201–210 of 270 posts
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Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?
Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about, it's just extremely rapid growth.
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I'm pretty sure I had to sign NDAs regarding coding questions before any interviews happened (not Amazon, a different company).
What are they going to do? Take you to court for vaguely describing a coding question?
It's the difference between a polite "this offer doesn't work for me at the moment", and burning your bridges.
(However, this particular article doesn't seem to discuss any specifics of technical questions, so I don't see an issue here)
/shrug A week after the second screen, I got sent a form letter "no" from my recruiter, which was just fine by me. I've accepted an offer from a rival of theirs and I can't wait to kick their asses.
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I applied to amazon last month, they asked me to do interviewstreet coding for 2 hrs. After that Recruiter didn't even have the minimum courtesy to let me know what happened. He simply stopped all communications with me. Reflects their attitude of treating ppl as mere 'resources' , I would work for amazon if I have no self-respect.
Ex Amazon here: that's not supposed to happen.
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When I've seen this with people interviewing in Amazon, it's generally because they're tagged to a higher level position, and during the interview, they decide they're not a fit at that level, but possibly at the one below it. i.e., he might have originally been interviewing for an SDEII position, but they felt his skill-set was closer to what they look for in an SDEI, but still wanted to make him an offer to join th…
The comments in the original blog post suggests a gap of 60k with the offer. Your comment makes sense only if he was interviewing for a Principal Engineer position or something, but instead was offered an SDE-I position. Plus I'm pretty sure very few (if any) non-Principal SDEs at Amazon actually get 200K in the first year.
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Bezos set a mandate to HR a few years ago that he wanted them to be able to hire a new grad without ever needing to speak to a human engineer. That is, he wants the entire interview process automated (specifically for new grads, at least for now). What you experienced is part of their experiment in figuring out how to make this work. They've got a number of variations of interviews going on right now. I believe this…
> without ever needing to speak to a human engineer That would be one way to remove bias from the process. I've often thought college admissions should be done in a blind manner. Applications go to a subcommittee that removes all race/gender clues from it, then the scrubbed applications go to the admissions committee.
I'm gonna ignore the fact that this is for Amazon, which has its own criticism. Anybody who is baffled by the author's insistence on $170-200k but the offer of low 6 figures needs to read up on negotiation. I recommend the various videos/books/posts by Ramit Sethi that are specific to salary negotiation. If you give the number first, you lose. They will only negotiate downward from there. You can deflect in a million…
I'm gonna ignore the fact that this is for Amazon, which has its own criticism. Anybody who is baffled by the author's insistence on $170-200k but the offer of low 6 figures needs to read up on negotiation. I recommend the various videos/books/posts by Ramit Sethi that are specific to salary negotiation. If you give the number first, you lose. They will only negotiate downward from there. You can deflect in a million…
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Interestingly, I opened the Amazon door as a new dev and found something very different than what this post describes. The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to ver…
My webcam doesn't work in Linux; and you won't find me programming in Windows under ordinary conditions. I guess I can't work at amazon?
The first reason he lists for declining the offer; salary was too low relative to housing prices.