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My Interviews with Amazon

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Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#31

Post by gdulli »

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…

You can find anecdotes about how working at any company is a bad experience and others about how it's a good experience.

With Amazon, however, there's something qualitatively different. The anecdotes and evidence of it being a terrible place to work far outweigh the positive. Its bad reputation is confirmed by things you read about their policies, quotes from Jeff Bezos, etc. Poor treatment of employees is consistent across both the corporate and warehouse contexts. This reputation has persisted since at least 2007, the first time I considered working there and did some research on it.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#32

Post by travisby »

ivraatiems wrote: post #5

Good on the author for making the decision based on his and his family's needs and not "but it's a top-tier company, man, you gotta work for the best be the best do the BEST." People often don't consider cost-of-living when making job decisions. I think the way to do it is to equalize the salaries based on cost-of-living across each company you're considering. So if you make $60,000 in a small midwestern town, that's…

One additional consideration to that - if you're working at a company with a 401k match, 4% of $120k is a lot more in the bank than 4% of $60k. Working (and living) in an expensive area will still make more financial sense than working in a less expensive area - from a retirement standpoint (that's if you move somewhere else in the end for retirement. If you stay where you are it won't balance out)

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#33

Post by perspectivep »

vonmoltke wrote: post #27
perspectivep wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you make $60,000 in a small midwestern town, that's the same as making $120k in Seattle or the Bay Area. Not true at all. I made almost that exact jump when moving from the Midwest to Seattle. You're forgetting things like raises, bonuses, and 401(k) matching that are a % of your salary. Sign-on bonuses and stock benefits are common out here but rare in the Midwest. Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, ot…

> Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs, gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. That is not what I see. Food seems to be about 10% - 15% higher than here in Dallas. Sales tax is slightly higher. Gas is definitely higher (about 20%). Travel from SeaTac is more expensive and less flexible than travel from DFW. I spend maybe $5000/year on online purchases and other thin…

Washington has no state income tax.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#34

Post by ivraatiems »

dgemm wrote: post #29
ivraatiems wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs, gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. I actually spend a lot less on transportation because I can take public transit instead of a car. We were able to sell one of our cars too. That's actually not true. I'm referring to cost-of-living, which includes housing, gas, food, etc. All the things you list. Here's a calculator you c…

The person you are replying to has direct personal experience with this, and you are telling them they are wrong by citing an internet cost of living calculator.

I'm telling them that cost-of-living is a valuable consideration when deciding on a job offer in a different city. They suggested that it wasn't (or maybe misunderstood what I was saying).

I'm not disrespecting their particular experience; it's awesome that their move worked in their favor. But I have interviewed for jobs in cities like SF and I have crunched the numbers on their salaries and so I have direct experience, too. Neither of our stories on their own are proof, they're just anecdotes; cost-of-living calculations are the result of lots of hard data.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#35

Post by vonmoltke »

cookiecaper wrote: post #30
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.

It's much more important to get a smart and adaptable programmer than one who memorized his compsci textbooks. Yes, an understanding of data structures and algorithms can be helpful, but unless messing around in that space is really going to comprise a large percentage of on-the-job duties (and as the grandparent indicated, it's not for 99% of us who can just use the canned implementations from the stdlib), it's stup…

> I'm glad to hear that Amazon kept the textbook-style questions light -- it's not what you usually hear about happening in interviews with big tech companies.

Yeah, this was a pleasant surprise about the process for me.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#36

Post by vonmoltke »

perspectivep wrote: post #33
vonmoltke wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs, gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. That is not what I see. Food seems to be about 10% - 15% higher than here in Dallas. Sales tax is slightly higher. Gas is definitely higher (about 20%). Travel from SeaTac is more expensive and less flexible than travel from DFW. I spend maybe $5000/year on online purchases and other thin…

Washington has no state income tax.

Neither does Texas.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#38

Post by jvehent »

And this is why remote work for tech people is the future.

Timezones are still an issue, but if you're willing to adapt your work hours to meet the majority, being remote allows you to work for fantastic companies without sacrificing your way of life.

Re: My Interviews with Amazon

#39

Post by kentosi »

My experience was the complete opposite. I interviewed for them when they came to Sydney.

The recruiter on LinkedIn said that it was for a senior Java developer role. We even spoke over the phone to go through some of what the role involved.

The actual interviewing process was half a day of being interviewed by various people from different departments, some asking sysops questions, some asking general BA questions, some asking network/IP related questions, and 2 (if I remember correctly) actually asking programming/developer questions.

One was shocked that I didn't have a laptop with me, which was not at all part of the instructions.

The process was nowhere near as organised as what's mentioned in this blog, and this was somewhat recent (late 2015 I think?)

Perhaps their overseas recruitment arm seriously needs better coordination?

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