Sounds like sour grapes to me.
Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
361–370 of 441 posts
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took a test with ProctorU a few months ago for my university class. It didn't seem creepy at all. They installed LogMeIn and watched my webcam, but as soon as the exam was over they disabled both. It's just a way of making sure there isn't any cheating.
I can't believe what I'm reading. A university installed effectively spyware on your device, to watch you as you were sitting an exam? I sat about a dozen university exams in the last couple of years and in no instance did I have someone staring at my face, or peeking over my shoulder, during them. There were always supervisors in the theater, but they mostly walked along the aisles of desks and made sure to be unobt…
Had the same experience. I passed my PRINCE2 (similar to PMP certification in the US) with ProctorU from my home.
I connected with a Lady via cam and she asked me to show via cam in a 360 style if I had anything else in the room I was in (books, someone helping,etc).
Took the exam after that and passed it. It is a bit unusual but very very convinient. If I had to take the exam physically somewhere I would have needed to take a day off.
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#363I think stuff like this is only acceptable, morally and perhaps legally, if they tell you what they uncover / discover about you with this. That way we can verify it's all above board.
Imagine they put the "eye movements / mouth movements / head movements" through a machine learning system and discover that certain head movements lead to poorer results (or maybe not poorer results, but slightly slower results). Only it turns out these particular head movements, etc. are due to a disability protected by the americans with disabilities act. They may not have fed this into the system directly, but if the decision was made based solely (or primarily) on these things, are they not breaking the law?
And how could it even be traced in this case if the person doesn't yet know they are going to have said disability, but the ML algorithm somehow learned that the person is likely to (for example) become deaf within the next few years.
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was taking exams at university I am certain the professor could monitor my eye and mouth movements. I could also of course be seen at all times as well as any sounds I made were heard . How is this different?
Did your professor store all of this with perfect recall and shared it with who knows how many people?
Was wondering if all this information can be used for Machine Learning by Amazon?
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. I would not consent to that. Then again, I run i3wm atop Linux. Even if I wanted to take such a test, it would be... interesting.
It probably wouldn't break. As long as you're using a modern browser, webapps are just as good at being invasive and tracking all your behavior on Linux as they are on Windows.
It's not that. It's just that the proctor (assuming there is a physical one) would likely be utterly baffled by my DE.
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#366As a developer at Amazon who does interviews, what the fuck? I imagine part of this is a response to the very, very large amount of time we spend interviewing interns every winter (I know I typically do 2 or 3 sessions of 3 1-hour interviews in a row). There's just too many interviews to do. Someone wants to innovate and find ways to sort the good from the bad without SDE time spent, I would guess. I hope this isn't…
> Then again, if it saves me hours and hours of phone screens... aka "I wasn't the one being violated, so I don't care."
It was a joke. I do care. I don't want anyone, especially not people considering joining my team, to feel violated.
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you call it fizzbuzz or pascals triangle and is that how they were able to google it? If you change the parameters to ducky-fuzz (the drinking game variant) and describe the requirements they shouldn't be able to google an answer, at least not a 100% one.
Unless people already know the problem and its original name.
I'd have thought that's a more valuable '+1' than a correct fizzbuzz answer - shows the candidate can recognise a common pattern in a problem, and know the name from being interested enough to hang out on HN, SO, or whatever.
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that even if employers do conduct fizzbuzz, some candidates use someone else's answer.
those are the people you should hire. why would you pay to reinvent the wheel when you really need someone to invent better IAM controls?
Because the point of FizzBuzz is not to get a working FizzBuzz class that can be integrated into an application, it's to see if the candidate can actually produce a working version themselves.
Imagine you're hiring someone to do your taxes. Sure, you'd expect them to use a calculator to do all the hard addition/subtraction, or more likely spreadsheets. But if you asked them to add 5 and 3, and they said "I would use a calculator, this is a stupid question, I can't just tell you off the top of my head" then you're probably not going to hire them.
It's a super basic test of 'Can this person code themselves out a paper bag."
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that even if employers do conduct fizzbuzz, some candidates use someone else's answer.
those are the people you should hire. why would you pay to reinvent the wheel when you really need someone to invent better IAM controls?
Because people who are both incompetent and deceitful are an utter waste of everybody's time, and also a liability?
Re: Software Engineering Internship Amazon Interview Experience
#370The 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.
Is it really creepy? When I interview you in-person I am able to note all of those things if I want to and I can include "Your odor" on the list. They probably just have a legal team somewhere that feels that it is worth disclosing these items that really are common sense in a face-to-face.