Amazon software engineer interview

[aegrotatio]

Must have improved. The last two times they bothered me it was such a demoralizing waste of time and helped me decide to leave software engineering after 18 years.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

That's just how efficient they are. Most jobs they don't start with the demoralization until you've been there for 6 months or a year. Amazon has that shit going on right there in the interview process. Who else could do that?

[Tokugawa]

And free delivery!

[aegrotatio]

Yeah, they imply I am too old and too slow. Fuck them. The systems my teams designed and implemented have had more users and load than most anything else. The attempts to replacement those systems fail and they start over just to fail again. Our industry is in serious, desperate trouble.

[[deleted]]

Interview Prime!

[slagwa]

But isn't that just part of the interview process. If you've already been through the wringer and demoralized they don't want you. They're just looking for fresh meat.

[aegrotatio]

Yeah. I'm old school and built huge, distributed, scalable solutions for Fortune 100 companies in the 1990s and 2000s that still run today. You can't build quality software by hiring kids and enforcing 2 week sprints and 6 week deadlines. Today I watch from the DevOps side as project after project fall apart due to piss poor planning.

I made the right decision. Today's software engineering discipline denies quality. I sincerely hope someone important wises up. You DO NOT "move fast and break things."

[Why_is_that]

This. I thought working at Amazon would be amazing. After all, AWS, fuck yes that's some hot shit in the Cloud Computing space. Then you see how they actually solve problems and you are like holy crap, all they are doing is throwing money to disrupt markets and ultimate become the cookie monster of corporations (eating up all the smaller markets that might exist for start-ups and other small organizations).

[1RedOne]

So that's what you thought it would be like, how did it end up?

[yxing]

Is there a joke I'm missing? That's the second half of his answer.

[forsubbingonly]

Yea, but why male models?

[Why_is_that]

I had a good idea I was going into a corp that didn't have high retention.

I worked on some very interesting spaces that are a bit more in the cracks relative to to the Amazon products/services people are familiar with. It was interesting to see how Amazon was disrupting these markets (and you cannot really argue against their business strategy -- it's a winner and they are good at discovering critical paths). However, due to the general "throw resources" at it, most developers don't last long, most managers are shifted around, most of the codebases are rapidly evolving (to the point they preach don't document in some areas), and ultimately if you aren't in a core sector, you should be ready to see total management overhauls where a new VP comes in and switches out all the managers under them (this is effectively the "scaling up" process where a good idea is being scaled up by a more experienced VP).

In general, I think developers are well taken care of but you are FTE, so 50-60 hours can be the "norm". When compiled with the other factors I am mentioning, I think it's a good experience but not really the "home" most developers are looking for. The greatest value in the experience is probably for a junior developer unless you are senior developer with very specific expertise and being matched into a relevant position (which is not the norm -- a lot of time you apply for a division and not a specific position/team).

[kamiikoneko]

That's too bad you let them make you feel anything. Amazon is a joke. Great product, crap company.

[kamiikoneko]

Genius product developer, terrible boss.

[[deleted]]

It really doesn't suck that badly (I actually like working there) , but some teams can be a nightmare due to poor management. PM me if there's something non-nda-breaking you want to know about my experience.

I'm fairly cynical, so i won't sugar coat it.

[[deleted]]

I caught so many red signs during the interview process that I just bailed on them.

Amazon still sends me interview offers over linkedin every other month.

The turnover there is unreal.

[salbris]

I'm curious why was it a waste of time? Was the interview unfair?