I have a confession to make. I cheat at my job. I cheat all day, every day.
I have this little book next to my desk I use to write down ideas and notes, and then I refer back to it later. Sometimes my boss is standing right there! I get such a rush.
I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!
Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!
I know that my cheating gives me an unfair advantage in the job market. I know this cheating makes me an inferior programmer. And now I know I can never work at Amazon because I can't get past their super scrupulous interview process. Oh well, I guess I'll just try and get by, cheating my way though life.
Well what a lot of children do in school is indeed cheating outside of collaboration. It's often one person who's already done doing the work of another without much bidirectional creative synthesis.
I would think that students who collaborate on schoolwork or studying are very institutionally fluent and aren't really at risk of the institution stepping over them and calling them cheaters.
I see the college cheating industry as a trade between wealthier cooler kids and the smarter disadvantaged kids, which I suppose is also life in most places, China or US.
"In school, taking credit for someone else's work that you had nothing to do with creating is unethical, not accepted, and punished severely. In the work world, it's called Tuesday."
--Anyone who's experienced it
Cheating and collaboration are not the same. If you've ever taken an advanced math/cs/STEM class you've collaborated often on problem sets, they are often too hard to do alone. But you shouldn't have cheated.
Collaboration is great for learning something new as a group.
But how do you then assess whether each individual in the group learned that important concept, or if they just all agreed with the one (and only) student who actually learned/knew it?
I remember having a cheating rig at high school. We were 4-5 classmates, who would always sit close and hangout. Each of us would study the classes we best at. For example I really sucked at English and math, but was really good at physics and biology, one guy was good at English and another one at Turkish literature, another at history, another at Math. Overall high school was really easy for us. It's not like we didn't cheat at exams, we also helped each other before the exams. Teachers tried to separate the group several times but we were smart and doing well, so they chose to ignore at some point. All members went to uni, studied STEM.
Now, I'm well aware that studying things you can already do is not the best way but this was what happened.
Similar to your little book, I have a personal wiki in a Git repository which basically functions for me as an external memory--if I find a solution to a problem that keeps coming up, or write a particularly useful snippet of code, I put it on the appropriate page so I can remember it again later. (When I say 'external memory' I really mean it--in addition to pages like Snippets:Bash I also have things like LifeSkills:SuitcasePackingList.)
Something that worries me is: what if I work for a company that decides that everything I've written on their time belongs to them? If I had all of this in my head there would be no question about it, but writing it down introduces questions of copyright. Should this ever happen it would basically be the equivalent of losing a chunk of my brain, which is a bit of an alarming prospect.
I work for a company that decides that everything I've written belongs to them. Note that I did not include the phrase "on their time." I have to get explicit waivers for any project I want to work on on my own time. It is more than a little disconcerting. I'm pretty sure they technically claim ownership of this comment.
I think I know what you mean. I had to run a few commands using the `--help` flag this morning to look up features that I wasn't sure they could do. It just feels so _dirty_.
> Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!
I realize you're being facetious, but do check with your employer that this is OK! Code on StackOverflow is under a CC-SA license, it isn't public domain or even very permissibly licensed.
>"I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!
Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!
"
I've lost count of the number of (thankfully former) co-workers whose only technical skills were searching Stack Overflow and asking their colleagues for help with a problem. The measure of a programmer is what they are able to do when there _is_ no answer to be had from SO or their colleagues.
I don't think there is an accurate measure of programming skill. Experience, diversity, challenges faced, skillfully using solutions to past problems, effective communication, reaching out for help when needed (including StackOverflow) are qualities that I can think of from a programmer that I would pay to build my product. I work / have worked with co-workers that you are trying to point out but use of StackOverflow was not my measure.
Some programmers work on bespoke algorithms and would do well to listen to the relevant commentators in regards to best practice. Not to mention that trusting everything you are taught can severely stunt your ability - read people's experiences and results.
I get that you're being facetious, but just to take you seriously for a moment: if the help that you're asking your coworkers for is something like "tell me again how pointers work in a linked list", there's a problem.
