Well, it’s a good thing Amazon’s hiring process managed to filter out someone who could do the job they were hiring for, but not the job they weren’t hiring for. That’s some top notch hiring practices right there.

I'm ESL myself, and I sympathize because I also don't find it easy always to communicate with ESL people from yet other native languages. But as for the niche optimization problem, don't you think that the Amazon folks would say: this candidate was not able to think on their feet and think outside of the box, when given a non-standard problem? I think hiring teams over-estimate how far they can push the envelope on that in an interview, but I find it a bit one-sided to assume that the question was outside of the job they were hiring for or that it was a malicious question.

I’m not ESL but I still can’t communicate with people that have very very thick accents.

I’m sure they have a lot of rationalizations and just default inertia around various practices. Could the interviewer successfully answer a niche question proposed by the interviewee? If they can’t, should they forfeit their job to the person they’re interviewing?

>2) practice communicating with people that have very thick Indian or Chinese accents. It will also help in general day to day life

Absolutely :) I have that item explicitly in my article, since it happened to me as well being on both sides of the interview process.

It's very unfortunate when communication is problematic accent-wise. And it makes judging difficult as well since you are not focusing on the technical merits alone anymore.

>1) don’t expect only questions relevant to the position.

For this, you might have been unlucky with an inexperienced interviewer...

The actual moral of the story is that FAANG interviews have a lot to do with luck.

A lot of interviewers grill you on stuff that they know a lot about, because how do you interview somebody on stuff you don't know anything about? So, what winds up happening is that you have to keep interviewing until you wind up with a set of interviewers that has a lot of knowledge overlap with yours.

I would say that luck in FAANG interviews is much lower than the average tech company. At least in my experience. Don't get me wrong, there is luck involved, and it's a big part of the interview process.

But, at least, you have standardised pools of coding questions, standardised pools of system design questions, and a standardised feedback form.

The interviewer varies a lot though... And makes all the difference when you have an inexperienced one, or someone that doesn't care.

We have a question bank, but you don't have to ask a question from the bank. Apple interviews are pure chaos, and up to the individual team.

> The interviewer varies a lot though... And makes all the difference when you have an inexperienced one, or someone that doesn't care.

I believe this is likely the main point being made about luck - be unlucky enough to hit up an inexperienced interviewer and all the time spent preparing as in the linked OP is up in smoke.

Not sure if it counts as an average tech company, but in terms of non-FAANG I think startups and smaller companies can end up relying less on luck. There is more time and motivation to truly flesh out candidates, maybe giving non-interview coding tasks and such to balance out interviews. At a FAANG if there was an issue because of an inexperienced interviewer, again you need luck for a recruiter or committee to attempt a save among all the other applicants.

"Embedded" is such a vast, vast field now, it's risky to assume anything isn't included

Explain? Embedded in my intention is working on the hardware directly.

After working in big tech for a while I'm so used to hearing Indian and Chinese accents that it doesn't faze me. Practice seems like a good idea though maybe easier said than done.