
My Interviews with Amazon - voltagex_
https://thesocietea.org/2016/07/my-interviews-with-amazon/
======
larrik
Interesting, 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
brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged
the reputation and their intent to improve.

Perhaps unlike HN, I've never seriously considered joining a mega-corporation
like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. I just don't see the appeal, nor do I want
to work in a city (SV, Seattle, NYC, or otherwise).

~~~
Bartweiss
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 verify
identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the _entire time_ part - there
was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting
down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the
cam.

Between the blind hostility of that opener and the meat-grinder rep, I passed
without interviewing (and passed with the next Amazon recruiter shortly after,
who had no idea they'd pinged me before). I'm sure this routine is reserved
for new grads, and the weird "don't lean out of frame" stuff seemed to be from
some interview-management third party, but it was still the most stilted
process I've seen from an actual software company.

~~~
sgk284
Bezos set a mandate to HR a few years ago that he wanted them to be able to
hire a new grad without ever needing to speak to a human engineer. That is, he
wants the entire interview process automated (specifically for new grads, at
least for now).

What you experienced is part of their experiment in figuring out how to make
this work. They've got a number of variations of interviews going on right
now. I believe this is so that they can scale up as rapidly as they need to.

Apologies for the lack of citation but I don't believe this is something
Amazon has spoken publicly about.

~~~
brianwawok
Oh that is great, robots hiring staff.

~~~
superuser2
Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a
majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is
certainly tempting.

~~~
wyldfire
Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is
high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not
engineering effort spent on interviewing)?

~~~
superuser2
Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about,
it's just extremely rapid growth.

~~~
ex_amazon_sde
The attrition problem is well known.

------
hellogoodbyeeee
I'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?

~~~
ytanotheramzn
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.

~~~
rohitnair
The comments in the original blog post suggests a gap of 60k with the offer.
Your comment makes sense only if he was interviewing for a Principal Engineer
position or something, but instead was offered an SDE-I position. Plus I'm
pretty sure very few (if any) non-Principal SDEs at Amazon actually get 200K
in the first year.

~~~
mturmon
Yes. If you can be promoted directly from SDE-I to SDE-II, there should not be
a ~60K gap between. I've had the described thing happen (start interview by
assuming level 3, but hire at level 2), and the gap is more like 20K. In other
words: they should have known better.

------
ivraatiems
Good 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 the same as making $120k in Seattle or the Bay Area. If you make
$80,000 in a small midwestern town, you're coming out ahead of the guy/gal
pulling six figures in SF.

It's an important consideration and one I think many employers try to get you
to ignore.

~~~
perspectivep
> 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, other expenses don't. Food costs,
gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. I actually spend a lot
less on transportation because I can take public transit instead of a car. We
were able to sell one of our cars too.

Not to mention you can probably keep most of your salary if you decide to move
back to the Midwest.

~~~
ivraatiems
> Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs,
> gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. I actually spend a lot
> less on transportation because I can take public transit instead of a car.
> We were able to sell one of our cars too.

That's actually not true. I'm referring to cost-of-living, which includes
housing, gas, food, etc. All the things you list. Here's a calculator you can
use to try it for yourself [1]. Using that, if I live in Columbia, MO (which I
chose at random) and make $60k, I must make $111k in the Bay Area to maintain
the same standard of living.

[1] [http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-
of-l...](http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-
calculator.aspx)

> You're forgetting things like raises, bonuses, and 401(k) matching that are
> a % of your salary. Not to mention sign-on bonuses and stock benefits, which
> are rare in the Midwest.

That is definitely correct. But you can certainly find companies offering good
(signing and regular) bonuses and 401k matching; I did. Stock is much rarer,
as you say.

~~~
ryandrake
Cost-of-living is only one cost to consider.

I also used to work in Nowhere, USA and now work in the Bay Area. While my
"cost of living as a percent of salary" is much higher, so is my "salary minus
cost of living" which is a more important measurement. To put it into concrete
hypothetical terms:

Person A lives in rural Iowa, makes $50K a year after taxes, and their cost of
living items (housing, gas, food, etc.) add up to $20K. Person B lives in the
city, makes $100K a year after taxes, and their cost of living items add up to
$60K. All other things being equal (I know, that's a stretch), who's doing
better?

One school of thought is that A is better off because while they're making
half the salary, their cost of living is 1/3rd. My school of though says that
B is better off because he has $10K more to do things that cost the same as
they do for person A: Investment, travel, Netflix, anything you buy on Amazon,
whatever.

~~~
tcoppi
If you can take a job somewhere with more than double your after-tax
salary(what you would have to do to go from $50k after tax to $100k after tax)
and only double your living expenses, of course you will come out ahead. I
don't think that is a common situation for a family unless you either
downgrade your standard of housing(smaller, add roommates, less desirable
area, increase commute, etc) or are seriously underpaid. For single people it
might be more commonly possible. Probably explains why a lot of people seem to
come to my relatively high CoL area straight out of school and move away as
soon as they start a family.

