Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

Post by imtringued » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 9:58 AM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #79

oarabbus_ wrote: post #72

I interviewed with AWS for an analyst/business intelligence engineer role. When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of: select date_trunc('month',datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc('month', datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1 The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. "Don't you need an ad…

These things can always be childish when working with a bad interviewer. I once had an engineer keep interrupting me while I was explaining how sockets work because I wasn't covering small minutia details. Interviewing is an insane process. This is why building networks is more valuable so you're basically being interviewed by people you've already worked with.

Post by sokoloff » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 11:43 AM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #244

kmarc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens everywhere; The superstar software developer (no) who knows everything (no) gets to interview you, and sometimes they are simply not right. Your story reminds me my ~7th (?) interview with Google where for LRU caching I mentioned Java's LinkedHashMap; which resulted in he explaining me "what a ridiculous, memory-wasting data structure would that be!" - and going on for a good 5 more minutes bashing my la…

My story: an interviewer stubbornly insisted that my code had to be O(n^2) because it had an inner loop, even though the inner loop was only iterating over the substructure of each element, rather than every pair of elements, and then demonstrated that he had no idea how to resolve a disagreement of that kind, and then immediately vetoed me from the rest of the day's interviews. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquest…

Post by kmarc » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #320

kmarc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens everywhere; The superstar software developer (no) who knows everything (no) gets to interview you, and sometimes they are simply not right. Your story reminds me my ~7th (?) interview with Google where for LRU caching I mentioned Java's LinkedHashMap; which resulted in he explaining me "what a ridiculous, memory-wasting data structure would that be!" - and going on for a good 5 more minutes bashing my la…

I've (nicely) reported interviewers like this to the recruiter. If other feedback comes back good, they might look back on the interviewer's past feedback, and they might request a follow-up interview. > I continuously refused all their recruiters since then. Even the almighty Google has people who don't know what they're talking about. Unless they're all like that, I'd write it off as a fluke. It's an embarrassing f…

Post by duggan » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

soVeryTired wrote: post #246

gtsteve wrote: post #106

I once met a guy who was a programmer for a hedge fund. The strategies and knowledge he had would be very useful to competitors. They didn't have a non-compete agreement in the contract, as this is almost never enforceable here, instead he agreed to a six month notice period - after working two months' notice they then paid four months' salary for him to take a holiday while his knowledge became less and less useful…

I got a couple of months' gardening leave (as it's known in the industry). The most senior guys would typically get six months off work: three paid, three unpaid. It's just an industry-standard way of doing things. I didn't leave for a competitor but still got a paid vacation (though in principle I was "on call" while I was on the books). To be honest, it sort of felt like a courtesy they extended rather than a means…

Post by shados » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #88

shados wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. 5 years is pretty darn high by tech company standard, as people already mentioned. Partly because of the culture of "you have to jump ship to make more money and promotions", but even the most employee friendly company will barely edge that, just because software engineers have a huge "grass is greener" syndrome.

>just because software engineers have a huge "grass is greener" syndrome "Grass is greener" is a strange label to use for the ability of even mediocre developers to get $50K+ raises by switching jobs, while the industry as a whole remains myopic about giving comparable pay increases to existing employees.