I have a confession to make. I cheat at my job. I cheat all day, every day.<p>I have this little book next to my desk I use to write down ideas and notes, and then I refer back to it later. Sometimes my boss is standing right there! I get such a rush.<p>I found this website called Stack Overflow that has so many answers to problems I run in to. Sometimes I'll just copy the code directly from the site, without typing it out again myself!<p>Sometimes I even just walk up to colleagues and straight up ask them for help with a problem. They just tell me things I can use in my job, out loud, in a busy office, and we still haven't been caught!<p>I know that my cheating gives me an unfair advantage in the job market. I know this cheating makes me an inferior programmer. And now I know I can never work at Amazon because I can't get past their super scrupulous interview process. Oh well, I guess I'll just try and get by, cheating my way though life.
Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.<p>edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.<p>For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
All these show what kind of candidates Amazon is looking for. A bunch of desperate people who'd do anything for [money|Amazon brand value|Whatever else Amazon has]. I wouldn't want to work at a place that resembles an irrational hell with such people as coworkers anyway.
If someone is really that desperate for a job && believe they are smart to work on things Amazon scale, why wouldn't they find other jobs or heck start a company themselves solving a genuine problem?
I do know starting a company is not for everyone to be able to do, but other jobs?
I am amazed at how far you tolerated it. This is probably how I would have handled it:<p>> As preamble, the proctor made me download some software, one of which spun up a UI for chatting with the proctor and giving them access to my machine so they can take control of my entire computer, including mouse.<p>Nope. Goodbye.
Thankfully, I would fail this interview the moment they require me to own a Windows or OS X license.<p>> ProctorU currently supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X 10.4 or newer version of those systems. At this time, ProctorU does not support any Linux operating systems such as Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.<p>edit: but I'd like to see them muck around with my linux.git .config to make sure I'm not cheating.
“Clean your desk, please. Your institution [Amazon] has mandated that there cannot be any written material next to you while you take the exam.”<p>To which I would reply
"Fuck you and your institution".<p>Run a binary on my machine ?
I think the interview should be over right there and not from my side. If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk.<p>Is it really so dry out there that people are willing to go through this bullshit to work for Amazon ?<p>I know some of you are young and inexperienced, but know that you always have the choice to say 'No'. If people mistrust you from the get go - this is the environment you're signing up for. Don't settle for this.<p>Don't work for Amazon, don't let them establish this bullshit as the norm in the industry.<p>Trust me, the dream job will come if you know your value.
I'm getting really sick of HN's attitude toward Amazon employees. Not Amazon, hate all you want on the company, but I really think the the "only a desperate moron would work at Amazon" type comments don't belong here.<p>I love my job, but reading HN makes me feel like I should hate it. This is a place that told me to "take as much time as I need" when I got married, told me the same thing again when my dad was taken to the hospital two months later, and <i>again</i> when my father-in-law had a heart attack a month after that. I will never forget the kindness I've been shown in one of the most difficult years of my life.<p>I know that my experience doesn't align with everyone's. But this broad categorization of Amazon employees as "desperate" or "corporate drones" is just false.
The worst part about all this is that even if you did submit to all of this garbage, all you'd earn is the right to work with a bunch of people who are either desperate/clueless enough to also submit or managers that think this sort of behavior is a-OK.<p>Maybe there was no training video. The test was to see if you'd surrender all privacy, your whole computer and let them waste your whole day on pointless bs. There was no spoon, Neo.
Is there a business opportunity here?<p>If Amazon wants complete control over the interview experience, maybe there's room for a service that rents out small office spaces, like ZipCar or AirBnB, but for a desk/small office with just a Chromebook, for this express purpose.<p>Amazon or any other company could say they need a desk close to some place on some date, and the service could make one available that meets the requirements (laptop, multiple camera feeds, etc).<p>Or maybe this already exists?
Many companies don't understand that hiring on their end is almost as competitive as getting a job on our end. While I was going to school I applied for an internship to Epic Systems and another company.<p>Epic wanted to put me through a proctored, three hour long "assessment" in front of a microphone, camera, etc. before even getting on the phone with me.<p>The other company gave me a couple of 30 minute phone screens followed by an on site interview that gave me far more insight into who they were and what they did. They made the process as smooth as possible for me and were genuinely interested in making the most of my application. Guess who I ended up working for.
I mentioned this in the last post about this process, but this is not exclusive to Amazon. I did a ProctorU test for Epic a few years ago that followed the same requirements.<p>I installed LogMeIn, let them poke around my laptop, showed some ID and did a sweep of my room with my webcam. I did not quit however, and ended up taking a ~3 hour SAT-like test.<p>I don't dislike the idea of setting up a standard environment for a candidate to take an assessment, but this process feels a bit inhumane and intrusive, imho.
> After about an hour of this, I tell the proctor that I am no longer interested in the interview, and that I want to quit. I’m asked if I want to reschedule. I repeat that I want to quit. I’m told that a Log Out Procedure(™?) will have to be initiated.<p>Isn't enough to have total access to your computer, you also have to leave them enough time to clean up (?) any copyrighted material they might have downloaded on your equipment...<p>Interesting that you'll never know if they have uploaded some material from you, be it documents, photos or whatever.