------
iamleppert
I wouldn't work for Amazon if my life depended on it. I interviewed once with
A2Z. Phone coding interview, working on their music service. I was just coming
from a major company in the space where I did the exact thing they needed and
they recruited me based upon the strength of the product I developed. I
answered and passed all questions without a sign of issue. I was expecting the
new step was an in-person interview, and in fact was told that. Although I was
local, I got called again to do another phone screen, more coding. I told the
recruiter that I already had other offers and would be more than happy to do
coding on site, so I could streamline the process.

She didn't like this and put up a hard-lined attitude about it, insisted I
needed more basic questions. Totally treated me like less than a person and
didn't care that I had other offers that would expire. Acted like it was a
gift that Amazon was interested in me at all.

Who seriously puts up with this crap? One can only imagine how working for a
company must be if this is how their hiring process works. I hung up the phone
and last I checked I wouldn't want to be working at the music thing anyway.

~~~
whamlastxmas
It's a really tough job market for a lot of people. I would guess as a total
ballpark that 80% of people who apply to Amazon would absolutely jump through
hoops all day just to get an interview. They're almost always not going to be
a good fit, but if you deal applicants all day and they're overwhelmingly
kissing your ass for the time of day, it's easy to see why someone with
narcissistic traits would get huffy when someone doesn't follow their every
whim.

------
johnwheeler
It'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 your stdlib: list, hash, set.

There's only one time in my 20 year career I've ever had to implement my own
data structure (Directed Graph), and I basically copied it line by line out of
a book and ended up replacing it with Neo4j.

~~~
dominotw
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.

~~~
johnwheeler
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.

~~~
greenleafjacob
Wow, I could not agree more. What you are calling grit is massively under-
measured in the current bullshit whiteboarding interviews for software
developers today.

~~~
johnwheeler
Thanks. Another name for it is StackOverflow :-P

------
ktRolster
This is the proper way to handle recruiters:

 _I responded saying that working for Amazon would be awesome, but for me and
Layla to move up to Seattle would require a 170-200k salary. I assumed this
recruiter would take a look at that number, scoff, and politely end our
conversation – but she affirmed that they could work with that, and asked if I
wanted to set up a phone interview._

If you still get too many, then it's time to increase your salary requirement.

------
Phlarp
Hearing that the recruiter more or less committed to a 170K+ range, only to
waste significant amounts of interviewee time before rendering a below market
offer is really concerning.

Amazon is in direct competition for talent with Google, Facebook and Microsoft
and from what information I can gather they all pay significantly more while
also lacking the bad reputation Amazon has accrued over the years for being a
complete meat-grinder. (whether or not the others are actually meat-grinders
is still up for debate: but they don't have a public reputation for being
such)

Why does talent in our industry continue to accept this kind of treatment? If
name brand law firms tried to pull this shit with associate lawyers I suspect
they would get sent invoices for the billable hours.

~~~
amzn-336495
Amazon is not in direct competition with those companies. Amazon bottom feeds
on new grad hires, people with restrictive visas, and interns. Their 90th
percentile pay for developers is going to be about $120k per year with maybe a
$150k total comp target. They may hire a few dozen top people per year, but
for the most part no one ever quits those companies to go to Amazon.

~~~
Phlarp
Of course few people quit google or facebook to go work for amazon unless it's
a Marissa Mayer-esque jump in the org chart.

The real question to ask is how many individual technical contributors does
Amazon lose to the others?

------
patja
What is the general take on the initial ballpark of 170k - 200k vs. the actual
offer of low 6 figures? Is that just how the game is played and to be expected
(e.g., never believe anything they say to get you into interviews), or is it
something to be affronted by: why did we both waste all of our time on this
process?

Or is it likely to be somewhere in the middle...maybe if he blew everyone away
in the interviews he would have received an offer for 180k, but he didn't so
it was more of a 115k assessment?

~~~
vkou
They interviewed him assuming he was a senior candidate, the interviewers gave
feedback that said "Good enough to hire, but not good enough to hire as a
senior."

------
kentosi
My experience was the complete opposite. I interviewed for them when they came
to Sydney.

The recruiter on LinkedIn said that it was for a senior Java developer role.
We even spoke over the phone to go through some of what the role involved.

The actual interviewing process was half a day of being interviewed by various
people from different departments, some asking sysops questions, some asking
general BA questions, some asking network/IP related questions, and 2 (if I
remember correctly) actually asking programming/developer questions.

One was shocked that I didn't have a laptop with me, which was not at all part
of the instructions.

The process was nowhere near as organised as what's mentioned in this blog,
and this was somewhat recent (late 2015 I think?)