Hey, don't let too many people know this, but nowadays you often don't even need to copy/paste the code! For example, I have to parse Excel files a lot in my work. Did you know some dummies have already written and tested a bunch of code that does exactly that? And then they place it online in a format that's easy for me to download!
I really hope they don't realize that I'm using their code to cheat.
We specifically have an interview question here which is: "How would you feel about asking for help, either from a colleague, friend or on the internet, to complete a work project?"
Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.
edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.
For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
I'm glad you're fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon again. It was the second most frustrating interview I've ever been in. It was clear to me that 4 of my interviewers had no intention of even considering me.
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.
I went for an interview in Redmond, for which the recruiting agency had clearly 'oversold' the job description (I should have known better, too) - it was billed as more of a PM position than what it was - line / UAT testing.
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".
Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too.
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.
Glad that SDES internally are upset but the damage has already been done. Amazon is becoming a place where serious tech talent will not work. No senior or serious talent in their right mind would go through this, so you are going to end up with just junior or desperate devs applying.
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?
> Amazon is becoming a place where serious tech talent will not work.
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.
I really home recruiting at Amazon takes this comment to heart. They won't, because they're too busy milking the college newgrad pipieline and that looks fat and happy, but experienced engineers in general won't work or even interview for Amazon. You get the naive people, everyone who knows better stays far away.
Someone was probably promoted for the adoption of this "frugal" hiring practice. This is a culture problem that permeates all of Amazon and goes all the way to the top.
Find a new job. The reputation of your company is going down the drain.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about :)
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.
I'm glad you guys are pissed, it's insane! I just hope you have enough influence to actually change something about it; as it stands this process is horrifying.
I get contacted by Amazon recruiters every couple months or so. They can be a bit aggressive and will sometimes try to get me to attend one of their hiring events in my city. I would possibly consider a SDE opportunity but they want me to relocate to Seattle. I just feel that if you are going to spend all this time and resources trying to poach devs from other cities, you'd at least open a local office or let them work remotely.
I would never consider Amazon based on what has been posted in the past, but I would also walk away from any interview process that began like this. Stupid.
Lets at least pretend to apply Occam's Razor to things first before jumping on a company.
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.
For some reason (in my experience) HR has a lot of power in companies. They can institute painful processes that nobody likes even director/executives and nobody seems to question it or if they do they are powerless to change it. The company I currently work for I wouldn't have a hope in hell of passing through all the hoops the interview process inflicts.
So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action.
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.
So was this an interview for an Intern position? Is this ProtorU thing used for anything else? Should anyone be worried about an interview for a full time non intern position? There seems to be some confusion about this in the comments.
Yes, ProctorU is also used for full-time interviews.
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.
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.
All these show what kind of candidates Amazon is looking for. A bunch of desperate people who'd do anything for [money|Amazon brand value|Whatever else Amazon has]. I wouldn't want to work at a place that resembles an irrational hell with such people as coworkers anyway.
If someone is really that desperate for a job && believe they are smart to work on things Amazon scale, why wouldn't they find other jobs or heck start a company themselves solving a genuine problem?
I do know starting a company is not for everyone to be able to do, but other jobs?
As someone who works as an SDE at Amazon, I find comments like this pretty funny. My favorite part of the job, and the reason I stick around, is the people I work with. Amazon AWS internally is a pretty minimal-bullshit work environment. "Irrational hell" is certainly not how I'd describe it. There are a lot of frustrations working with under-maintained/legacy systems, but that's fine.
Don't get me wrong, I have complaints, but at the end of the day I show up to work to solve hard problems with smart people, and that's very satisfying. I build tools other people build businesses on, and that's a really good feeling. I get paid what I consider to be too much, but that's what it took to get me to relocate from the Midwest (and no one I work with takes the current demand for devs for granted).
And yes, I appreciate the money, the pedigree, and the other opportunities it has opened up for me.
The reality is at BigCo there's always that one part or another part of the company that's fine to work at. There are a whole lot of other parts that are not. The trick is to find out what the good parts are and avoid the bad ones.