This may not be cost effective, but the way Redhat does remotely proctored exams isn't bad. Granted it's not a job interview, but it is an example of someone monitoring you remotely during an exam. It depends on you living nearby or traveling to one of the remote testing locations though(yes, I see the irony).<p>The experience is: you sit in a room at a standard monitor with a keyboard and mouse. There are video/audio monitors placed:<p>- above your head, roughly 2 feet, looking down<p>- in front of your face, able to observe your eyes<p>- to the left and right of you, about 2 feet<p>- behind you<p>Basically, you are watched from all angles, including what your eyeballs are looking at. I always feel like a probe is about to come whizzing out of the desk and begin prodding me when I begin, but the feeling subsides after awhile.<p>protip: As a male, asking the male proctor to stop looking down my shirt didn't have the humorous reception I intended.
I do not <i>want</i> to hire a developer that knows everything off the top of her head. In my industry, best practices can change. One who is able to work without any research is probably not using the best methods... they're using the last greatest thing they learned. This isn't completely bad, I do like knowing how people solve problems... but I hate the "invert a binary tree on a whiteboard" mentality.
Serious question. Given the US laws (compared to Europe) of easily hiring and firing employees regardless of probationary periods, do they really have so many "con artist" applicants who turn out to not deliver (skill or motivation lacking) that they void the trust during the interview phase by monitoring the applicant's machine? I've interviewed a small and large places, and if they really want to be sure about this part, they have you come onsite and sit in the same room with you.<p>Whenever I was asked to code something as the 2nd step of the interview process like homework assignment, I'm always glad if it's not a site like hackerrank with a timer running out and JavaScript monitoring what tabs I navigate to. Especially, if they already know and have seen my public code and revision history, I feel like I'm applying for public office of some sort when they remove trust and make your go through that in addition to spending your personal time to work on some little project for the interview.<p>The biggest paradox here is that industry regularly complains about the lack of qualified engineers while ignoring probationary periods and trying to replace them with a 4 or 6 step interview/examination process. In many European countries both parties can walk away from the partnership with zero hurdles during the probationary period. It varies from 1 month to 6 month in Europe and if the company fails to assess the employee in that time, you cannot blame the employee and make him go through increasingly more distrusting interview process. One has to consider that not everybody lives in San Francisco and has potential jobs lining the streets, so it's time inefficient for applicants to go through many interviews.
I think this is interesting. Most of my interviews with other companies since I became a software engineer (with a "pedigree" at a big name company) have been informal chats on the phone or in person with 3-4 people about a combination of technical and professional matters.<p>I remember going through the degrading 6-hour IQ-tests, silly white-board interviews, etc. at a bunch of companies when I was first looking for a job, but even then there were a few companies that did a pretty good job. I had an interesting conversation about IoC and clean code at a consulting company, after which I interviewed with the company president and talked business. That interview stuck in my mind as being very respectful, and I'd seek the company out again if I moved back to the state.<p>My Amazon interview (which I got an offer from) was a quick round of 4 interviews with some tired engineers (they had been marathon interviewing on the road). I was asked some softball applied algorithms and data-structures problems, mostly to make sure that I didn't make easy problems too complicated from what I can tell. The reject rate on those interviews in very high, and there are probably a lot of false-negatives (and there is a lot of money at stake), so I think it's understandable that emotions can run pretty high about them.<p>A few years in: I turned down the last job that gave me an offer after a very silly whiteboarding session because I lost a lot of respect for the company after going through their interview process. Something like this "ProctorU" bullshit would cause me to quit the interview immediately and send a terse but polite message to HR at the company that their interview process was a non-starter for me, and that I would not consider working for a company that did not treat me as a professional.
It's weird that so many American schools and so many American companies seem to think the best model for them to follow is the one of a prison, with inflexible, arbitrary rules that dehumanize and disenfranchise.<p>Maybe the fact that America imprisons so many of its citizens is to blame for this.
honest question, I don't mean to be provocative, I'm just trying to understand.<p>what the hell is wrong with Amazon's company culture? I feel like I can't go three months without reading about some story about something with Amazon related to hiring, working conditions, or management style that is deeply offensive and alarming.<p>why does this keep happening over and over again? it's so notorious that the NYTimes has written magazine articles about it. it's so notorious that Bezos has to go write apologias in the annual newsletter. what's going on?<p>I'm asking because 4 or 5 times a year I get an offer from an Amazon recruiter to come in and interview for a position that otherwise looks appealing. I say NO every single time because of these issues I keep reading about.
At some point in history we, as a programmers, allowed that HR 'professionals' insert themselves between us and employers. Approach used in this interview is nothing that any half-decent programmer would choose as a reliable test. This has HR written all over it.<p>This has nothing to do with quality (of candidates) only to do with HR person ticking another interview done.<p>Being contractor, I don't accept any HR involvment for some time, if company insists on running stupid tests they can't count on me. I have never seen any HR like approach with hiring that made ANY sense.<p>If you need and want job done call me. If you want agile/scrum pretending to work its not for me...
