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My Interviews with Amazon

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Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#241

Post by amzn-336495 »

Phlarp wrote: post #83

Hearing that the recruiter more or less committed to a 170K+ range, only to waste significant amounts of interviewee time before rendering a below market offer is really concerning. Amazon is in direct competition for talent with Google, Facebook and Microsoft and from what information I can gather they all pay significantly more while also lacking the bad reputation Amazon has accrued over the years for being a comp…

Amazon is not in direct competition with those companies. Amazon bottom feeds on new grad hires, people with restrictive visas, and interns. Their 90th percentile pay for developers is going to be about $120k per year with maybe a $150k total comp target. They may hire a few dozen top people per year, but for the most part no one ever quits those companies to go to Amazon.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#242

Post by derefr »

serge2k wrote: post #228
derefr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had points in my programming career where I felt completely burnt out. I would open up a text-editor and just stare at it. I didn't want to create. But, separately from programming, I absolutely love teaching/mentoring. I found that, if I was helping someone with a programming problem, I could code just fine while burnt out. As long as someone else was doing "the programming"—the part involving wanting to create…

Justify to me why you shouldn't be replaced by someone who has comparable skills, but doesn't rely entirely on pair programming? I can't hand you an important task and expect it to get done unless I give you a second resource? You are talking about burnout. Would you really walk into an interview and respond to a coding question with "Oh, you'll have to write with me directing because I only pair program"? I'm going…

1. Why are you assuming that my job description would/should be "engineer"? Why not, say, QA lead?

2. Why hand me the task? Why not hand someone else the task, and I'll wander in and make sure they get it done twice as quickly? Why does everyone need to be modellable as a task-queue that atomic problem-statements can be dropped into?

You don't expect, say, your office manager to program; but you do expect that, by hiring an office manager, more programming will get done, because now your programmers aren't running out to buy drinks for the fridge and toilet paper.

3. Remember that I did say that I could get work done by pair-programming with an intern, not an employee. The phrase "second resource" implies that you're imagining yourself handing me someone who you could get Hard Problems done on their own. My point was that, with a few people like me around, you could mostly just "hire" people (often for free!) who have no idea how to get Hard Problems—or even Regular Problems—done, and me and my type of person would guide them and the work would get done in the process.

This is usually known, in the trades, as an apprentice system. Apprentices do all the "work", you know. They're the hands that build most things that get built. Masters just stand there guiding those hands.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#243

Post by [deleted] »

cookiecaper wrote: post #69
perspectivep wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proof is in the pudding. My savings are growing at an astronomically higher rate than it was in the Midwest. I used to tell myself the same thing before I moved.

It really depends on the individual situation. The biggest cost variance is in housing. In the Midwest, you can get a 2,500 sq ft home for ~1.3k +/- $350. [0] Under normal leasing standards (no more than 1/3rd your income to rent), you can pay that if you have a job in the $50k-$60k range. And that's almost the standard -- big houses and big yards for everyone. In LA or SEA, you're looking at 2.5x-4x that, which is a…

[deleted]

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#244

Post by bastijn »

I read a lot of comments on bad behaviour of Amazon, which might be. Also a comment series on the lowball offer and wasting his time if there wouldn't be an offer in the 170k range. Also true.

But I think it is in order to tell the author of the story as well not to waste their time. This time it's Amazon who most of us don't like, but in generic it could be any company. If your main reason for not going has nothing to do with the offer or job itself but only with something you could, and should have considered beforehand you effectively wasted the companies time, not the other way around. They gave you a free test.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#245

Post by abbasaamer »

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…

This.

I'm a hiring manager at Amazon (in natural language on Alexa). One thing I can say about Amazon culture is that teams can vary quite a bit. This is because Amazon gives a huge amount of ownership to each team, which naturally means each team's leadership has a lot of control on their culture.

Amazon does try to instill certain cultural elements across the company, but despite that, things can vary based on the leadership and the part of the company you're in. Prior to Alexa, I was in supply chain systems and I would say the culture there was quite different there.

Personally speaking, I really enjoy this team. It's definitely not a meat grinder; on the contrary, I think our team has great work-life balance while providing sufficient challenges to keep us motivated.

