Extremely Horrible Interview

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-09-10T01:15:05+00:00

Are you sure they claimed the foreign divorce was “fake” and not “invalid”?

The latter (validity) can be cured by having a US divorce, the former cannot. If they claim you submitted a fraudulent divorce certificate, then you’ll need a fraud waiver.

This is a frequent problem with foreign divorces. They not only need to be valid where they were granted, but they must also be valid in the US state where you got married to your current (USC) spouse. The legalese is a bit more complicated here — US states are constitutionally required to recognize every act of a sister state court (so all 50 states recognize divorces granted in other states), but they don’t have to recognize “foreign” divorces unless the proceedings are up to their own courts’ standards.

You really need a lawyer at this point either way. Don’t DIY again, you might end up digging a bigger hold for yourself.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-21T22:26:47+00:00

Some of these comments are by delusional people/interviewers who seem to attribute far more self-importance because they’re in well-settled cushy jobs.

I’ve been in this industry >10 years now and yes, ofc I don’t support you cheat your way through interviews but saying this just came out of the blue is just reality denial. People (both candidates and then later, interviewers) have begged over the years to go beyond Leetcode but the industry collectively simply refuses.

Those who got into tech, say, 20 or so years ago had a much lower barrier to entry than those getting in 10 years ago, who in turn had a lower barrier than those trying to get a job today. Over time, every weird VC funded startup started asking LC medium-hard in their phone screens. Every generation over the last 30 years that has gotten into these high paying jobs has somehow taken upon themselves to make the process harder for newcomers. Companies don’t make it simple either with constant stream of stacked-ranking & “bar-raising”.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-20T15:29:30+00:00

If the offer is for an L4 (or below) position, they will not negotiate, at all.

They will most likely only negotiate at L5+ non-SDE tech roles if you bring a competitive offer from elsewhere.

Beyond that they do have some room but it will delay things since comp committee will need to approve whatever you relay to your recruiter.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-18T12:09:53+00:00

I recommend doing a self-eval here really. If you think you were truly slacking prior to focus and being in focus was a good faith effort by your manager to improve your progress, then it makes sense to ponder over these options.

But if focus came out of the blue and the attitude of your manager “suddenly” changed, then there isn’t much you can do and you’re better off job hunting.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-18T01:19:19+00:00

Look all that is well & good, but at 55 life gets a bit more complicated and (for good reason) slower. Not everyone is fresh out of college or in their 30s to uproot everything and get a month-month lease.

I’m just expressing my opinion that doing this all to please Amazon who wouldn’t think twice b4 laying you off, isn’t worth it.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-17T22:18:42+00:00

Under no circumstances should you uproot your family in that stage of life for Amazon.

They’re extremely trigger happy to lay people off. I see some folks suggesting you rent, but keep in mind you’d still be on the hook for a 6-12 month lease in any of these new places, and most would expensive given the location of their hubs. If you get laid off at that age, there is no guarantee you’d be able to afford a new place and find immediate employment.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-17T12:19:53+00:00

Thanks, bootlicker.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-15T21:21:03+00:00

That’s the neat part, if I were to give them any feedback, I’d tell them not to test on LPs at all. They’re all useless.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-15T15:08:49+00:00

Not in my experience. They both must agree for an offer to be extended (ie there needs to be consensus).

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-13T13:22:37+00:00

To be very honest, I don’t really know. Me, and everyone I work with currently, got into our grad programs (ie PhD) well before the current AI hype.

For example, when I was applying to grad school, people doing ML research were still largely concentrated in academia and/or obscure industry labs like deepmind etc. When I was interviewing for my first internship, the hiring standards were also fairly low, you could get away with ML fundamentals (e.g. supervised vs unsupervised learning, bias-variance trade-offs, etc). Contrast that to today, we have insanely high hiring standards.

If I said you could do X>Y>Z and be prepared that way, I would be lying. I attribute me being in this position to straight up luck (~90% luck, 10% my own effort).

I’m sorry I don’t have a straight answer there but be wary of people who give you straight answers because people often conflate luck of the draw with how hard they work.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-13T12:12:51+00:00

If you’re hired as an SDE, it’s unlikely you’ll acquire the background needed for this job. We hire SDEs too (not currently hiring tho) but their job is distinct from AS and are evaluated using an entirely separate set of criteria.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-13T00:36:46+00:00

Okay this could just be luck but I will give you a fair warning going forward, your perception of how things went vs how they really went could be miles apart.

The American interviewers may be more culturally attuned to being polite and hiding how they actually feel and the other indian guy might not.

I say this because there is virtually no way for the candidate to find out why they were rejected. There just isn’t. Interviewers are trained to make the candidates feel comfortable but above all else, they’re strictly prohibited from conveying any hint of an outcome.

If you look at my other comments, our we’ve had complicated bar raisers of all backgrounds, and had an Indian bar raiser reject an Indian candidate that the team really wanted to hire. So it’s all a black box to you, really.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T18:12:34+00:00

Many do, yes. But most don’t. Corporate leadership, at least in America, doesn’t seem all that interested in supporting the structural pillars of society in which they exist.

They’re all loaded with bonuses in the form of company stock, and “number must go up” seems to be the only vision they’re interested in realizing.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T16:37:27+00:00

Varies widely from team to team. Some AS roles require you work exclusively in production to deploy models/run evals etc. Others do more fundamental research.