Perhaps their overseas recruitment arm seriously needs better coordination?

------
jvehent
And this is why remote work for tech people is the future.

Timezones are still an issue, but if you're willing to adapt your work hours
to meet the majority, being remote allows you to work for fantastic companies
without sacrificing your way of life.

~~~
envyUser
They tried this with India, it failed. It's why we need such a robust H1b
"solution".

~~~
e12e
One of the few interesting presentations I've seen by a top consulting firm,
was given by a regional manager in Norway for Accenture - he talked about
their experience with outsourcing to India (this was in the early 00s).
Basically it came down to a cultural (business culture) divide, communication,
and differences in education.

Throwing half-baked specs over the fence to people from a different culture,
who's main qualification wasn't that you could get them _at all_ , but that
you could get them _cheaply_ unsurprisingly lead to catastrophic project
failures. Sending consultants both ways to work locally together for a while,
creating real mixed teams -- worked better.

Tell Stackoverflow, Trello and Gitlab that remote teams doesn't work. Of
course it _can_ work, but you need to plan for it. Oh, and team members that
are any good, will command a high salary. Don't pay them, and they'll jump
ship.

------
thecodeboss
Hey - I wrote this! =D

------
SonicSoul
Great write-up! I'd love to see the linked in profile that generates such
great leads. I've tried to improve and polish my linked in profile but still
not hearing from recruiters. I must be doing something horribly wrong

~~~
thecodeboss
Hi - Here it is
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkrauss48](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkrauss48)

While I got recruited about 10 months ago, all the information should be the
same (besides a new job).

------
steven777400
I had a similar situation (but with Microsoft), and although in my case it
would have been a net improvement in income (probably), there was impact on
family and stability to consider, so I declined the offer.

I think being aware of priorities for each person and each phase of life is
important. There's times when big name or (relatively speaking) big salary is
the prime factor, and that's great, and go for it! There's also times when
being close to family, staying rooted, and being stable is the prime factor,
and that's ok too.

------
vonmoltke
Sounds like my experience last month, except I was interviewing for a low-
level software position and didn't get an offer. :/

Actually, I only asked for $130k base and felt guilty about _that_.

~~~
The_Hoff
No joke, I've heard of companies equating ask-salary to self-worth and that a
modest request can cost you.

~~~
vonmoltke
That thought has crossed my mind. Sometimes I feel like that question is some
sort of bullshit test to see if you over- or under-value yourself. Based on
the StackOverflow transparency discussion yesterday I think I am underpaid by
about $10k to begin with, which I have still not fully internalized.

------
ruirr
My experience being interview by Amazon is mixed...I had a screening call +
three phone interviews with Amazon, for an elite devops system/network team.
They were amazing and very nice people, from the initial RH contact to the
technicians evaluating me. Actually to be fair, EXTRA nice people. On the
other hand, some other recruiter messed up, and put me with an interview that
I only found out at the last minute it was for a system help desk position in
some other occasion. That experience was horrible, and the technician who was
supposed to conduct the interview missed it and passed on the interview to an
indian employee which accent I barely could keep up with...I just did not
abort the interview out of respect. What I would say is that they handle
differently people that applies for the more important positions, and in that
respect, they are not much more different from other big players in the
industry. To give credit to Amazon, their hiring process seems to be saner
than Google, where you get contacted by a lot of clueless 3rd party
headhunters that try to coax senior people like me into lowly positions that
do not match our experience.

------
throwaway_ddb
I had a couple phone screens with them for an AWS role in Palo Alto. They not
only forgot to call me for both of them (we rescheduled both times), but my
interviewers could not have come across as less interested had they tried. I
went through some basic algorithms with them and asked questions about how
they wanted to handle errors and edge cases only to be brushed off "do
whatever" or "that's fine"\--and not in the friendly "don't worry about that"
sense, more with a "why are you wasting my time?" tone. I asked about what
they worked on and was told either very basic details that I knew as a user or
"I can't talk about that."

/shrug A week after the second screen, I got sent a form letter "no" from my
recruiter, which was just fine by me. I've accepted an offer from a rival of
theirs and I can't wait to kick their asses.

------
fredliu
His package (base salary + bonus + average vested stock each year) seems to be
standard with regard to the position he's applying. Still, with that package,
if Seattle's cost of living is the show stopper (not cheap by any means), then
I guess never bother trying at Google/Facebook/equivalents in the Bay Area...

------
bastijn
I read a lot of comments on bad behaviour of Amazon, which might be. Also a
comment series on the lowball offer and wasting his time if there wouldn't be
an offer in the 170k range. Also true.

But I think it is in order to tell the author of the story as well not to
waste their time. This time it's Amazon who most of us don't like, but in
generic it could be any company. If your main reason for not going has nothing
to do with the offer or job itself but only with something you could, and
should have considered beforehand you effectively wasted the companies time,
not the other way around. They gave you a free test.

------
linkregister
Kudos on the author for sticking to what he said was his bottom line. This
episode benefits all developers/engineers because we need to incentivize
software companies to branch out beyond SF, Seattle, Boulder, and NYC.

------
overcast
Pretty nice of Amazon to say high hundreds, waste time, and then offer low
hundreds. Even after explaining from the very start, that this was a
requirement.

------
nso95
Why is everything opposed to algo/ds questions? If you understand them
conceptually and know how to program, you should be able to implement them.

------
whybroke
A point I hope employers note:

The first reason he lists for declining the offer; salary was too low relative
to housing prices.

------
outworlder
A whole day dedicated to onsite interviews, plus traveling time. How do
employed people manage that?

I understand that, from the company's point of view, 1 day is still to short
to assess someone. But it is still a lot of time dedicated to an offer that
may or may not materialize.

