I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture.
IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer, the process is working as intended and I'd assume he found a job that better matched him somewhere else, where his mindset will be better valued.
The goal when interviewing is not "get the job", it's "am I a good fit for this role".
If the company is some weird dysfunctional hierarchy run by socio-paths, I'll be happier elsewhere.
Or to put things in a much more pretentious manner - If you're too stupid to appreciate my genius, you don't deserve to work with me :)
I made the mistake of letting that company bring me back for a second "less technical" round of interviews, but I shouldn't have.
About 45 minutes into doing this I decided that any company that screened candidate like this was not somewhere I wanted to work so I told the interviewer that I didn't think this was the right fit and I appreciated them taking the time to consider me for the role but I wouldn't be continuing on.
I'll never forget he was like, "But you're doing great!" ... like yes, I know. I'm not stopping because I'm failing, I'm stopping because you are.
Which is why I never lie in interviews. If I don't make your cut, I might be dodging a bullet.
For me personally, quality of life is important, so is vibing with my coworkers, and management that respects work-life balance. I have this at my current job. My salary is good, not amazing but comfortable. Would I trade double the salary for an environment where I'm stressed, expected to work 50 hour weeks, and answer calls on my own time? Nah. No way.
But how do you differentiate between if it is just this one interviewer or if it is the team or the whole company? I had interviewed at places that my friend referred me to, and after the fact, my friend told me it is just this one interviewer with their weird preference that screwed the whole process…
I’m very much a generalist and kept to standards and terms not specific to AWS infra. They ”passed” me but wanted a follow-up after going through some training packages to make sure I could translate everything to AWS.
At the time I was leaving a bigger software company , largely because I felt we completely locked down customers in solutions perhaps not in their best interest - so this put me off.
I realized AWS would be just the same, just on a different level.
And of course this makes sense - they want to sell their stuff!
I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.
While this resonates with me and probably the majority of the HN readership, I also want to be paid (handsomely) to build things. But in every case where someone pays me to build things, they want to sell it to someone (if they haven’t already sold it before I built it).
I think the important difference is whether you believe the thing you’re building is good for the people that are buying it. Never have I ever seen vendor lock-in become a net benefit for those who have found themselves in its grasp.
Certainly not every enterprise setting is like this, but they do exist, or the setting can even be created if just enough people of the right stuff end up together.
1) Is this word for word what they told him?
2) If so, why did he believe them?
1) I rarely get any feedback, particularly not feedback as detailed as this, with a single reason for failure 2) Employers habitually bend the truth around interviews: interviewing for jobs that don't exist, that are already filled, reneging offers 3) Not being hired after an interview doesn't mean you failed it. They're more like dates than exams.
> They're more like dates than exams
It's much better to look at your own performance critically than to trust the feedback you get. Because the feedback you get (if you get any at all) is unlikely to be that useful or that trustworthy.
/edit: now that i think about it, they may prefer a sales mindset in all roles which i can also understand
But you don't get to know the rules.
Back in the 90s, looking for a job wasn't so bad. Now it's a nightmare.
This is hearsay, and smells like bullshit to me. I've given dozens of interviews during my tenure at AWS (in which I had a sales-adjacent role) and we never made a decision based on that. Plus, we'd never give that kind of feedback to a candidate.
Interviews at Amazon are highly structured and there's a Bar Raiser assigned to oversee every one of them to make sure they follow the rules during the debrief. The BR, who is usually not even on the same team or organization that's hiring, would not have allowed this to be the cause for rejection. It's far more likely the candidate was reported weak on one or more of the Leadership Principles evaluation sessions.
In the end it came down to either pressuring the client to embark on a complex cloud transition in time for a major sports event (that was a make or break event for the customer) or, as my friend recommended, start with a PoC but do the risky transition after the sporting event to minimize the potential for a catastrophic failure if things didn’t go to plan.
He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
My takeaway was that interviews are a game with their own rules, and you have to play by those rules - demonstrating some sense of judgement outside the parameters of the game will not be tolerated.