Side note: The most frustrating interview I've ever had was with Microsoft Boulder: they just flat out insulted me in the interview and questioned why anyone would hire me based on not getting their trick question. That said my interviews with Microsoft Redmond were lovely.

Anyway, I got into the interviews, and I could sense something was up. I was answering the questions but they didn't seem... enthusiastic... about them, or me. I like to think I usually interview decently, though of course I can improve.

Eventually someone says, "Hmm, can you wait here a minute?" and a new person comes in with him a few moments later.

"So... I'm not sure why the agency sent you to us." Okay...? "You're definitely over-qualified for this role, and frankly we think you'd be bored." I thought it was a good opportunity to get in the door (and MSFT is a great place to work), so I tried to offer a little placation, when he introduced the other person, "But I know that [name] here has been looking for a PM, so why don't you talk to her."

I walked out that afternoon with a different, better, higher paying job, because someone thought "outside the box".

That's "thinking for the company" which I had rarely seen during my 10 years working for a large company. "Thinking for myself / department" approach is much more common, unfortunately.

But I just appreciated that could have so easily been a 'thanks for your time', handshake and leave, with no-one satisfied.

What you've described sounds to me like a setup for hiring an H1B employee. The employer is legally required to interview everyone who meets the requirements, and must hire qualified domestic employees if they are available for work, but the employer will look for any reason to disqualify domestic candidates.

A whole industry of consultants popped up a decade ago that coached companies on how to use this "loophole" to favor H1B over domestic employees (which is on it's face, illegal. If a US employee is available, the employer must hire him so the trick is to find a way to disqualify this domestic candidate.)

Or maybe they already had an internal candidate and were required by HR to interview some additional people (e.g. you) before they discover, to everyone's surprise, the internal candidate is the very best one for the job. "Going through the motions" to interview others when their mind was made up before the job description was even written.

EDIT: Just so it's clear, I'm not saying Amazon does these things; and I don't know anything about this particular case. I am saying this sort of faux-interview happens in the industry, and has the same "feel" of the interviewers simply going through the motions.

The right solution for this is to keep employers out of the skill-based immigration process.

However, there was a bit more to the story - one, that I'd started discussions with them and the agency prior to moving from Australia to Seattle, and they'd been willing to sponsor a visa (that wasn't needed), and sure enough, a couple of weeks after, my team had some new testers who weren't H1B who'd filled the position.

And it might be a little misleading on my part, there wasn't a sense of absolute, outright apathy. But just a growing more deflated tiredness, perhaps.

We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.

That's funny. I don't know a single person who enjoyed interviewing at Amazon, and the one guy that did who got in quit a few weeks later and still won't stop talking about how bad it was until he's blue in the face. It was such a bad experience it seems to have partially fused with his identity!

Seems like every once in awhile there's some article taking a crap on Amazon, and then these types of green comments coming to the rescue.

Addressing your experience directly - I really enjoyed my Amazon interview in Edinburgh eight years ago. Lots of interesting free-form problem solving, with the whiteboard there to jot down notes rather than to produce working code.

I'm guessing there are teams or entire orgs which just don't take interviewing as seriously, though - again, with Amazon's scale, it's not surprising.

I think every company has a mix of horribleness and goodness, and based on the data I have, it seems like the mix at Amazon is more skewed towards horrible than other major companies.

I've made the same observation as you, but I think there are other factors at play. It seems that Amazon has become the new "cool" company to hate, just like Microsoft was a few years ago. I've personally heard a mix of positive and negative stories from all the big 3, but Amazon seems to be the only one that makes headlines.

I'm not trying to say that Amazon is perfect, or even better than Microsoft or Google, I'm just saying that maybe it is better to trust the opinions you hear from people you know rather than what makes the front page of HN, wherever that happens to take you.

During my Microsoft internship, I watched a male coworker verbally harass a female coworker to tears while she was giving a presentation and no one batted an eye. A friend told me to come check out Amazon, and I've never looked back. I would never go back to Microsoft, but I don't fault people for going there because I know that it is a huge company and that my experience isn't representative of the whole.

Anyways the difference here is HR/recruitment was too "ambitious".

The SDEs have found out and we have put a stop to it.

