Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't think it is a good idea to post the actual questions one is asked. As an interviewer, I like to use the same question so I can calibrate across candidates.
My Interviews with Amazon
41–50 of 270 posts
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#42I'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?
No, you aren't wrong. That recruiter did not do a good job. The salary range talk is always up front to ensure that candidates and the company aren't wasting one anothers time. If the process gets to the offer stage, it needs to be in the range discussed up front. It costs me money (in terms of PTO) to come out and interview, and it costs the company thousands in time and expenses to conduct it. That recruiter essentially pissed away a couple grand without any real prospect of hiring. As a hiring manager, I'd be upset about that if it happened in my company.
I had this happen early in my career. Recruiter and I talked about a range, went through 3 rounds of interviews, and I got an offer below what I was currently making. Absolutely not in the discussed range. The offer came via email and I was insulted - I declined without negotiation. I still have the email, and I was apparently pretty polite. A week later they pinged me back to ask if I had considered it, if I was dissatisfied and that they could go up. I just politely restated my decline. They'd already wasted my time, and as junior as I was, my time was still valuable - I took time out of work, traveled, etc. That was almost 10 years ago and I'm still salty about it. That should tell you what kind of impression this behavior leaves behind. Looking back at the emails now, I am very surprised at how professional and polite I was about it - my memories of 20-something me are apparently overblown :)
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#43I'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 the team.
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#44It's wasteful for companies to focus so much on implementing data structures for front-end coding jobs when they're packaged commodities nowadays. If you're going to be building search engines or whatever, OK. And, time complexity questions should be asked. But chances are, the broad majority will end up doing line of business apps that require three data structures of which you will never write a better version than…
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 enough to read the docs and ask intelligent questions.
None of that changes the fact that when my cache blows up in production, I'm going to be in the exact same position as my all-algo-knowing colleague -- scared, grasping at straws, and applying grit to fix the problem.
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 experie…
Say you're making $60k with $40k in expenses. Saving $20k.
You move and now make $120k and your expenses double to $80k. You're saving $40k; twice as much. But in reality, not all of your expenses increase that much, and the other benefits (bonuses, matching, raises, interest, etc.) are % based, so the discrepancy increases quickly.
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#46I'm gonna ignore the fact that this is for Amazon, which has its own criticism. Anybody who is baffled by the author's insistence on $170-200k but the offer of low 6 figures needs to read up on negotiation. I recommend the various videos/books/posts by Ramit Sethi that are specific to salary negotiation.
If you give the number first, you lose. They will only negotiate downward from there. You can deflect in a million different ways (which are covered by Ramit extensively), and each time you deflect your advantage increases. They can persist in a million different ways ("I'm sorry, this is just procedure" is probably the most common), but if you cave and give them a number, it will only go down from there. If you give them a range, the best offer you will ever get is the low part of the range. Don't give them a number...wait for them to offer, then negotiate upwards.
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#47I'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?
This is how business works -- people will openly lie to you to get what they want. The recruiter most likely knew that number was out of range, but also most likely didn't care, because they probably get paid based on how many people they put through the process that reach some milestone in the interview process.
Recruiters are just sales people. They usually have limited if any tech background and heavy business or sales background. They should be treated skeptically, like any other sales person.
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#48Good 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…
> 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.
Well, perhaps less than double, but still higher overall (except, obviously, stuff on Amazon will probably be the same, as I don't think they've implemented destination-specific pricing.) Gas is definitely higher in California than the national average, and higher in the Bay Area than the statewide average. Vacations will depend on where you want to vacation. Lots of services will be more expensive, because the people selling those services need to make enough money to live in the area. (Similar with goods where locally-sourced labor is a significant factor to the total cost of getting the good to you.)
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
>When I brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged the reputation and their intent to improve. I recently interviewed, one of the interviewers actually brought up the NYT article and said that the retail side is intense, the tech side is more laid back, for whatever that's worth.
I'm sure he did say that ;) but consider that he was not entirely truthful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243
I'm aware that people can say whatever they want and took it with a big pile of salt, just wanted to give another piece of anecdata.
Re: My Interviews with Amazon
#50Interesting, 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…
Interestingly, I opened the Amazon door as a new dev and found something very different than what this post describes. The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to ver…
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.