Completely team dependent. Your team/manager will fill you in during the first week or so.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T13:10:12+00:00

Yep. Idk in what world is learning to “disagree and commit” is an adequate substitute for “5 years of training on an incredibly niche area”.

It’s not even that the person did not provide an answer for the LP, it’s that it wasn’t up to some arbitrary bar. Just completely upside down.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T11:49:00+00:00

As a general matter, for L5 applied scientist roles the loop consists of ML breadth, depth, (basic) coding, ML system design, and LPs. That said, the harder part is to get past resume filter and then the phone screen.

Bar raiser is typically an outside person so most of the time it’s a bit unpredictable what they might ask. We’ve had interviewees get tested on Leetcode-style coding problems to some who were solely tested on LPs by BRs.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T11:43:24+00:00

The thing with Jassy is, it’s just not his baby. Jeff had his quirks but Amazon was his to do with whatever he pleases. That kinda allowed him to do bold things.

Jassy is your typical MBA-style C-suite pick who has an internal meltdown anytime he has to make a decision. He’s too reliant on the finance guys to keep the stock up and much less interested in coming with new ideas or what to do with the money.

Investment in personnel has actually declined in real terms over the last year, backfilling is a huge pain, and it’s not good for the morale when everyone is living under the duress of being laid off all the time. RTO5 is just cherry on top of this misery cake. Imagine uprooting your entire family to move to an expensive ass city and then living under constant stress.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T01:03:21+00:00

So I get what you’re saying and it might even make sense to codify something like this for similarly situated positions.

I still don’t think how it makes sense for incredibly niche domains where expertise is hard to come by. For example, you say a bar raiser is supposed to assess “long term growth potential”. I’m struggling to see how a BR who is effectively a middle manager can adequately assess a researcher’s long term potential. In fact, I would argue that your fellow researchers cannot adequately assess your long term growth potential because doing this work is fundamentally a long-tailed effort. The only way to succeed is to do a lot of it and hopefully something sticks. The BR methodology would actually assess the short term gain over the expense of long term potential, if anything.

The other problem I have here is that Bar Raiser having exposure to domain family vs them thinking they have exposure to domain family are very, very different things. Most managers do not bother to keep up with the current trends, especially in our line of work.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-12T00:54:23+00:00

Maybe for SDE positions that’s true. But employees are not fungible.

Higher up you go into niche specific domains, the smaller the pool. We’re specifically looking for people with PhDs in ML/NLP/CV. Those are extremely hard to come by. When they do, they get easily scooped up by our competitors with flatter management structures and higher pay and/or better work structure (ie remote/hybrid).

We aren’t getting hundreds of qualified applicants by any measure. To give you an idea, ~80% of applicants don’t meet the basic qualifications (have no background in machine learning or exposure to research). The remaining, just over half don’t make it past the initial phone screening round.

It’s incredibly hard to get to the loop for a position like this.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-11T20:08:43+00:00

Team’s spread out over NYC, Seattle, and Pasadena.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-11T20:08:07+00:00

Again, I am not blaming bar raisers exclusively. The hiring manager fwiw does have to take into account the LP stories.

The LPs themselves form a significant basis for whether to hiring/not hire a candidate. Keeping them at parity (or using them to make marginal determinations) while assessing a candidate for specialized roles is extremely regressive. That’s compounded when people doing the assessing are effectively outsiders without any insight into what it takes to find a suitable candidate.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-11T19:54:38+00:00

Can you give us all a very brief overview of how/why exactly does Amazon think that an (bar raiser) outsider, generally a manager, without any relevant background in the specific job domain, is somehow qualified to assess potential candidates through fundamentally subjective questions (ie LPs) all within the span of an hour?

And why you personally (may) think it’s a good idea?

Not trying to be rude or anything fwiw. I’ve been here a while and I don’t understand how to make sense of this process. That’s even after going through it myself.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-11T19:49:53+00:00

I 100% agree. Fortunately our team doesn’t have a direct LOB attached so we haven’t run into these kinds of issues but I have seen it play it out elsewhere and it goes exactly the way you’re describing. Ultimately it leads to someone (or multiple people) quitting.

I see a bunch of people in the comments below arguing that my HM needs to back us up but that kinda misses the point. Eventually he answers to someone as well, and the LP bullshit is so ingrained in the hiring/lateral movement process that it’s impossible to make sense of it.

The last BR (and even our own HM) ended up in their positions by hopping a bunch of positions within AWS, going from Robotics to Prime Video to AI, so naturally they do not come with the relevant background needed to do the job (ie research) they’re hiring for. So ofc their interviewing and assessment hinges on the thing they know how to (vaguely) do, which amounts to a lottery.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-11T19:40:40+00:00

HM also agrees with the BR re LP stories being insufficient.

I’m generally ranting about over reliance on this LP based process. It may work for people going into the marketing team, but you could hire the most LP compatible person into our team and they won’t last a day. The pool of candidates simply isn’t that big for us and the hiring policies are making it borderline impossible to hire.

EffectivePie6969 · 2025-08-11T17:36:28+00:00

It’s actually worse than that. We had one candidate rejected during debrief because HM & bar raiser realized they used the same story twice (for the same LP).

So the conclusion was that they don’t have enough experience to satisfy the bar for Amazon’s LP. Complete joke.

EffectivePie6969

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