My wife recently went through the hiring process at Amazon. She completed an online programing test, then went through an interview where a recruiter asked basic CS questions over the phone, and was then invited for an onsite interview. She took a day off from work, and spent about 4 hours doing the interview at Amazon's SF office. The interviewers had come from Seattle. This happened over 3 months ago, but she has not heard anything from her Amazon recruiter about the interview outcome. The recruiter had earlier promised to get back no later than 2 days after the onsite. My wife's emails to the recruiter were unanswered.

We understand why things are this way - the recruiter wants to utilize her time on candidates who convert; any time spent on a rejected candidate is time "wasted". But when a candidate takes a day off from their current place of work to attend an onsite to get treated without common courtesy is sad state of affairs. Imagine if the situation was reversed - once the interview was arranged, and my wife agreed to do it, how would all those interviewers who flew in from Seattle have felt had she not turned up?

You seem to be interested in fixing things at Amazon. I mentioned this incident to point out that recruiting at Amazon can do with much course correction. Take time to look in the mirror and understand why it is that only Amazon among large tech employers attracts such negative attention. Sweeping all of that under the "we are now the cool company to hate" category is dishonest. Again, I am glad that this particular incident posted by the OP has caused a positive change in the recruiting practices.

Presumably so that said PR team can create throw-away accounts and defend Amazon.

That's really the problem with the social media policy. On the one hand, it protects the company from the worst possible outcomes of letting untrained employees loose on social media - and given the size of the company and the diverse views held by its employees, I could imagine those outcomes being pretty dire! But on the other hand there's a chilling effect on positive impressions of the company.

[0] that was a lye[1]

[1] removing the stain on my reputation

So, they are wading into discussions of Amazon, just in a way that's not directly linked with an existing nym? Following neither the letter nor the spirit of the rule?

I worked at Amazon for many years and enjoyed it. Nice to meet you.

It's a huge company with a wide variety of teams and experiences. It's not for everyone. But I am still friends with lots of my former co-workers. Lots of them liked it and, believe it or not, many of them are still there. Some for over 10 years.

Given that Amazon interviews by team, I think it depends on what team you end up interviewing with...

I didn't take the offer because it was like $20k or more less than another offer, but the process was fine.

There's also going to be selection bias, in that most people who have reasonable interview process aren't going to write blog posts about it...

To be fair I interview poorly, but I would would have much preferred for the person managing the interviews to cut off the process as soon as they were sure that I wasn't a fit. By failing to do so it just created an awkward and frustrating situation.

I ask because elsewhere on this thread you have people bitching that they were asked some low level CS questions about inverting binary trees and the like, and how insulting they found that.

While I sympathize, it's not going to change the fact that the company does want to hire engineers that are equally competent at contributing to some sexy new high-scale AWS services as some boring business reporting features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all do exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, if you had people that were actively rude, did not give you hints when you got stuck, and made you feel unwelcome, that would definitely warrant feedback. Though, as you said, it's too late since it's 2013.

I advise anyone in the future who runs into this kind of situation to contact your recruiter with feedback, and be very clear if you had a bad experience. Amazon takes customer feedback super seriously, and when we interview, the candidates are customers.

I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question.

While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library.

EX of good question: Facebook has their own COW C++ string with small string optimization because libstdc++ didn't used to have that. It can also provide massive speed improvements on multi-threaded code, what are some ways to implement this?

Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.

Seriously, you're bothered because someone asked you to solve a toy problem? Most interview problems are things one wouldn't do in the real job; that's because all real job problems take more than an hour to solve.

Implementing a stringbuilder is a bad question because there's not much depth to it (after you get the basic implementation down, where do you take the question next?), not because there's a stringbuilder in the stdlib.

Allow me to respectfully disagree.

Even if they ask you something you or they don't think you can do, it's not just about really solving it but at looking at how you approach such a problem.

No one can really solve important, long term problems in an interview but you sure can reason about them and talk/try toy solutions.

> Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.

You can always say "I probably wouldn't do this unless I had a good reason but, If i had to roll my own, I'd approach it this way:"

The point is to have a discussion. Why? What are the benefits of a string builder? When is it necessary? What performance characteristics should it have. What kind of questions do you ask, what kind of edge cases do you consider?

It's an interview - if you are not sure why the interviewer is asking you to re implement a standard library, ASK.