I fit the exact combination you were excluding.
[lives in the US with a work VISA| does not have an American passport | can NOT afford to not care about money]
I'd much rather apply to the plenty other companies that has opportunities. Seriously, IMO, this country has so much opportunities for the person that is working hard and willing to try.
Work is a place we spend the majority of our living life in the most active age of our life. It has to be at the least "NOT hell". Don't you think?
This is exactly why Amazon's behavior are so unacceptable. They abuse the fact that most people do not have those luxuries to create an unhealthy and exploitative work environment.
To this day, i thank my dad who told me to go study in Canada rather in US since he knew how crazy immigration laws in states are. Graduating from a Canadian uni gives me options to work for any company/start up i like without having visa restrictions.
Yikes. That's a pretty heady classification of myself and my coworkers. The funniest part about your response, though, is that you said we'd "do anything for whatever else Amazon has". Looking past your assertion that we're in some way desperate, I'd say yeah, the whatever else Amazon has is pretty nice. I'm by no means a kool-aid drinker, but working with really smart coworkers, having accomplished mentors throughout the company, and working on genuinely interesting problems are nice perks to have. Amazon has its warts no doubt, but that's true of any company this size.
You can have your beefs with the company, that's fine. But I'd avoid the wholesale characterization of over 200k people -- it's not a good look.
I saw an IT Manager job description for Amazon's offices near Chicago. It had items like "Must be able to stand 10 hours a day." What? A managerial position where you're standing all day? Where you have direct reports and meetings and such? No offices or cubes for management? Oh, ok.
Also nice way of saying, "50 hour weeks are the norm."
It's because not everyone gets so emotionally carried away by what the media love to make of Amazon.
The company employs 230,000 people. But for every one of them, it's just a day job after all. The scrutiny is justified given the scale and impact of the company, but what you're doing amounts to nothing more than misguided condescension from a bystander with little sense of what it's really like.
Playing such behavior down like "So many thousands work there so it's alright" is a very negligent attitude IMO. Companies that treat their potential employees like this need to be called out and shamed.
I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't scrutinize who they recruit. Please read the post with an open mind and think for yourself whether they have crossed lines of sensibility or not.
"nothing more than misguided condescension from a bystander"
- No one is judging Amazon for its x thousand employees. Only its hiring practices. Which is creepy and stupid. I don't need to know everything about the company or its 230K employees to judge their hiring practice.
I am amazed at how far you tolerated it. This is probably how I would have handled it:
> As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse.
You have to really watch those interview red flags. They're super important.
I had one right out of college where the office (on energy efficient lightning) looked like some cubicle version of hell. A person in the elevator on the way to the interview mouthed "run away" to me, and really creeped me out.
I got the job, but literally couldn't even handle a full day in that cave-like godawful place.
Holy cow.. I've got an Amazon SRE headhunter sitting in my inbox right now. I am sorely tempted to decline and send a link to this article as reason why.
It gets worse -- when he wanted to leave the interview, the proctor couldn't disconnect those systems and kept making him wait until he finally gave up, cut off the call, and tried to purge it all himself.
That the electronic equivalent of preventing someone from leaving the building.
The clean your desk stuff is fine, but all of this should have been sent well ahead of the interview. Why they waste the time of two people to get ready for the interview is beyond me.
They won't let you continue if their software detects a virtualized system. Source: I used ProctorU for remote exams with Georgia Tech.
I feel in that case, it was acceptable. Students were encouraged to get a cheap "burner" windows machine and use it only for the proctored tests, and we were warned in advance of all the restrictions.
My thoughts exactly. If I was reeeeally invested in getting that job, I would have found another laptop lying around, and powerwashed it after I was done.
Thankfully, I would fail this interview the moment they require me to own a Windows or OS X license.
> ProctorU currently supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X 10.4 or newer version of those systems. At this time, ProctorU does not support any Linux operating systems such as Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.
edit: but I'd like to see them muck around with my linux.git .config to make sure I'm not cheating.
