Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

Not in India, but a good opportunity to share my experience interviewing for a Software Engineer role with a team in AWS that was part of a recent acquisition (CloudEndure):

After the interview was scheduled, I had some questions but up to this point, I didn't have any human interaction with the interviewer. It took almost two weeks to schedule a call with my recruiter (mostly because she wasn't great at responding to emails). During that, she explained that this specific team (CloudEndure) had a different hiring process: I was to have two 90 (!) minutes interviews on separate days, after which it'll be decided whether they'd like to continue my interview process within that team, recycle me with another team or reject me. The content of each interview, she told me, was to include Amazon Leadership Principles, algorithms/data structures and possibly some system design (the main SDI interview is only in a later stage).

While I was preparing for the LP principles and the more standard parts of the interview, another Amazon recruiter contacted me and scheduled an interview to another group. Few days later he told me that since I already had an interview with Cloudendure schedule, and sinc "all interviews in amazon are uniform and have the same 45 minutes format", he'll cancel the interview that he scheduled and we can talk after my interview with Cloudendure. I reached back and asked whether anything has changed regarding Cloudendure's interview format and he apologized, explaining that he didn't knew they had a different format.

The interview itself: as the interview started I learned that the guy who was interviewing me wasn't the guy I thought was going to interview me but someone from his team who filled in for him (later I learned that day US-East had a major outage which I guess was the reason for this). The 2nd thing he mentioned was "we won't do any leadership principles on this interview things". At that point I realized I just spend few days working on my stories, linking them back with each LP, but I let it pass.

He dedicated 30-40 min to explain what the team is doing, then 5-10 more minutes where I went over my experience with him.

Then came the technical part:

The algorithmic problem was rather easy and I was familiar with it so I let him know of the latter, allowing him to choose whether he want to hear the gist and switch to another question or let me solve it as if I never saw it before. He chose neither and instead questioned me as to who told me about this question, which was an awkward way to ask where I met this problem, regardless of the problem itself which is rather common (easy LC question). As per his instruction, I continued to solve that question, where the tricky part are the possible inputs for parsing a string, so I went over all the edge cases prior to writing any code, proceeded by explaining my idea of how I'd solve it, then coding it while explaining what I was doing, and finally traced an example input by hand.

The interviewer then proceeded to the 2nd question which was more vague and consisted of a system given as a synchronous single machine, single threaded black box, on top of which I had to implement undo/redo. I won't go into all the details here but I went from a naive space inefficient solution to an optimal solution, making sure I don't cause any infinite feedback loops.

The interviewer and I were discussing the possible solutions through out the 2nd question. He did provide me with hints seemed happy with my solution and by the end asked me if I could allocate few more minutes where we continued discussing different designs.

The interview in total took 2 hours and 5 minutes (!!), 35 minutes over time and I thought I did great, the interviewer seemed to like my approach to problem solving.

Two days later I got an email that they "have decided to continue with other candidates". I was confused since the recruiter clearly mentioned that such decision was to be taken only after the 2nd interview, and so I emailed her, asking to schedule a call sometime that week. She didn't answer my (two) emails nor my two phone calls.

I contacted the other group recruiter too. He answered promptly and told me that he'll try to check if he can see whether he can schedule another interview for me, but few days later he apologized, saying that he can't nor does he have access to anything within the team that I was interviewing with.

I was very frustrated with that experience, most of all, by not knowing why I failed the interview. I have interviewed successfully and unsuccessfully with FAANG in the past, but never got zero feedback and complete ghosting from the recruiter.

This jives with what I observed as an intern some on an AWS team some years ago. The oncall rotations seemed absolutely brutal and the engineers were so busy and stressed out fighting fires that they barely noticed my existence (which I was okay with) and the tech debt kept accumulating between because between new feature launches and firefighting there wasn't much scope for anything else.

My intern project was a fairly no brainer tech debt item that automated a lot of the deployment process and saved our lead engineer several hours a week in babysitting deploys. I resolved to never work on a cloud infra team after that -- while the internship was fine, being a full time engineer seemed absolutely miserable.

The money is probably the thing that keeps most people in the job, but it's not like willingness to take a pay cut magically makes jobs fall into your lap, either. It expands the pool of companies you could possibly work for, sure, but everything else above that I said still applies.

There's also rarely a guarantee that the new company you're trying to join is significantly better, and companies intentionally make it difficult to get the inside scoop on work-life balance/on-call responsibilities until after you're hired. Personally, I would love to find a new company to join... but my experience interviewing is that it takes months of effort for a potential pay cut and no guarantee that I won't just end up in another shitty situation and paid less, so I struggle deciding if it's actually worth it.

OP made no mention of software and mentioned Sun and Motorola, so I don't think they made any point specifically about software.

It may also be relevant to point out that Amazon is first and foremost a retailer, unlike the other companies mentioned.

I don’t think they do, but it’s a way to smear and make all Amazon engineers unemployable by proxy. I already have difficulties finding interviews at good companies because the Amazon name implies IBM level talent instead of Google level talent.