By the way, I'm sorry to hear some of the negative stories from others about their interviews. That's certainly not deliberate; our goal is to create a positive experience for every candidate irrespective of whether or not they successfully clear the interview. I personally work with some very professional and courteous recruiters on Alexa, but if anyone has had a negative experience interviewing for Alexa, I'd be happy to follow up and see if I can take some action on your feedback.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#246

Post by greenleafjacob »

johnwheeler wrote: post #44
dominotw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but programmer has to know what ds/algorithm to choose, of course you can look up complexities and stuff but it doesn't help in cases where performance tuning of caches ect is necessary. you have to understand what that particular algorithm/ds is actually doing to tune it properly.

Your example of performance tuning caches is a perfect. It's enough to generally know about caches. Databases have query caches. Memcache and Redis are memory caches. Retrieval is O(1) because they're based on hashes. You can influence object expiration and turn on LRU. I can't implement a cache with LRU by the seat of my pants though, but I'm experienced enough to know you shouldn't do that anyways. And, I know enou…

Wow, I could not agree more. What you are calling grit is massively under-measured in the current bullshit whiteboarding interviews for software developers today.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#247

Post by mter »

kafkaesq wrote: post #221
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.

Hard work, get it. But what about the stories of people bringing their laptops into the bathroom stalls (which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff)? And once there, talking to each other about work stuff while doing, you know, their "business"? Taken together, these anecdotes paint a picture of a company that's not just hard-driven, but...…

> But what about the stories of people bringing their laptops into the bathroom stalls

There's no where else to put it if you need to go to the bathroom and you take your laptop. I mean, some people just leave it at the sink but eh. But laptop into a stall to work? No.

> which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff

Most of the buildings weren't owned by amazon. So they have a normal amount of stalls. Which is a problem on the floors with lots of devs because we have the normal dev demographics.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#248

Post by johnwheeler »

greenleafjacob wrote: post #246
johnwheeler wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your example of performance tuning caches is a perfect. It's enough to generally know about caches. Databases have query caches. Memcache and Redis are memory caches. Retrieval is O(1) because they're based on hashes. You can influence object expiration and turn on LRU. I can't implement a cache with LRU by the seat of my pants though, but I'm experienced enough to know you shouldn't do that anyways. And, I know enou…

Wow, I could not agree more. What you are calling grit is massively under-measured in the current bullshit whiteboarding interviews for software developers today.

Thanks. Another name for it is StackOverflow :-P

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#249

Post by jwalker14 »

jgn wrote: post #125
ryanlm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll work for them in a heartbeat. Seriously, I want to work somewhere where I'm never bored, and can take part in conversations, etc. It seems like a good place for an ambitious new grad for a few years. If there are any Amazon employees reading this, please reach out!

I'd be happy to get you into the interview process, or at least point you in the right direction. My experience at Amazon has been great. I don't know anyone who cries at their desk, works 80 hours per week, or feels like they're being pushed through a meat grinder. I worked for Microsoft before Amazon, and that was brutal. You'll find bad teams at every large company. One of my friends was on one at Google.

I'd take you up on that offer. I'd love to have a third crack at it.

I've had two coding challenges within that last year. One for an internship and one for a full time position (earlier today no reply yet don't expect one). The problem for me is I freeze. As soon as the "testing" type pressure gets put on I go cold and freeze. Then as soon as the test is over I can pull alllllll the information forward. It sucks because I struggle with CS exams too. Every time I have a test I freeze until I'm out of time and as soon as I leave a room it all comes back.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#250

Post by 1anh2kqowg »

cookiecaper wrote: post #69
perspectivep wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proof is in the pudding. My savings are growing at an astronomically higher rate than it was in the Midwest. I used to tell myself the same thing before I moved.

It really depends on the individual situation. The biggest cost variance is in housing. In the Midwest, you can get a 2,500 sq ft home for ~1.3k +/- $350. [0] Under normal leasing standards (no more than 1/3rd your income to rent), you can pay that if you have a job in the $50k-$60k range. And that's almost the standard -- big houses and big yards for everyone. In LA or SEA, you're looking at 2.5x-4x that, which is a…

>(In SF or NYC, you probably can't obtain a comparable living situation, but a 2500 sq ft apartment apparently runs around $15k/mo, meaning you'd have to make almost $1M/yr to barely afford one)

I'm not sure where you are getting this from. The mcmansion trend hit the bay area just as much as it hit anywhere else. The burbs are 20-30 minutes away with tech worker job hours. The 2500 sqft homes here cost a million dollars, so your mortgage cancels out the additional bay area income. But that mortgage money doesn't go into a black hole, it's equity. So at the end of the day you can sell your bay area house, go back to oklahoma, and buy ten houses. This is probably the best opportunity going in the world right now to build dynastic wealth.

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