Wow, seriously? I had to shoot down a ProctorU interview at one point because I had some hardware and internet stability issues that were going to scuttle the thing (and I couldn't go to a library or anything in light of all these rules).
But it didn't even occur to me that Amazon might be using an interview service that can't handle Linux. One of the best programmers I knew in school was exclusively on Debian, and spent a semester on a cheap Arch machine when his main laptop died. An interview process that completely excludes him is a jaw-droppingly bad one...
They'd lose me the moment they wanted full access to my system. My computer, my rules. You want to take control, mail me a computer and take control of that.
This was a huge problem for me at Gatech's online master of computer science program (omscs).
I ended up having a small windows partition just to take the exams.
Also note windows 10 isn't explicitly on that list. There were problems early on.
“Clean your desk, please. Your institution [Amazon] has mandated that there cannot be any written material next to you while you take the exam.”
To which I would reply
"Fuck you and your institution".
Run a binary on my machine ?
I think the interview should be over right there and not from my side. If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk.
Is it really so dry out there that people are willing to go through this bullshit to work for Amazon ?
I know some of you are young and inexperienced, but know that you always have the choice to say 'No'. If people mistrust you from the get go - this is the environment you're signing up for. Don't settle for this.
Don't work for Amazon, don't let them establish this bullshit as the norm in the industry.
Trust me, the dream job will come if you know your value.
I'm getting really sick of HN's attitude toward Amazon employees. Not Amazon, hate all you want on the company, but I really think the the "only a desperate moron would work at Amazon" type comments don't belong here.
I love my job, but reading HN makes me feel like I should hate it. This is a place that told me to "take as much time as I need" when I got married, told me the same thing again when my dad was taken to the hospital two months later, and again when my father-in-law had a heart attack a month after that. I will never forget the kindness I've been shown in one of the most difficult years of my life.
I know that my experience doesn't align with everyone's. But this broad categorization of Amazon employees as "desperate" or "corporate drones" is just false.
Ex-Amazon here. The good technical skills of my peers was the highlight of being there. Many had offers from the usual Google/Facebook/Twitter & co.
No, they weren't desperate.
People here are criticizing the management, not the engineers.
> People here are criticizing the management, not the engineers.
They are though. I have seen Amazon engineers referred to as "desperate", "morons", and "idiots" in multiple threads here on HN. I'm fine with criticizing management. I encourage it. But criticizing the engineers simply for working here is an unfair generalization.
If Amazon has the wisdom to hear all this criticism, then the company culture should improve and you will all be happier as employees.
If it doesn't, then you'll eventually see it yourself and it will be easier for you to quit.
Note that we actually work for our bosses - and they work for theirs. We don't do company work, we do what our bosses decide we should do.
So a corporation is a group of people working on goals set by others.
If you follow the recursion, you'll notice that these changes need to come from the very top, so that's where you need to knock if you want to improve your company's image.
Then work to change your company's culture. Speak out against those doing what makes headlines here. It's not on us to make sure that Amazon employees are positively represented. It's on you to make sure that Amazon employees deserve to be positively represented.
I do what I can, but any opinion that contradicts the HN hivemind makes me a corporate shill. At this point, Amazon could save a truckload of puppies and HN would find a way to make it evil.
The worst part about all this is that even if you did submit to all of this garbage, all you'd earn is the right to work with a bunch of people who are either desperate/clueless enough to also submit or managers that think this sort of behavior is a-OK.
Maybe there was no training video. The test was to see if you'd surrender all privacy, your whole computer and let them waste your whole day on pointless bs. There was no spoon, Neo.
If they only hire a subset of interns this way, how would a full-time candidate have any clue? If a manager doesn't get an intern that had this happen, how would they know?
Okay now most poeple know, it's on HN (and people are pissed apparently according to another commenter here). Do you expect the current employees to up and quit?
I think it's easy to say that "you'd just earn the right to work with a bunch of clueless people", but Amazon is a huge company. Do you expect that all MSFT/GOOG/AAPL/ETC employees keep close tabs on programs that recruiting are using (potentially even testing?) And do you expect that people with mortgages, families, commitments are just going to walk out as soon as they hear about something like that?
