The moment they wanted access to my screen...

I would have terminated it. I'm not a privacy nut, but I am a respect nut... and if your level of respect for your engineers allows you to enforce such a ridiculous policy of "testing" in the interview process, well, you don't have much respect for the engineers... or their time, or their own privacy (on their own machine).

I wont work for a company who installs "screen watching" software on your machine. I wont work for a company who middle-man's the SSL cert. I wont work for a company who drug tests. (I smoke MJ, but a lot of companies state MJ doesnt fail, but I still refuse to take a drug test, its principle)

We aren't cattle. When you're treated as such in the interview process, you can strongly infer that you will be treated as such in your position.

I interview people remotely all the time. We allow people to go through Coderpad or something like that, but in practice, I always suggest screensharing.

The reason I suggest this is not that I am interested in the rest of their computer: I don't want keyboard or mouse control, and our rubrics have absolutely nothing to do with what else is running your box. What I am interested in is letting the candidate work with their favorite tools. It's your computer, with your favorite editor, with whichever bindings you have, and whichever libraries added to your project as you like to use. In our interviews you can also check language docs and stack overflow if you like: In fact, it's pretty common for people that pass the interview to do so.

Interviewing is stressful, and other than letting people work on a longer interview project on their own time, the best thing I can do for my candidates is to make them be at ease in every other way possible. In case people worry about privacy, I am happy if they just share a window, especially if it's for an IDE that lets them both see the code and show me test results at the same time.

So In my employer's case, a preference for screensharing is not really about treating people like cattle. We discuss all those pros and cons with candidates prior to screening, and accommodate them in almost every case. While I'd agree 100% that the ProctorU plan wound not be something I'd find acceptable, there's a great case for wanting access to your screen that is for the candidate's benefit.

Well, screen sharing is okay (even though I'd prefere some 3rd party service with real-life code editing) and most OS has this kind of feature by default. Or via something like Skype (some other IM softwar has similar features too).

My main 'concern' was about "The proctor then proceeded to shut down all my running applications for me" - the fuck is this? Pardon my language.

I've had one interview using Skype screen sharing where I had to import a toy project in my IDE and deal with some more "real-life" kind of tasks, and it was a good experience. Collabedit and the like are a bit limiting outside of Google-style algo questions.

I'd never install something like LogMeIn/TeamViewer though.

Showing my screen is one thing... I prefer a collabedit or something similar... I work on a MacOS computer... so even when apps are closed, notifications still show. I set my messages notifications to show the full message... including images... so even with Messages closed, if my wife SMS's me, it shows on my screen. I dont want to have to go shut off notifications for an interview process... and i shouldnt have to.

There are plenty of tools to share the code view in many IDEs.. there are sites and services dedicated to this. To have access to my entire desktop, INCLUDING control of my mouse/keyboard and installing software... I would have a hard time telling them not to go fuck themselves... because the level of disrespect in treating an adult like a child student is so high its painful...

I hate having to shut down notifications for screen shares as well, but I found out that there is a pretty easy way to mute them temporarily on macOS. Alt + click on the notification button (top right corner) and it will mute notifications.

To be honest, my exact reaction to something like this would be to tell the recruiter the only way it was happening was in a virtual machine, with no camera or mic access. I'll happily do a video interview, but I'm not going to be given a test like that under such invasive, low trust circumstances. Either you trust me not to cheat, or you don't trust me enough to give me the position.

I'm also a bit against tests of this sort, beyond just the privacy issue - in the real world, if you're not looking up things you're unsure of, you're making a mistake. Denying someone even written resources seems like setting them up for failure. But the privacy issue is a big one, and would likely cause me to quit before even allowing access to my machine.

>you don't trust me enough to give me the position.

This. Why would I want to work in a company that labels me as a some sort of cheater before proven otherwise?

I would have quit the moment that either a) they asked me to turn on a camera inside my house or b) they asked me to give them access to my computer.

I'm a pretty private person, and giving anyone access to either of these is a dealbreaker. Hell, I don't even let my friends in my house, much less an employer.

One of the last times I dealt with a recruiter, he wanted me to have a Skype interview with him before he passes my contact information on to the employer (for a job I really didn't want, but I was unemployed so I didn't have a choice if I didn't want to lose my unemployment). I tried to argue him out of it, and I ended up doing the interview in my backyard because there's no way in hell I'd ever turn a camera on in my house.

