I was given an offer from Amazon with a BA in a completely unrelated field. They never even asked about my education. This was for a Front End Engineer role though, not sure if that makes a difference.
Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#12Imagine you are talking about an Amazon SDE (software development engineer) or similar role, and not just the warehouse workers, the latter of which I would seriously hope could care less about your advanced education. My experience with Amazon's SDE hiring process has been pretty disappointing. It's a lot like Google's, where they bring in a bunch of devs and managers to tech-screen you, with nothing more than a "ra…
Thank you for the response. That's good to know. I don't understand why interviewing isn't just, "Did you work yesterday? Great. Open up your laptop and show me the code you wrote yesterday."
A few reasons it's not like that:
1. The person interviewing you is often less experienced and skilled than they let on. They can't make sense of your code, not because it's not any good, but because they don't code at your skill level in that language.
2. Showing off code, while making for a better interview than the behavioral stuff that passes for interviewing at the bigs, still isn't all that great a tool. There are a lot of people who might show it off, and might even talk the talk, but who didn't write all of it and might not even understand it.
3. The code is secondary to the job. How you come up with the code is primary to the job, and showing off code doesn't show off how you came up with it. Even the best code ever would be a bad hire if it took you six months to come up with it or annoyed your fellow devs for months in coming up with it.
4. The way you're used to coding will be different than the culture of the new firm. It just is. If hired, you're going to adapt to it, not the other way around.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#13I have an associates and did a stint with Amazon. That comes with a caveat. I interviewed for a senior software engineer, and got placed as a system engineer. With an understanding that I'd move to software within six months. That never came to pass, and I found it was due to my lack of education. I had been in the field for ~7 years at this point and was a team lead / architect for the past ~2 years. So yes it can b…
That's kind of disheartening. I want to be a software engineer. I love writing code.
So write code! You don't need to work at Amazon or Google to be a software engineer. I've been independent my whole career and I'm working on multiple things that aren't mired in bureaucratic nonsense. The more code you write on your terms the more you can understand how long things take. You can identify opportunities and build or improve on them.
Edit, from another HN post about Tim Cook saying you don't need a degree: Cook also added that about half of Apple's US employment last year was made up of people who did not have a four-year degree.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for the response. That's good to know. I don't understand why interviewing isn't just, "Did you work yesterday? Great. Open up your laptop and show me the code you wrote yesterday."
A few reasons it's not like that: 1. The person interviewing you is often less experienced and skilled than they let on. They can't make sense of your code, not because it's not any good, but because they don't code at your skill level in that language. 2. Showing off code, while making for a better interview than the behavioral stuff that passes for interviewing at the bigs, still isn't all that great a tool. There…
Ok. How about, "Show me your personal git commit log from yesterday?" That deals with most of 2 and 3—granted not all of the scenarios.
As for 1, there are many languages and frameworks that I wouldn't be able to say if they used best practices for, but I think I could generally recognize good vs. bad code with no prior knowledge of the language.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few reasons it's not like that: 1. The person interviewing you is often less experienced and skilled than they let on. They can't make sense of your code, not because it's not any good, but because they don't code at your skill level in that language. 2. Showing off code, while making for a better interview than the behavioral stuff that passes for interviewing at the bigs, still isn't all that great a tool. There…
Ok. How about, "Show me your personal git commit log from yesterday?" That deals with most of 2 and 3—granted not all of the scenarios. As for 1, there are many languages and frameworks that I wouldn't be able to say if they used best practices for, but I think I could generally recognize good vs. bad code with no prior knowledge of the language.
Most people don't make commits to their "personal git" every day. Or even every week. Or hell, ever.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#16I was hired without a BS. I had 4 years prior experience and applied as a SDE. I got hired as a support engineer and stayed for two years. When I told my manager switching to SDE they said the path was support -> SRE -> Sysadmin -> SDE. I'm now at a different company.
So yeah, they do hire folks without degrees, but it's one of those "don't know the position/team until after the interview" type of deals and it's tough to change roles internally.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of disheartening. I want to be a software engineer. I love writing code.
So write code! You don't need to work at Amazon or Google to be a software engineer. I've been independent my whole career and I'm working on multiple things that aren't mired in bureaucratic nonsense. The more code you write on your terms the more you can understand how long things take. You can identify opportunities and build or improve on them. Edit, from another HN post about Tim Cook saying you don't need a deg…
He's hiring a lot of non-devs lately. When I look at the new hire emails for software devs I see a lot more master's than bachelor's - none without a degree. That's anecdotal though, so it might just be my department.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#18It is possible. As others said, you will have a somewhat of a tough time getting an interview, but if you get one and nail it, you will get an offer just the same. As to how to get an interview in such situation? - be very proactive and find alternative ways to get your resume in front of the eyes of engineers or engineering managers. If you rely only on submitting through the standard Jobs page, your resume will most likely never make it through the layers of automated software and recruiters filtering. Find a friend that works in one of these companies and ask them to help you out, lurk in the groups where employes frequent and try to make a name for yourself, make sure one of your apps is moderately successful and meets a need for one of these companies.
Note that getting an offer is also contingent on your eligibility to work in US. If you are not a US citizen or a green card holder, the requirements to get an H1 visa are to have the equivalent of four years of education, where each three years of work experience counted as a year of education. (There are other H1 class visas, but they are not as common in the computer industry) But the company has to like you really a lot to go through the trouble in that case...
And since you managed to pique my interest, Id be curious to look at your resume. I'll leave out the part of figuring out how to send it (without it being caught by the junk filters) as an exercise to you. Shouldn't be that hard..
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#19I don’t think they care. When I applied, the recruiter specifically mentioned it’s factory style recruitment process. They just put you through the grinder and then assign you a team. As long as you are comfortable being hire like this, you should get an interview. They also try to push you to Sde2 no matter how senior you are. It’s to save cost. I rejected their follow up request. Other companies have a better recruitment process without treating candidates like an object.
Re: Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?
#20They don’t care. Study basic data structures and alogrithums.