For starters, I find it odd that you claim that the recruiter gave you feedback, and on the technical skills of all things. If you reached the last round of interviews of a FAANG, that round does not focus on technical aspects and it's more focused on soft skills and personality traits that emerge during the interview. In fact, I know for a fact that they don't look at the solution at all, and look at the process that the candidate follows such as how he takes suggestions and how he attacks problems or how he adapts to changing requirements. Sure, there are technical questions, but they barely fill 30% of the interview time, and even then their main goal is to gather info on the candidate's personality traits.

With that in mind, it's easy to believe you bombed your interview if you are the type of person who opens a discussion on a public forum attacking your interviewer with accusations of being too incompetent to evaluate you and too immature and having no clue about how great you are and how awesome you did. Just from this post alone I was readily convinced I would hate to work with someone like you, and apparently so did your interviewers.

If you ask me, they've clearly dodged a bullet.

I got all the unit test passing for all their algorithm questions. I didn't bomb the interview. Maybe we have different definitions.

[..] They had no clue how to calculate time complexity. No clue why provided unit tests were not enough and etc. [..]

This part makes the impression that you lack the pracmatic understanding of real world-coding. Testing to much, focusing on unimportant things, building to big and wasting to much time for worthless things.

In coding there are usually two type of people: tinkerer who get things done fast and dirty, and academics who slowly build shiny ivory-towers. Both have their legit space, but not every job fits both of them equal good.

I really doubt the veracity of your claim, but even taking your complains at face value I have to say the rationale you are trying to gather your complains make no sense at all.

I mean, do you honestly believe you are able to adequately justify your case by quoting a single sentence provided by a recruiter (who, mind you, is not he one interviewing you) who happened to be the one talking with you over the phone?

And again unit tests are completely irrelevant to the issue. If you made it to the last interview round of a FAANG then you already passed their tech screening. The last interview of a FAANG hiring round typically focuses on your personality and soft skills, which clearly from the way you chose to present yourself in this thread is something you are really struggling with.

This experience actually sounds both common and unavoidable.

FAANGs have x10 candidates for every position. So the interviews are indeed both difficult and arbitrary. And after a rejection they can always call you after 6 months and restart the whole shtick. So why not. Sigh.

As someone who interviewed 100s of software engineers - its just the system doing its best, and there is usually no bad-intent on either side.

Tim Bray says the company has become 'toxic' and the firings are 'designed to create a climate of fear.'

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bjpj/amazon-vp-tim-bray...

100%. Amazon is known for an organizational culture strongly oriented toward this kind of behavior (textbook sociopathy, btw).

The answer is simple: you don't. The OP already downgraded his claim to stating he took a one-liner remark made by the recruiter as feedback regarding for his entire performance. Even taking OP's comment at face value, and even believing that recruiters debrief candidates regarding their performance, a single sentence does not cover nor summarize a multi-stage interview.

They were probably running through a standardized interview with you, with the goal of making it a more objective process and to allow comparing results.

Such interviews can appear to be about technical tasks, while actually some other things are evaluated, e.g. how you approach solving issues, how you interact with others, how opinionated you are, etc.

If they had "no clue how to calculate time complexity", I'd guess the interviewer played this role and expected you to explain how to do it, patiently and without any judgement. How did you respond?

I am venting here because I expected more from a company that is so proud of its interviewing process and I am disappointed.

People who interviewed me were so arrogant and clueless. They had no clue how to calculate time complexity. No clue why provided unit tests were not enough and etc. They were just looking at the solution and thinking they know everything.

If you displayed this type of disdain at the interview they might have caught on to it.

In the famous Joel quadrant of “smart and get things done”. You might have come across too much in the “smart” and not enough in the “get things done”.

And, from your experience, you learnt that there's many imperfections, even at "the world's best companies". But possibly yourself too, as feedback from failed employment applications is always incomplete.

2. Sure, maybe Amazon interviewers are all consummate professionals with zero character flaws, zero personality disorders, and a consistently applied and unimpeachable conceptualization of "professionalism"

And yet, your story completely comports with my Amazon interview experience and every subsequent experience I've had with an Amazon recruiter. (In ways that are remarkable because they stand out relative to experiences with other companies.)

The signal is clear to me at this point: to Amazon, you're cattle.

Anyway, thanks for posting this.