rating for Amazon.com
posted
by
chakotay2329
on
May 22, 2008
If I said the engineers were arrogant, that would be a gross understatement. I asked why the kept asking me technical questions but had not interest in my experience, they said and I quote "We are all very smart people and we need to make sure you are smart too." Not Kidding. The 6th person I met was a woman that didn't warm up the conversation at all, just started in with the questions. No "I'm so and so, I work in such and such area, I would be a co-worker of yours, ..." Nothing, just technical questions. She asked a question where I knew there was a short cut answer, but she didn't accept the standard C++ library would do that for you. Started to insist I was wrong and didn't know what I was talking about.
In short, real smart a-holes.
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Re: Worst Interview Ever posted on June 09, 2008 07:12 PM
I interviewed at Amazon.com and did get a job offer. I mention this to prove I have no sour grapes against Amazon.com.What you mention isn't just a problem at Amazon, it is problem with other famous tech companies as well and a lot of other smaller companies that emulate them.The interview process has become not a test of technical skill, but rather one of patience and endurance. Worse, they are not bothered with whether you get an answer that shows thought and is correct, but rather they become very anal and demand that your coding answer matches their one exactly. They will ask for 6 reasons why something is the way it is, and it you only come up with 5 they will sit and spin and spin until you say exactly the words in the prepared answer they have.I had on-site interviews at Microsoft on three different days. For the first one I had to travel outside my city and so had to wake up at 5am. For the second lot of interviews I had to travel to a foreign country. On the first day I had to wake up at 3am to catch a 6am flight. Interviews were held on the same day. On the second day, I had my first interview at 8:15am and so had to wake up at 6am (6 am at my home time zone, 7am their time zone). To make matters worse the interviewers doubled up their whiteboard coding questions. For my first lot of interviews I had to answer 16 written coding questions along with lots of other non-whiteboard questions. I didn't even get a break for lunch. During lunch the interview continued with the interviewer making continuous hand written notes of everything I said.It is just getting crazy. I run my own small micro-ISV and quite frankly it is not worth my effort answering 16 coding questions. I would far rather spend the time and energy adding features to my own coding efforts.People just don't have the time to spend days in interviews.The only solution is that companies become better at interviewing. This means not getting recruiters to cast a wide net, but rather going slower and doing more research on candidates and what both sides want before starting up a very lengthy process. I run a micro-ISV. My software is on the Internet for everybody to try out. It shouldn't take 4 days of my time just answering technical questions that are far below the complexity of software I've put out on the Internet.And at the end of it all, the reason I was given for not getting a job was "team-working". They couldn't expand on what exactly they meant by this. I guess they meant that my very last corporate job was in a small company, but it ignores all the work I did in the 10 years before in larger teams. They asked so many technical questions, it is hard to know how they based their "team-working" decision.A waste of time. Just think of how much real software you can write in 4 days. -
Re: Worst Interview Ever posted on September 19, 2008 06:33 PM
It's reassuring to see that others can share similar feelings to my own. I too ended up walking out after reaching my limit with interviewers. I was kind of entertained by the process, but felt that even if I had done everything right, I still wouldn't want to work there. The entire experience felt pretty sterile, and didn't paint a very endearing picture of the workplace environment. I'm not sure what drives people to behave like this, but I'd love to know. I certainly don't have any special insights to offer as to what might constitute a more effective interview process, but I wouldn't want to be working around people who would warm up to this kind of screening process. -
Re: Worst Interview Ever posted by witten on September 20, 2008 10:22 PM
I think part of the problem in this industry in general is the widespread belief that technical chops are all it takes to be a good software developer. Having the technical skills are certainly important, but one shouldn't underestimate the importance of being able to play nicely with other developers, having general engineering discipline, knowing how to distill a customer's requirements into a coherent development plan, and so on. There's so much more to making software than an ability to reverse a string in place. -
Re: Worst Interview Ever posted by cdemnky on September 21, 2008 08:44 AM
amen to that.good news, I believe, for entrepreneurs, as engineering/technology focused environments tend not to be very innovative on the customer side (look how people like to complain about end-user software, including myself with development tools). -
Re: Worst Interview Ever posted by witten on September 21, 2008 12:20 PM
Agreed.. There definitely is a niche there for entrepreneurs to fill: Making good end-user-oriented software that the big engineering houses can't or won't due their cultures of tech worship.
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