This is not unusual for Amazon - most tech companies these days ask these kinds of questions

We used to ask people to implement standard date-related functions. "That's stupid, all the date functions are already written, and they handle all the weird edge cases for you!" That's right - we want to see if you can think about all the weird edge cases.

It's not about the obvious functions, it's about whether or not you can plan reasonable interfaces and think about edge cases.

Was that not in the mandatory one?

Does that sound like it could be the one?

[1] http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/swap-two-numbers-without-using-...

Not to mention the turn over. What is that like in most tech depts?

I suppose however, Amazon can simply use the excuse of: we can't find qualified devs so we need more H-1B workers. Heck I am starting to think that this is the plan all along.

I apologize if I am coming off as negative but this kind of stuff really has to stop. I don't understand how it got to this point and how anyone would be willing to give up their privacy or self-respect like this. How did we get here?

It's not becoming it. It already is.

Doesn't everyone have conversations with their tech friends about how everyone who's been there is trying to go away and interviewing at Amazon was terrible?

I'm not even kidding. That "never work for amazon" is the image we have from amazon, it's to the point it could be a meme.

It very much already is a place no serious tech talent will work. At my last place of employment, we used to crack jokes about working at Amazon.

Find a new job. The reputation of your company is going down the drain.

I, and most people I know have mostly positive Amazon experiences. We are proud of the work we do, and the innovations of the company. I interview a LOT, and I make sure that 100% of my candidates come out with a positive experience, even if they do not get hired.

There are problems at every company, but right now it's fashionable to shit on Amazon, ever since the NYT hit-piece that got a TON of facts straight up wrong, and ever since then every negative Amazon story gets upvoted to the stratosphere. Every company makes mistakes, it's how you deal with them that counts.

Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time. It was still a bad decision, but it wasn't about being cheap.

Further, this expectation of a private quiet clean place to interview for several hours seems rather biased against poor people. Not to mention the test itself sounds like it doesn't account for the possibility of people with motor disabilities, the blind, the deaf and other disabled people.

Honestly, open book tests are a thing that has been extensively studied. Use IRT based adaptive multiple choice tests (like the computerized SAT or GRE where tests adapt to your ability), set a time limit, have a rolling set of questions to prevent knowledge transfer, and have an intern test day every quarter. You can calibrate test responses based on Amazon engineers at their desks.

This is the hard part, and I think it's why open book tests don't happen more. Coming up with good questions is hard. Don't forget that if they're not sufficiently work-like people on HN will still say that your hiring culture sucks.

I will say, though, that I think your bad-reputation timeline is totally off. By the time that NYT piece broke, I had heard "Amazon is a horrible employer" from a half-dozen different places. I didn't even finish the thing, I just shrugged and went "well, matches what people have told me, no new info here".

The first time I was warned away from Amazon, it was over specific (and probably unenforceable) pieces of their internship contract. A friend rejected his offer because it contained a bizarrely broad non-compete that could theoretically have barred him from ever starting a company with anyone else who had ever worked at Amazon. This was 2012.

The second time was from a friend-of-a-friend who spent one year as an SDE. He talked about bureaucracy, burnout, and made the Microsoft comparison. He said it Amazon was reasonable as a ~2 year cash out, but nothing more. This was 2013.

After that, I was still open enough to respond when I heard from a recruiter. The internship interview required invasive rules like the ones at issue here, which proved fundamentally incompatible with my machine/internet setup at the time. I declined it, and scratched off Amazon unless I got news that these things had improved. This was 2014.

How you deal with mistakes is what counts, agreed, but Amazon's reputation struggle is far older and more pervasive than the perception spread by the NYT story. Fair or not (and I honestly don't know), it's a long-standing issue.

The non-compete and non-solicit for customers & business partners lasted for 9 months from when my internship ended and the non-solicit (titled "Non-Interference") for Amazon employees, contractors & consultants lasted 6 months from when my internship ended.

The interview process was two back-to-back phone screens. I heard from other interns the following summer that it had changed to an online coding test and one phone screen. I had never heard of anything so invasive as what is mentioned here before this article (and the precursor a week or two ago) hit HN.

I was working at Amazon when the NYT hit piece broke. It read like it was about the business/sales/marketing side of the company and it did not at all reflect what I experienced at Amazon.