I'm not defending Amazon at all here. Something may be wrong if this shit keeps happening (there isn't a faces of google website, for example), but I don't think the burden here is on a lowly SDE or whatnot who is powerless, and in most cases has no clue of the situation.
>And do you expect that people with mortgages, families, commitments are just going to walk out as soon as they hear about something like that?
No, I'm expecting that the people with the most options will start drifting away. You know, the ones they most need. And now we know they won't be hiring any stellar replacements any time soon either.
Readit News
I have this little book next to my desk I use to write down ideas and notes, and then I refer back to it later. Sometimes my boss is standing right there! I get such a rush.
I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!
Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!
I know that my cheating gives me an unfair advantage in the job market. I know this cheating makes me an inferior programmer. And now I know I can never work at Amazon because I can't get past their super scrupulous interview process. Oh well, I guess I'll just try and get by, cheating my way though life.
"In the work world, collaboration and team work are essential to success; in school, it's called cheating."
More here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
I would think that students who collaborate on schoolwork or studying are very institutionally fluent and aren't really at risk of the institution stepping over them and calling them cheaters.
I see the college cheating industry as a trade between wealthier cooler kids and the smarter disadvantaged kids, which I suppose is also life in most places, China or US.
--Anyone who's experienced it
Cheating and collaboration are not the same. If you've ever taken an advanced math/cs/STEM class you've collaborated often on problem sets, they are often too hard to do alone. But you shouldn't have cheated.
But how do you then assess whether each individual in the group learned that important concept, or if they just all agreed with the one (and only) student who actually learned/knew it?
Now, I'm well aware that studying things you can already do is not the best way but this was what happened.
Something that worries me is: what if I work for a company that decides that everything I've written on their time belongs to them? If I had all of this in my head there would be no question about it, but writing it down introduces questions of copyright. Should this ever happen it would basically be the equivalent of losing a chunk of my brain, which is a bit of an alarming prospect.
It gives actual examples of commands, just like a cheatsheet does.
I realize you're being facetious, but do check with your employer that this is OK! Code on StackOverflow is under a CC-SA license, it isn't public domain or even very permissibly licensed.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12527/do-i-have-to-w...
The license [1] says that you are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit...
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?
Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!
"I've lost count of the number of (thankfully former) co-workers whose only technical skills were searching Stack Overflow and asking their colleagues for help with a problem. The measure of a programmer is what they are able to do when there _is_ no answer to be had from SO or their colleagues.
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I really hope they don't realize that I'm using their code to cheat.
"Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?"
(pro tip; the correct answer is, "fine")
You missed the part where a search engine shows you several links, including the ones from Stack Overflow.
And all of the stack overflow answers that were linked from the top of the google search are "Have you ever heard of Google, N00B?"
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edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.
For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't get me wrong, I have complaints, but at the end of the day I show up to work to solve hard problems with smart people, and that's very satisfying. I build tools other people build businesses on, and that's a really good feeling. I get paid what I consider to be too much, but that's what it took to get me to relocate from the Midwest (and no one I work with takes the current demand for devs for granted).
And yes, I appreciate the money, the pedigree, and the other opportunities it has opened up for me.
Maybe you just got lucky.
I'd much rather apply to the plenty other companies that has opportunities. Seriously, IMO, this country has so much opportunities for the person that is working hard and willing to try.
Work is a place we spend the majority of our living life in the most active age of our life. It has to be at the least "NOT hell". Don't you think?
You can have your beefs with the company, that's fine. But I'd avoid the wholesale characterization of over 200k people -- it's not a good look.
Also nice way of saying, "50 hour weeks are the norm."
I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't scrutinize who they recruit. Please read the post with an open mind and think for yourself whether they have crossed lines of sensibility or not.
"nothing more than misguided condescension from a bystander" - No one is judging Amazon for its x thousand employees. Only its hiring practices. Which is creepy and stupid. I don't need to know everything about the company or its 230K employees to judge their hiring practice.
