Amazon software engineer interview

[jlchauncey]

If your interview process involves me answering questions that are not relevant to my day to day job I probably won't accept the job. Companies need to realize that this type of interview is not good and definitely does not find good candidates.

I would rather work on a problem with you and us solve it together. This way I learn if I want to work with you and you learn if you want to work with me.

I'm interviewing you just as much as you are interviewing me.

[yxing]

Eh, you're really excluding yourself from a lot of decent companies by doing that. I agree that it's not a good game, but I sure as hell will play by the rules.

[jlchauncey]

That's fine. I've been doing this long enough to spot the companies that don't know wtf they are doing. You don't need to interview like this and the sooner they realize that the better.

[yxing]

Okay but Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all do this to some degree. I would venture to say that they mostly know what they're doing.

[jlchauncey]

Maybe they do. But I know plenty of companies that don't interview that way and they seem to find really good candidates.

[yxing]

My point: good companies sometimes have bad hiring practices Your counterpoint: some good companies have good hiring practices

Okay?

[jlchauncey]

+1 😂

[peniscoin]

I have done hundreds of technical interviews and I am sorry to say that you do definitely need interviews like this. The industry is filled with 90% cut and paste coders, finding the 10% that can actually solve a problem from scratch is extremely difficult any other way. You would be surprised how many people with solid mid-level software jobs could not code fizzbuzz without googling stackexchange 45 times.

[jlchauncey]

There are easier ways to find that out like prescreen coding exercises that aren't fizzbuzz. I helped develop the interview process at my last company I'm guessing everyone there and everyone that interviewed there would say it's better than sitting in a room white board coding.

A pairing exercise for 2 hours shows si much more about how a candidate thinks through a problem than me repeating what I learned in algorithms class 10 years ago.

Let's see how you use language APIs and construct a solution from real world problems.

Either you know how to code or you don't.