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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

benadam.me

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Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#461

Post by ummonk »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #334
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Leetcode, but it keeps coming up here. I've been interviewer a lot lately and I keep trying to find ways to filter out the candidates that care more about interview prep than solving real problems. Is this a nonstandard perspective?

I’ve been doing technical interviews for decades and have gotten good feedback from candidates about my technique. I have a small number of questions that are nearly impossible to have prepared for - one for instance is finding the median in a large dataset using map reduce. The question is open enough there’s a lot of solutions that are expensive, a lot that are dead ends, and one that’s pretty clever. The key is I…

I’ve experienced interviews that could be described this way. Nearly impossible problems where the interviewer hints at the right (or preferred) solution and I’m stuck doing a guessing game that’s highly unrepresentative of real life software engineering (since no one in actual work drops hints while holding back their knowledge unless they’re jerks). It’s a terrible experience.

I assume you do a much better job given your positive feedback, but it’s not something that every potential interviewer will replicate well if they try to follow your description.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#462

Post by vanusa »

aspaceman wrote: post #249
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Leetcode, but it keeps coming up here. I've been interviewer a lot lately and I keep trying to find ways to filter out the candidates that care more about interview prep than solving real problems. Is this a nonstandard perspective?

I think it's pretty common at small to mid sized companies + startups. Your more "trendy" companies and your F500 companies do the type of Leetcode interview you hear everyone on HN complain about. It typically looks like a 15 minute phone interview with HR, followed by a lengthy Leetcode/ take home exam (that's auto graded, no humans), a computer form where you input your school, GPA, and courses taken (seriously).…

Don't even know what files are

Which is of course exactly what these companies should expect if their idea of candidate "preparation" consists of sitting in front of a webform and being asked to type in functions, one after another.

Like a rat in a cage.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#463

Post by astronautjones »

jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #445
chiph wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do you think google's making the world a better place? Silicon Valley, season 1 episode 1: "But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility." Mike Judge is a genius.

> Mike Judge is a genius. He really is. Any one of his properties would prove that by itself. Having such keen insights into disparate facets of humanity tells me that he just gets humans on a level not many other people do. Hopefully that doesn’t sound too flowery and pretentious.

When I last saw geto boys live, willie d introduced the set by saying "we know why y'all are here, that's why this is the office space tour. and you know mike judge is the greatest satirist of this generation, watch silicon valley sundays on hbo" and then they went into "still" and bushwick bill beat up a printer on stage with a baseball bat. it was transcendent.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#464

Post by wayoutthere »

paganel wrote: post #353
pyrale wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine getting fired because your manager is on a leave and their manager sees you as free real estate.

Tells a lot about company politics. Often times I'm left wondering how come capitalism still survives. Actually, writing this down made me think that big companies (like the FAANG mostly are) are quite anti-capitalistic. I'm not sure how to call them, because sure as hell they're not socialist or anything of the sorts, but it's reasonably clear that many of the theoretical capitalistic principles that many of us know…

Hate to break it to you, but the word you’re looking for is “anti-competitive”. Capitalism is in fact designed to be anti-competitive, so in the absence of laws punishing anti-competitive behavior, capital accrues to those with the largest mass of capital.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#465

Post by mikesabbagh »

Had similar experience with another large enterprise. I always wondered how come those companies can survive with such friction. Building small internal application was costing millions, 500x more that what you can build as a startup. It took me 3 years to quit.

Also why do you want to work for Amazon and Google? There are many great people there, you will not be noticed. Work for a smaller company, they will pay you more, appreciate everything you do and you will be much happier!

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#466

Post by vanusa »

strgcmc wrote: post #116

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't? I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and…

Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he's going to carry forward with him... isn't that a successful outcome?

I agree that it definitely doesn't read like a straight tale of horror and abuse. But I don't see how can you sum it up it by saying "he found some good practices" when he takes care to point out, for example:

Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)

Sounds like a grind, day-in, day-out, with lots of made up stress.

Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent doing “program” style work which leaves about 10% of my time for technical work. Ultimately this is not what I want to be doing with my career.

So the work sucked basically. And definitely wasn't what he was expecting.

One of the projects I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript) was tasked with doing the front end system design for a React application (and the API that would power the UI).

Standard sweatshop practices, sounds like.

Oh and did we mention on-call? About which he says:

To be blunt: it sucks.

Which (among other reasons) is why he quit after 10 months. Which is definitely not a step to be taken lightly, because (aside from losing on the compensation) it basically amounts to a resume stain.

Now of course he said positive things as well, and it wasn't a simple condemnation of Amazon, by any stretch. But still -- it strikes me as rather strange that you are somehow able sum it up as "he had good things happen to him there" and it was a "succesful outcome".

To my ears, his experience there read like a very mixed bag.

My paraphrase of his report would be: "You learn a lot there, but it's a grind that will suck you dry before you know it."

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#467

Post by mikesabbagh »

autokad wrote: post #278
robby_w_g wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then…

> "My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field." I told google that this style of interviewing is discriminatory, especially towards people with families, or other commitments. Never got another call for…

why do you want to work for Amazon and Google when there are so many great companies that would appreciate you every day (and pay you more)

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#468

Post by noidea_ »

reaperducer wrote: post #350
autokad wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field." I told google that this style of interviewing is discriminatory, especially towards people with families, or other commitments. Never got another call for…

I told one that I am a human being, not a circus animal here to do tricks, and if they want me to do live coding, they'd have to pay me for my time. Same result as you: The recruiters stopped bothering me.

No post body was provided.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#469

Post by bc4m »

unoti wrote: post #195
emptybottle wrote: post #80

It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work. My own experiences, the horror stories I've read, the broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession. It di…

> It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work. > broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession. > a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "to…

Microsoft's interview loop was the easiest I've ever had, it's the only job I've had where I've felt my ethics challenged, and my org's leadership was comically ruthless.

You joined a good org and that's awesome, but I believe you can just as easily join a bad one at Microsoft or a good one at Amazon.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#470

Post by coliveira »

kaashif wrote: post #457
majormajor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine if instead of coding exercises we had the interview process from other industries that weighs degree and past experience more heavily in the absence of any other sort of testing. What would it look like to break in then? Completing a BS in your spare time? EDIT: Most ideas I've seen about replacement for live coding - like take home projects or contract-to-hire - are not really any more friendly to people…

I think take-home projects might take the same amount of time as leetcode, when you count studying, but are much less stressful. As long as enough time is given. This really doesn't fix the problem of breaking into CS, and it's not even practical when there are too many candidates. Leetcode gives a gigantic number of false negatives, but that's a price companies are willing to pay.

I don't agree. I much prefer to spend one hour doing a live coding interview than spending 24h working on a test. It is much more time spent, and therefore more stressful.
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