> As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse.
Nope. Goodbye.
(Although I wouldn't work for Amazon anyway, but now I don't have to do any research if a company brings up "ProctorU").
I had one right out of college where the office (on energy efficient lightning) looked like some cubicle version of hell. A person in the elevator on the way to the interview mouthed "run away" to me, and really creeped me out.
I got the job, but literally couldn't even handle a full day in that cave-like godawful place.
That the electronic equivalent of preventing someone from leaving the building.
Nope, Goodbye.
I feel in that case, it was acceptable. Students were encouraged to get a cheap "burner" windows machine and use it only for the proctored tests, and we were warned in advance of all the restrictions.
> ProctorU currently supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X 10.4 or newer version of those systems. At this time, ProctorU does not support any Linux operating systems such as Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.
edit: but I'd like to see them muck around with my linux.git .config to make sure I'm not cheating.
But it didn't even occur to me that Amazon might be using an interview service that can't handle Linux. One of the best programmers I knew in school was exclusively on Debian, and spent a semester on a cheap Arch machine when his main laptop died. An interview process that completely excludes him is a jaw-droppingly bad one...
Also note windows 10 isn't explicitly on that list. There were problems early on.
To which I would reply "Fuck you and your institution".
Run a binary on my machine ? I think the interview should be over right there and not from my side. If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk.
Is it really so dry out there that people are willing to go through this bullshit to work for Amazon ?
I know some of you are young and inexperienced, but know that you always have the choice to say 'No'. If people mistrust you from the get go - this is the environment you're signing up for. Don't settle for this.
Don't work for Amazon, don't let them establish this bullshit as the norm in the industry.
Trust me, the dream job will come if you know your value.
Absolutely. I'm not surprised the Amazon SDEs are fuming about this.
I love my job, but reading HN makes me feel like I should hate it. This is a place that told me to "take as much time as I need" when I got married, told me the same thing again when my dad was taken to the hospital two months later, and again when my father-in-law had a heart attack a month after that. I will never forget the kindness I've been shown in one of the most difficult years of my life.
I know that my experience doesn't align with everyone's. But this broad categorization of Amazon employees as "desperate" or "corporate drones" is just false.
People here are criticizing the management, not the engineers.
They are though. I have seen Amazon engineers referred to as "desperate", "morons", and "idiots" in multiple threads here on HN. I'm fine with criticizing management. I encourage it. But criticizing the engineers simply for working here is an unfair generalization.
If Amazon has the wisdom to hear all this criticism, then the company culture should improve and you will all be happier as employees.
If it doesn't, then you'll eventually see it yourself and it will be easier for you to quit.
Note that we actually work for our bosses - and they work for theirs. We don't do company work, we do what our bosses decide we should do. So a corporation is a group of people working on goals set by others.
If you follow the recursion, you'll notice that these changes need to come from the very top, so that's where you need to knock if you want to improve your company's image.
Maybe there was no training video. The test was to see if you'd surrender all privacy, your whole computer and let them waste your whole day on pointless bs. There was no spoon, Neo.
If they only hire a subset of interns this way, how would a full-time candidate have any clue? If a manager doesn't get an intern that had this happen, how would they know?
Okay now most poeple know, it's on HN (and people are pissed apparently according to another commenter here). Do you expect the current employees to up and quit?
I think it's easy to say that "you'd just earn the right to work with a bunch of clueless people", but Amazon is a huge company. Do you expect that all MSFT/GOOG/AAPL/ETC employees keep close tabs on programs that recruiting are using (potentially even testing?) And do you expect that people with mortgages, families, commitments are just going to walk out as soon as they hear about something like that?
I'm not defending Amazon at all here. Something may be wrong if this shit keeps happening (there isn't a faces of google website, for example), but I don't think the burden here is on a lowly SDE or whatnot who is powerless, and in most cases has no clue of the situation.
No, I'm expecting that the people with the most options will start drifting away. You know, the ones they most need. And now we know they won't be hiring any stellar replacements any time soon either.