~~~
icedchai
We either call in sick, or make something up. I have used various excuses.
Once I said I had to "get some tests on my thyroid" and would be unavailable
for most of the day.

------
saosebastiao
I'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.

~~~
linkregister
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with this as a steadfast maxim. I think
overall your statement fits maybe even 75% of negotiations but many do not fit
this mold.

Overall, your BATNA (and your counterparty's) is the most important factor in
the negotiation. Numbers can certainly go up, especially with changes in your
BATNA. Case in point: "I've just received a higher offer; I would accept yours
if you could match it + $10k." People post articles on HN all the time talking
about how they get companies to outbid each other.

More important than "never giving the number first" is being steadfast in what
you want (within realistic bounds). I have followed both styles but haven't
been penalized by starting with the number first. If you're the best
candidate, the company will pay what you insist on. Otherwise, the "never
giving the number first" was never going to work to begin with.

------
george_ciobanu
I thought one is not supposed to share actual technical interview questions?

~~~
magic_beans
Only if one has accepted the offer, which, _spoiler alert_ , this guy did not.

~~~
Buge
I'm pretty sure I had to sign NDAs regarding coding questions before any
interviews happened (not Amazon, a different company).

~~~
freyir
What are they going to do? Take you to court for vaguely describing a coding
question?

~~~
asuffield
The status quo is that the company whose questions you leaked will never hire
you again in the future, and other tech companies who find out about this
while researching you as a possible hire might also decide to never hire you.

It's the difference between a polite "this offer doesn't work for me at the
moment", and burning your bridges.

(However, this particular article doesn't seem to discuss any specifics of
technical questions, so I don't see an issue here)

------
ozten
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.

~~~
mrswag
They made him lose his time, I think it's fair game.

------
jasoncchild
this is by far the most thoughtful mic-drop i've read today

------
derptron
I'm so nervous in interviews that I get nervous just reading these stories.

------
draw_down
I know people who have worked there and have read so many horror stories. And
beyond that not even horror stories, just plain old stories about it being a
shitty place to work.

I'm sure it's possible to get a good job there, not everyone's life can be
miserable there. But I wouldn't roll those dice, would you?

------
cloudjacker
> I was honestly pretty shocked that I had gotten an offer, and told the HR
> person that I would get back to them within a week after I discussed this
> with my family.

Upvote if your startup pretended that your offer would expire in 48 hours

#WordGamesFromSandHill

------
deanCommie
I'd rather be homeless and broke in Seattle than living in a mansion in OKC.

~~~
aianus
I'd rather be homeless and broke in a sunny third world country than ever
visit Seattle again. So what?

~~~
plandis
I'm curious why is Seattle so bad you'd give up the relative safety to live in
a third world country?

~~~
larrykubin
I live in Seattle. I get really depressed from December-February due to the
lack of sunshine, and I've found it to be a more difficult place socially
compared to other cities I've lived and worked in. To the point where I have
frequently thought about leaving.

That said, I played beach volleyball all day yesterday with some friends as
the sun set over the Olympic mountains in the background, and it was
greatness. But it took me a couple of years to find my place.

Happy as can be at the moment, but it's odd how the gray can send me into a
spiral of inward reflection that drives me nuts. Everyone posts the beautiful
pictures of Mount Rainier and sunsets, which are gorgeous, but half the year
you can feel lethargic and go into a hibernation mode which messes with your
head if you don't have a strong social circle already.

~~~
fragola
I live in Seattle. I love the look on new coworkers' faces when they see Mt
Rainier for the first time in April: "HOLY COW IS THAT A VOLCANO??"

~~~
adrianratnapala
I live in Munich and work in just south of it. I took my lunchtime walks down
the same country path 100 times before I noticed the Alps were looming huge
right in front of me.

And I think the weather here is good. (And the wheather in Seattle was
wonderful on 100% of the days that I visited it).

------
dudul
Nice post. Confirmed that I was right to systematically ignore Amazon
recruiters.

