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Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

rajk.me

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Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#151

Post by manacit »

djsumdog wrote: post #130
manacit wrote: post #94

By all means, this is not unique to Amazon - not that it makes it any better. I did a post-grad interview for Epic (epic.com - healthcare software) in a similar fashion, that was at least as draconian. After passing a 15 minute phone screen, they sent me a link to a service that: * Installed their proprietary software on my Mac * Connected me to a real person who verified my DL against who they were expecting * Had m…

That is a terrible process. I've never been asked that by anyone. The most I've had are some remote interviews where they use something like codepen (on-line group REPL)and they ask you a question and watch you write/run it. In one of them, my interviewer was a little late and found me trying to open .. and /. I could get a file list of a root file system. There was a file in / titled something like HACKING.txt and e…

They are a big company that operates with a fairly proprietary set of programming language and tools (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS), and they hire a good number of people right out of undergraduate degrees. I remember there being a large proportion of non-CS students from across the country there interviewing for engineering positions.

What they're looking for, I think, is not necessarily your ability to "hack" and program, but that you fit the mold of someone they can put through a rigorous 6 week (or more? I forget) training program that will teach you the basics of their stack, and then have you banging away.

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#152

Post by flukus »

manacit wrote: post #94

By all means, this is not unique to Amazon - not that it makes it any better. I did a post-grad interview for Epic (epic.com - healthcare software) in a similar fashion, that was at least as draconian. After passing a 15 minute phone screen, they sent me a link to a service that: * Installed their proprietary software on my Mac * Connected me to a real person who verified my DL against who they were expecting * Had m…

How long until the latest phishing scam is promising people job interviews?

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#154

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

hermitdev wrote: post #102
SilasX wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that, for the vast majority of the population, it has the intended effect of keeping the calculator from storing digital cheat sheets. I admire your tenacity too.

I do not disagree with your assessment, but it was a great motivator for me to learn z80 assembly. I just wish I knew how to use the stack. Modern me shudders at how horrible that code was - it worked, but god damn was it ugly. I still have the Z80 assembly reference manual on my bookshelf. It just hasn't been opened in close to 20 years. I've never had a physical x86(_64) reference manual, but I usually keep PDFs ha…

I know Z80, more or less, but it's hard to get your hands on the link cable for a TI-83+ where I live.

I'll probably have to order one off Amazon at some point.

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#155

Post by riazrizvi »

kafkaesq wrote: post #18

The following information will be collected during the duration of the exam: Your microphone Your webcam Your physical location Your head movements Your eye movements Your mouth movements Creepy as all get-out. By all means, lets have more leaks like this.

I think it's a bit silly to get so worked up about this. The test is simply to gauge programming skill in an online test, and they want to check you are not cheating. Though I think they could have worded it without freaking people out: "You are going to be video monitored during the test".

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#156

Post by c3534l »

I don't really care much about amazon because I hear they monopolize your life and have an aggressive culture. However, I do like me some puzzles:

1. The passage is about the good and bad of fanfiction which is posted on the internet. I pedantically disagree with the exact reading of response 2, but it's the correct one, I believe.

2. Only conclusion 1 is necessarily true, because of the transitive property of inequalities; X ? Y and Z/Y can be rewritten as X 3. These kinds of spot-the-pattern questions are incredibly arbitrary. However, the most obvious thing to associate with the alphabet is a numerical association with the letters based on it's placement in the common (but not universal) ordering of the Latin alphabet. When you do that, you see that UVS is the only sequence of letters that aren't "descending" even though letters can't truly be ordered.

4. The No Free Lunch Theorem says that no statistical method can find a pattern on the set of all possible inputs, which is why these questions are all bullshit, mathematically speaking. The only thing that makes 4 a better next step for the sequence 1, 2, 3, is that our own personal experience tells us that counting is fairly common, but enumerating the squarefree numbers isn't. You could also make the case that 27:24 has the pattern of 3^3:3^3-3, so maybe 64:x is 4^3:4^3-4 making it 60, but this doesn't feel in any way obvious to me, so I have no idea what they're thinking.

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#157

Post by kuschku »

runarb wrote: post #45
brianwawok wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, having another computer? I literally have 12 computers or phones in my house. Could I not use another one if I needed to cheat that badly?

They may catch you if they replay * Your webcam video * Your head movements * Your eye movements * Your mouth movements that was all collected during the test.

Not necessarily.

You can use an HDMI splitter, and merge the videos of the two computers. As overlay. You can also program the second computer to have a mouse controlled by a single muscular activation in your cheek or tongue – for example, if you have a tongue piercing, put a magnet in, use a phone to recognize the magnetic field, tape the phone below your desk (it’ll measure the difference from movement), and connect that to the PC.

No way to recognize it for them, and you circumvented it entirely.

They’re trying to fight against people whose job is to circumvent weird complicated restrictions, and finding workarounds.

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#158

Post by nilved »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #4

Wait, I see nothing wrong with any of this. Obviously Amazon is trying to curb cheating on remote coding/compatibility tests. They don't actually care to collect any info about you beyond what you do during the test. They don't care which websites you visit before or after the test. Or how you use your clipboard - after the test. But during the test, it's not so unreasonable. People do cheat, especially if they can g…

What you're saying is "I have nothing to hide." Don't let them get their foot in the door.

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#159

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

jackfrodo wrote: post #80
morganvachon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a practical sense, it's not much different from a math instructor having you clear the memory on your graphing calculator before an exam; it's an anti-cheating measure and given that this is an online assessment, it almost makes sense. However, from a philosophical point of view, it's Draconian and unnerving. What assurance does the interviewee have that Amazon isn't storing and using all this telemetry? Amazon is…

In the future, could you not use the phrase "bend over"? I don't think it has a place on HN.

...Aparently, HN disagrees.

Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience

#160

Post by Cyph0n »

rickycook wrote: post #145
Cyph0n wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I somehow felt that people were going to read that last sentence and forget everything before it. Bad call keeping it in I guess.

well, as i said in another comment as well, if your questions can be answered by a quick web search, then maybe they should think about how you actually work; you web search a LOT. ask questions that filter on something less obvious there are still in person stages; this is just a filter for them. it's not like it's the only data you get to hire or not hire someone

Why is everyone assuming that a cheater will only do a "quick web search"? You could call someone to walk you through it over Skype, or get a person to solve it over remote desktop, or even have a friend sit in and do it for you, etc.

These are the cases where monitoring is needed. Whether or not what Amazon is doing is actually effective is another issue entirely. All I'm saying is that it's not as huge a deal as a lot of people on this thread are making it out to be.

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