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My Interviews with Amazon

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Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#191

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

npinski-AWS wrote: post #70
larrik wrote: post #3

Interesting, I get pestered by them constantly, and never actually considered going for it. For one thing, the common sentiment on HN seems to be 'friends don't let friends work for Amazon'. Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. This is as someone completely on the outside who's only heard stories, though. When I…

Everyone's mileage may vary. I've been at Amazon for 3 years in 2 different offices on two different orgs (Vancouver-AWS, Europe-Retail). I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out. (A couple of people I know left because they didn't want to do any oncall at all anymore, but noone was misled, and as far as I know they are not bitter about it) But, the key is that there…

> Everyone's mileage may vary.

In Amazon it can vary quite a lot across countries, cities, teams.

> I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out.

I met plenty. Heavy on-call rotations being the primary reason. Many people were quite bitter about the real VS claimed on-call load.

But again, I agree that this varies a lot.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#192

Post by brown9-2 »

Buge wrote: post #114
magic_beans wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if one has accepted the offer, which, spoiler alert , this guy did not.

I'm pretty sure I had to sign NDAs regarding coding questions before any interviews happened (not Amazon, a different company).

Did the NDA specifically refer to the interview process?

Usually they mention any sort of business practices or plans you might learn about in the course of interviewing; recruitment is highly unlikely to fall under that definition.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#193

Post by rohitnair »

ytanotheramzn wrote: post #43
hellogoodbyeeee wrote: post #12

I'm a little confused. The recruiter said that $170-$200k was an acceptable range. Then they offered him the position for significantly less than that. I don't understand why he even considered the offer. I would have been really upset that they wasted my time with a bait and switch. Am wrong for feeling that way? Are there other factors to consider?

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.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#194

Post by logfromblammo »

SonicSoul wrote: post #109

Great write-up! I'd love to see the linked in profile that generates such great leads. I've tried to improve and polish my linked in profile but still not hearing from recruiters. I must be doing something horribly wrong

If you are on LinkedIn and have not been contacted by recruiters, I would suggest that you go ahead and get that face tattoo removed, then replace that profile picture of you committing several capital crimes at once with a boring headshot (the photographic kind) of yourself in business attire.

Statistically speaking, after the first week or so, you should have at least been pinged by a bot or two.

Perhaps your profile should explicitly say that you are a live human with a pulse?

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#195

Post by thecodeboss »

SonicSoul wrote: post #109

Great write-up! I'd love to see the linked in profile that generates such great leads. I've tried to improve and polish my linked in profile but still not hearing from recruiters. I must be doing something horribly wrong

Hi - Here it is https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkrauss48

While I got recruited about 10 months ago, all the information should be the same (besides a new job).

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#196

Post by VLM »

freyir wrote: post #130
aianus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did an internship there and didn't see catch a glimpse of the sun for three straight months. I've never been so depressed in my life. That's the main reason; it also smells like pee, there are aggressive hobos everywhere, the public transit is useless, it rains every day, and everything closes at 6pm.

> it also smells like pee, there are aggressive hobos everywhere, the public transit is useless As a San Francisco resident who recently visited Seattle, I was amazed by how much less it smelled like pee (and other human waste), how polite the hobos were, and how efficient the public transportation was. It seemed like some kind of gleaming urban utopia, although I did visit on warm sunny days.

Apparently I'm not missing much by skipping the whole "new urbanism" thing.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#197

Post by btilly »

wernercd wrote: post #71
jc4p wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have just under ten years of experience and lead teams of developers, Amazon routinely spams me asking me to do 120 min online coding tasks before even a phone screen too. It's just fucking disrespectful of my time, to be honest.

I'm at a new job where the "old team" of two developers is being replaced by 5 devs... the old team had ~15 years of experience and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Not saying anything about YOU... experience is important... but 15 years experience doesn't mean 15 years of good experience or lack of bad habits.

The classic phrase describing this is, There is a world of difference between 10 years of experience, and 1 year of experience 10 times.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#198

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

serge2k wrote: post #183
justinv wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at Amazon (non-tech; 3 different orgs; so literally NYTimes' focus or whatnot). Your first paragraph is exactly how I describe Amazon to people. You either love the culture - or you hate it. There are very few people I know who are ambivalent about working there. It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone.

> It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone. It's needlessly hard and too much of it is unimportant. Do you really think people at Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc... aren't working hard? Aren't working on things they think are important? The job isn't demanding? Yet the horror stories consistently come from Amazon.

The company has a pattern of bruteforcing through problems using lots of sweat instead of thinking and planning more. Almost ironically, Amazon has a principle called "Bias for Action".

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#199

Post by asuffield »

SonicSoul wrote: post #109

Great write-up! I'd love to see the linked in profile that generates such great leads. I've tried to improve and polish my linked in profile but still not hearing from recruiters. I must be doing something horribly wrong

The only plausible way for this to happen is for you to check all the "privacy" buttons in the settings, so that no recruiters can find you. Otherwise you should expect to receive a lot of recruiter spam.
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