I have met a few interns who had bad experiences at Amazon but most had good experiences and were invited back. I can only think of one who was invited back but had such a bad experience that they refuse to ever work for Amazon again.

When it comes to things like this, the variation between teams within large companies is much much greater than the variation between large companies.

I'm personally of the opinion that Amazon is not a perfect company, but reports of its "evilness" have been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, I think this is a case of people with negative experiences having more of a reason to chime in than people with positive experiences. That somewhat biases threads, unfortunately.

I'm throwing this comment in here because I think it's easy for people to forget than n=1 anecdotes don't really confirm or deny anything (positive or negative) about a company's overall culture.

My impression has been that Amazon is highly variable internally, a bit like MS (which I actually do read horror stories about).

I don't know that the impression is actually false in this particular case, but these things can happen, and you'd be wise to not take the "internet consensus" too seriously.

Possible, but also staggeringly unlikely. Occam's Razor suggests it's a shit place to interview, nothing more complicated necessary.

I've interviewed for Google and Apple internships and the process has been extremely pleasant, with the interviewers happy to give their time. With Apple, I got to meet the entire team and spend time with them. I've heard similar stories about the Microsoft interview process (I mean, they even fly you out to Redmond).

What makes Amazon incapable of interviewing their interns adequately?

The one exception is a friend who started working at Amazon a few months ago. She loves it. But she's also been handed a pile of money and told to basically do what she wants. They hired her to create a new product line (not tech related) and the execs apparently don't know enough to get involved so she's basically got signoff to just do what she thinks is appropriate. So she loves it. Her husband also works for Amazon and hates it.

I'm sure there are other people at Amazon who like their jobs. I just haven't met any and I'm not sure they constitute a majority.

Happy to chat about it more, this isn't a throw away account.

Just throw 95% of all applications into the bin before even reading them. That scales as good and you don't look so awful.

The one about the Seattle culture or the warehouse side? I remember both, and I remember the warehouse one being a lot of garbage too. I was working as a contractor doing Amcare stuff and found a lot of issues with the article.

I don't hold that against amazonm. Any company of a size like amazon is going to have people that may be a bit unstable that get pushed over the edge.

I do however hold their treatment of their warehouse employees against them. When I look at a company I look at all their employees and see how they are treated. When a whole class of employees are treated as replaceable automation its probably the case that they will treat ALL their employees in that way eventually.

Amazon is the total opposite. Like this dev said, HR has totally taken over the process. To work there you need to go through their meat grinder.

It's much more likely those responsible for choosing the ProctorU solution didn't realise everything around what the approach entailed, or necessarily the ramifications. That's especially true if it came out of HR/Recruiting who aren't necessarily the most technical people.

They have a very real problem, with thousands of people in the recruitment pipeline (especially during intern interview season), and they saw a way to significantly filter them out, without having to turn half the business over to more of a recruiting pipeline than it already is.

OK, sure. My reasoning there would be that ultimately they don't really care. All due respect to Friar Ockham.

The thing is, one suspects it wasn't "someone in HR" who thought up the idea of using draconian new system that's pissing everyone off, and driving candidates away in droves. But rather, Bezos himself, personally. In fact it seems to represent the very essence of his "everything will be automated" philosophy, to the letter.

reads like the first sentence in most horror stories programmers go through

Source: a friend applied, and they made her use it - except it didn't work, so she ended up not even having a second round screen before getting her onsite invitation.

That said, I have to wonder whether the interviews are really necessary in most cases. For institutions that it is familiar with, I suspect Amazon could do just as well hiring interns purely based on their grades in relevant courses. If you reliably take 100 interns from Berkeley or Waterloo, say, it shouldn't be hard to figure out which courses count.

At worst, doing things this way would be much easier. Who knows, maybe it would work even better, by eliminating unconscious bias or something.

By all means keep the interview path for special cases with odd backgrounds.

If you have thousands of data points, what makes a successful candidate, and possibly, build a model around that?

It's pretty much standing policy that to be hired at Amazon you must be able to write correct code with no aid whatsoever, no documentation, not even a compiler to check your work. If they don't use proctors, they will go back to what they were doing before: having people write code on a piece of paper and then read it back to them over the phone.