401–410 of 441 posts
Let's say if this would not be just for interns but for everyone. Then there would be this second order effect where they filter candidates who don't mind this happening to them. If they keep at it long enough, they'll end up shaping the culture of the company in a certain way. Which may not be the way they'd want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a bit silly to get so worked up about this. The test is simply to gauge programming skill in an online test, and they want to check you are not cheating. Though I think they could have worded it without freaking people out: "You are going to be video monitored during the test".
What the heck is cheating in programming? Do people watch you on a webcam at work to see if you are reading stackoverflow?
It's been a while since I took the GRE and LSAT, which I tutored for a while, but they have questions much like the ones listed here. Some of these tests take place on a computer now, others are still large proctored exams. I'm pretty sure I was fingerprinted before taking them.
I thought that it was potentially illegal to use exams like this to hire, which is why it's convenient to use universities. I'm not so cynical as to believe that universities don't impart valuable knowledge and critical thinking to some of their student. However, the quality of education doesn't vary nearly as much as people claim between a very very elite university and a strong state school.
The real value is largely in the filter, high standardized testing scores, along with (at elite privates) a number of students admitted because they come from powerful and wealthy families.
Supposedly research shows that people who post these kinds of numbers but attend less prestigious universities do about as well as the people who post these numbers and attend a prestigious university (I'm figuring this is because they almost always attend a reasonably good university, and the quality of teaching doesn't really drop off much).
Anyway, I think that companies can't ask for SAT scores, but maybe they can just administer their own SAT? Having an outside company do this is probably valuable from a liability point of view. My guess is that some kind of end-run is going on here...
I suppose this explains why some companies simply use universities to do their filtering for them. It's been a while since I took the GRE and LSAT, which I tutored for a while, but they have questions much like the ones listed here. Some of these tests take place on a computer now, others are still large proctored exams. I'm pretty sure I was fingerprinted before taking them. I thought that it was potentially illegal…
Any place where it would be illegal to use this kind of question (at least, for anti-discrimination reasons) it would be illegal, on the same basis, to use university background (or anything else) that acted as a proxy for the same type of questions.
As 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…
Off topic here. I am a grad student looking for an internship in India, I tried as many good companies I could but sending emails somehow doesn't feel right. I would like to try amazon India. Can you point me in the right direction? I am kinda lost.
I suppose this explains why some companies simply use universities to do their filtering for them. It's been a while since I took the GRE and LSAT, which I tutored for a while, but they have questions much like the ones listed here. Some of these tests take place on a computer now, others are still large proctored exams. I'm pretty sure I was fingerprinted before taking them. I thought that it was potentially illegal…
> I thought that it was potentially illegal to use exams like this to hire, which is why it's convenient to use universities. Any place where it would be illegal to use this kind of question (at least, for anti-discrimination reasons) it would be illegal, on the same basis, to use university background (or anything else) that acted as a proxy for the same type of questions.
I don't think it even needs to be quite that insidious, it can have that effect even if the employers aren't consciously aware that this is what they're doing.
As someone who has first hand experienced cheating in interviews I think this is an extremely good move. I know some people in bay area who are making > $100k in cash (no taxes paid) just by answering screening interviews on other people's behalf. This is called "interview by proxy" and the person generally takes first month's salary as remuneration in cash.
Why would you cheat, though? You're going to get the job and probably be completely incapable of doing the work. Not to mention there's usually an in-person tech interview afterward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I thought that it was potentially illegal to use exams like this to hire, which is why it's convenient to use universities. Any place where it would be illegal to use this kind of question (at least, for anti-discrimination reasons) it would be illegal, on the same basis, to use university background (or anything else) that acted as a proxy for the same type of questions.
Interesting bit about the law, there... the thing is, they can essentially use universities as a proxy while maintaining plausible deniability, right? I don't think it even needs to be quite that insidious, it can have that effect even if the employers aren't consciously aware that this is what they're doing.
Not really plausible deniability, but there is popular mythology about general intelligence tests being illegal and not university background, while in either case the rule is that if it disadvantages a protected class, it must be demonstrably a valid predictive measure of job performance to be legal; because of the popular mythology, people are probably more like to challenge use of tests than use of university admissions, so using tests probably has higher expected legal costs even when you are right, and greater chance of getting sanctioned when you are wrong, because if people don't bother to challenge it in the first place, there is no risk of sanctions.
OTOH, for the same reason, people actually using tests are more likely to actually be aware of and guided by the legal rules, so there are probably more cases where university background is being used in an illegal way than is the case for general intelligence tests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that these are Proctorio's ( https://proctorio.com/ ) restrictions; they're just a third-party company that Amazon is using to administer the test. I've used a couple of similar systems (e.g. ProctorU - https://www.proctoru.com/ , where a human will actually watch you via webcam(!), or ProctorTrack - http://www.proctortrack.com/ ), and "monitoring" of this sort is pretty much par for the course (no…
> It's worth noting that these are Proctorio's ( https://proctorio.com/ ) restrictions; they're just a third-party company that Amazon is using to administer the test. If Amazon has chosen to use use Proctorio, with an understanding of how it operates, then it's very much Amazon's restrictions.
And if they don't "understand" their constraints (or pretend not to)... why would you want to work for them?
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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…
being able to solve problems is more important than how you solve problems. (generally speaking, yes i know there are exceptions)