That seems overall sensible to me. I don't have any cameras* in the rooms I stay/work/sleep, and made sure that things like microphones are really only active when I want them to (eg. the mic line on my VoIP phone is hard-wired to the big, red indicator light on it). I feel very uncomfortable when I feel watched/listened to, and with digital devices there is no easy way to discern "could watch/listen" and "does watch/listen", so restrictions need to be placed in the real world, not in the world of bits and bytes...

* Actually I do have one-or-the-other (D)SLR, but these are "dumb", not networked, and can positively not take pictures without somebody noticing - clack.

It's an general aptitude test. If someone cheats they move forward when perhaps they shouldn't and they waste Amazon's time.

ProctorU does similar things for universities. I've taken a few, they're not always this intrusive, but I understand the sentiment. People cheat. It's hard to stop that and even harder to do remotely.

Seems like the proper way to handle this would be to have the test taker go somewhere with a proper test taking environment. If you don't want them to come on sit, then I'm sure there are local facilities they could contract to handle it.

Attempting to take over a person's own computer in order to prevent cheating on a test is simultaneously an egregious invasion of privacy and completely insecure. Are we really supposed to believe that you wouldn't be able to hide some cheating materials from your own webcam?

I recently had this a version of this with test taking - As part of immigration, I had to complete civics and language learning courses. Both had tests to take to complete the training.

The tests were held at the schools, all online. Purses, bags, jackets, electronics and so forth were left at the front of the room. Paper and pencils were provided in the computer labs, which were recorded and inspected for signs of cheating. Humans were at the site, but video wouldn't have been out of the question either.

It wouldn't seem too much to be able to rent a local school's computer lab for these sorts of purposes, for a small fee. And the internet and security on these is already tax-payer funded. This should put test taking environments well within reach of most people.

> Seems like the proper way to handle this would be to have the test taker go somewhere with a proper test taking environment. If you don't want them to come on sit, then I'm sure there are local facilities they could contract to handle it.

I'm certain it's more expensive for the company, though. And some candidates don't have nearby access to this.

There a so many locations that almost all do -- certainly much easier than any local interview location.

But easier and cheaper than ProctorU? That's the main sell.

Doing things badly is usually easier and cheaper than doing them properly.

Exactly. There are proctored testing labs worldwide -- there is absolutely no reason for Amazon not to handle it this way if they really feel the proctoring is necessary. Someone at Amazon just didn't do their job properly.

Mensa International tests work similar to this, ie. they rent a room in a VHS or university for a couple hours to conduct the tests.

The FAA's written exam for pilots is similar, they have certified testing centers which can administer it. That's what made me think of this approach. Looking around a bit, it looks like dedicated testing centers are fairly common.

What is cheating in this situation? When we are talking about university exams - yes, you can cheat by using materials you are not allowed to.

As a software developer - I alwasy kind of cheat. I use Stackoverflow and infinite google search abilities :)

I consider cheating to be part of my job. I look up things I've done a dozen times before, if I haven't done them in a few weeks. I'll often ask google how to do something, then while it's loading the results, start writing the code that does that thing. A more valuable test, in my eyes, is how well someone CAN cheat in the interview. I want to hear someone say "you know, I've never actually heard that question before, let me see if anyone's talking about it on StackOverflow." Admitting you don't know the answer, and coming up with a way to get the answer is far more important a skill, to me, than blind recall. I've said "I don't know" in an interview, and while getting the words out took some effort, it showed the interviewer that I could admit to not knowing, and started a dialog between me and the interviewer, which gave him an idea of how I think about new problems.

You can consider this tantamount to a blackboard exercise. In all likelihood they're looking for basic algorithm stuff.

In that instance, in your daily job you wouldn't even cheat by looking it up, you'd just use a library. I would assume that they value people who understand how these things work rather than just being able to implement it. After all, you can teach someone basic Python and how to use Scipy in a couple of hours, but does that make them a data scientist?

Anyway my point is lots of companies have programming exercises/tests, and I'm not aware of too many that let you just look stuff up while you're doing them. Debate the merits of that, but it's common enough that seeing it in this platform shouldn't feel totally shocking.

So it filters for only the good cheaters, then.

To be fair, those people are very likely to be successful!

He could just have set up a separate user account.

It sounds like he didn't know it would've been this intrusive. I had no idea personally and I know a lot of people who have worked at Amazon.

Exactly. I respect Amazon as a company, and wanted to work there at the time. Wasn't quite expecting this.