staff.

Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is certainly tempting.

Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?

Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about, it's just extremely rapid growth.

The attrition problem is well known.

Have you tried hiring dev's lately? It's a employee's market. We've made offers to a half dozen people in the last 4mo only to be beaten out by other firms. One guy who turned us down had 12 offers.

Sure, you can compromise and take lower quality people, or pay more than anyone in your city, but if you want great people for top 20% of the market pay, it's a lot of work on the hiring side.

Pay more or work remote. You are likely limiting yourself to a tiny Geo area. No reason in 2016 we all need to sit in traffic to commute to work.

Oh I agree. I think if an engineer has to spend over 2-4h a week interviewing long term you are spending too much time on hiring.

A little break to talk to humans is good. Shouldn't be your main job, unless you work in HR or something...

People already set up pre-filter "tasks" to qualify the competence of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers for their real work. There's probably some good data there that Amazon could use to do this pretty well, if they wanted.