
Amazon’s Interview Questions And Why I Don’t Work At Amazon - drakaal
http://www.xyhd.tv/2013/10/industry-news/amazons-interview-questions-and-why-i-dont-work-at-amazon/
======
asuffield
It's not a serious post... but I have interviewed with Amazon and their
questions are a big part of why I don't work there. (The other reason is that
when I asked people what they were working on, they all said they were
rewriting all the Perl code in Java "because Amazon is a Java company" \-
apparently that was the biggest business need at the time)

Rather than go into great detail on why I don't like their questions, I'm
going to pick out one that stands out as an example. It starts:

"Suppose I want to <description of some user story>, so I want you to design a
system that <vague description of an implementation method>."

Okay, I'm thinking, done this before a lot of times, it's bland but not an
unreasonable way to find out how somebody approaches problems. But they
haven't finished talking, and they add one more sentence:

"Make sure you show me the objects and classes that your system will use."

This is the point when I try not to let my disappointment and irritation show.
It's not just that they've completely prejudiced the question, by forcing it
down one particular design path, it's that they've made it clear this is not a
test of my ability to design systems, it's a test of my ability to mimic their
design of the system. Worse yet, in one stroke this destroys any hope of
finding out how the candidate thinks; instead, it just measures how well they
can think along certain lines.

I don't have a problem with object-oriented designs - I'd probably have done
things that way anyway. But I do have a problem with companies that hire based
on conformity to groupthink. I don't want to work with a group of people who
were selected based on their performance at this kind of question.

~~~
brahma1337
FYI Google's codebase is also heavily Java. I'm not sure if it's a good idea
to judge companies/projects based on the language they use. [Edit: Okay, maybe
I misunderstood that part]

Did the other interviewers also ask similar questions?

~~~
carbocation
asuffield didn't malign Java: he seemed to imply judgment about the fact that
the company seemed to be converting working code from LANGUAGE1 to LANGUAGE2
for the purposes of being a LANGUAGE2 company.

~~~
asuffield
In particular about this being the only major project they were working on.
They didn't just rewrite, they stopped doing everything else in order to
prioritise it. The mind boggles.

------
TIJ
I personally don't think this post is a serious compilation of question that
get asked at Amazon considering the stature of the company nevertheless i
think an interview at amazon will never be complete without rigorous test of
candidates problem solving skills and/or the specific capabilities that he is
applying for. Also the kind of questions that are mentioned in the article are
the kind of questions HR's ask to confuse the candidate and the sole purpose
of these questions is to check the candidates presence of mind and how he
tackles those questions.IMHO Amazon is a great company to work at there is no
doubt in that.

~~~
next89
This data would suggest otherwise[0]. It is the company with the second
shortest tenure from the report, with an average of only 1.0 years.

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-ranked-by-
turnover-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-ranked-by-turnover-
rates-2013-7)

~~~
brahma1337
Hmm. I think data showing hiring vs time for companies would be more relevant
than average tenure of an employee.

i.e. The faster a company grows, the less likely/harder it is to maintain
culture and enforce hiring/recruiting standards - I can see how that may lead
to shitty interview questions.

~~~
TIJ
yaa average tenure never makes sense at all, i agree with you on your point.

------
gamegoblin
I just interviewed and got a job offer with Amazon as a college hire. The
entire interview was literally a single long-ish (a few hours) coding project
in the language of your choice. No HR nonsense, no questions about my
weaknesses or challenges I have faced. It was quite refreshing from other
interviews. I wrote code, wrote tests, wrote documentation, got a job, no
bullshit.

~~~
sumzup
I've heard this is a relatively new phenomenon at Amazon; it's great that
they're moving in this direction.

------
brahma1337
I don't think this post fits well with the HN guidelines -
[http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

It seems superficial and cynical, and doesn't seem to have anything useful to
say. (Also, the post is tagged as 'Industry News'...??)

------
webo
For what position?

I worked for Amazon, and looked over the list of allowed/prohibited interview
questions on the internal wiki. I did not see any of these question.
Furthermore, they are against asking puzzle-type and behavioral questions.

~~~
todazar
Hmm, when I interviewed for an internship at Amazon, they asked me a
behavioural question or two. Might have been that I had no previous experience
and they needed to gauge how I worked with people somehow. Or that wiki isn't
strictly followed by interviewers?

------
od2m
I interviewed for Lab 126 (like everyone else on the internet). I was really
excited about the prospect but the guy giving the interview had an attitude
problem and was completely uninterested in the process.

He insisted on grilling me on a metaphor in my personal statement as if it
were literally true. I honestly don't know if he was trying to piss me off, or
was (slightly) autistic and didn't understand metaphors. Once I'd gotten him
off that, I mentioned I had a friend who worked at Lab 126, which he was also
completely uninterested in. When your interviewer isn't interested in the fact
that someone you worked with for 5 years works down the hallway from him?
You're not getting that job. It was pretty clear a decision had been made
against me before the interview ever took place and Amazon was just wasting my
time.

Left a bad taste in my mouth.

------
andrewcooke
if all the numbers from 1 to 250, but one, were written in random order (no
spaces) how _would_ you find the missing number?

FOR EXAMPLE, 132456789101113 is 1-13 and not very random. most answers below
have misunderstood me (well, less now that some have been deleted in shame...
;o)

you can get the digits, just by seeing what is missing. but then you seem to
be left with a rather tricky partition problem. so i guess dynamic
programming? is there a better way?

would it help to pick out unique combinations (if the pattern 249 occurs just
once, it must be 249, unless it is the missing number)? how far would that get
you?

i guess since you know the missing digits you should check for each
permutation - you might get lucky and not find one.

is there some cute trick? something involving suffix trees?

[edit: anonymoushn has a good point - it's not guaranteed unique]

~~~
untitledwiz
Add them all up, subtract that from the actual sum of 1-250 and voila.
Optimization bonus: you don't need to do the second sum, there's a closed form
(I don't remember what it is, but I do remember Gauss came up with it as a
kid).

~~~
taeric
Doesn't this only work if you have spaces between the numbers?

------
seanMeverett
Interviews are a horrible test of how someone will perform on the job. Never
in work life are you required to come up with a solution immediately. Those
types of solutions are almost always wrong. It's only after deep thought and
100s of hours toiling on a problem from every angle that an elegant solution
that simplifies presents itself. But sadly, the only way to know if someone is
capable of that is to actually hire them for a trial week or 30 days and see
how they do and immediately fire or sign for a longer term contract.