You'd think a company with massive turnover would try to remove barriers to finding new talent, not create them.<p><a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employee-turnover-all-fortune-500-companies-1361257" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employee...</a>
How you're treated during the interview is a good indication of how you'll be treated by the company if hired. Unless you really need employment, I'd stay away from Amazon.
I had a similar experience when taking Acquia Certification exams for Drupal a couple of months ago.<p>I was required to install an application called 'Sentinel' [1] that monitored my pc, could not have a second monitor or external keyboard attached and had to move my laptop to show that nothing was on my desk. If I remember correctly, I wasn't even allowed to use the built-in camera of my laptop.<p>At some point in the exam the monitor paused the exam because I was holding a pen (I use a wacom as a mouse) and I had to put it away in order to continue. When the exam crashed, they told me to just reboot the application. But you can't login again after a certain time has passed, so they had to reset my schedule.<p>I was able to successfully finish the exams, but it added unnecessary stress to the entire experience and the whole experience felt outdated.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.novell.com/training/courseware/ts_proj_info.jsp?pid=40464" rel="nofollow">https://www.novell.com/training/courseware/ts_proj_info.jsp?...</a>
This seems like an excellent interviewing technique if you invert the results. If someone actually lets you install spyware on their machine, they fail. If they raise no concerns about access to reference materials, they fail. The ones that pass would be security conscious and outspoken about how good software is written.<p>... well, except that it would be exceptionally adversarial.
Amazon is truly awful at hiring. Their engineers often give strange programming puzzles to solve, then add arbitrary constraints like, "this needs to operate in 16MB of RAM".<p>If Amazon can't spring for a $15 stick of memory it's probably not going to be a great work experience.<p>I also wouldn't want to work with engineer who asked BS questions like that. Waste of time.
When I worked at a $BigCo about 3 years ago I used to joke about what it'd be like if we worked like we required candidates to interview.<p>Me, in a meeting: "Hey Kate, that's a great idea! How about you code it up on the whiteboard right now."<p>Kate: "Sorry, what?"<p>Me: "Write it, on the board, right now. No bugs."<p>Kate: "Can I use my laptop?"<p>Me: "Of course not. Here's your pen. Hope you like drawing curly braces."
The previous HN submission about an Amazon interviewee being monitored during an online test was kind of strange but not a big deal.<p>But this... this is absolutely horrific. Clean your desk?? Do you expect people to not use paper in the real world, or what exactly?
I've also had the annoyance of being 'interviewed' using this ProctorU method. They have this 'feature' where you are not allowed to navigate away from the webpage that has the test, and if you do, it 'blocks' you from doing anything until you message the proctor and have them reset it for you.<p>Except, in my case, this damn thing kept blocking up every few minutes, and I had no idea why. Contacting the proctor, having them diagnose it, and getting them to reset it, wasted a few minutes every time.<p>I finally realized what the 'problem' was. It was firing the 'navigate away' event every time the mouse went outside the boundary of the page. Since I often play with my mouse, moving it around the screen, it would block me any time the pointer left the page. I eventually figured it out, but it took me 3–4 block-contact-reset cycles.<p>All in all, a pretty annoying experience.
This cannot be real. Seriously, every candidate asked to submit to this should tell the recruiter/employer to get f*cked. Totally unacceptable, unreasonable, patronising.
Semi-related tangent: I had a not-terribly-unpleasant experience when taking an online exam for a linux certification. The certification exam was effectively an interview round similar to this one because it was the first step the employer suggested after I submitted my resume for the job. The test proctor was unseen but could use my webcam to see me. It made me uncomfortable, for some reason I thought I'd be able to see and hear them if I needed anything. I suppose they might multiplex the proctors across multiple test takers. I knew in advance that they wanted a tidy area, so I used a guest bedroom with a small dresser that I set my laptop on.<p>I was logged into a VM through my browser and tasked with several simple sysadmin jobs. Unlike this person's Amazon interview, the technical difficulties that I encountered were all my own doing. On my server, I tried to be very disciplined and used 'sudo' sparingly (sudo for each command that I issued that required escalation. No "sudo -i", that doesn't leave quite as nice of an audit trail. Well, I fat-fingered something while in visudo (grant privileges to a user was one of the tasks). I forgot the user's name so just exited but I must've 'ZZ'd instead of :q!'d. visudo puts up big scary banners about the syntax error and I quickly dismissed them because I planned to go right back in fix it in a jif. Well, sure enough, those syntax errors effectively neuter sudo. Of course, that's the right behavior for sudo and I just hadn't thought it through. I couldn't complete the remainder of the exam's tasks without sudo. I thought for sure there's a way for the proctor to reset the system to neutral -- I'll just start the exam over and go through it quickly. No such luck. I can reboot the VM but there's no way to halt the VM during the bootloader. :(<p>I did whatever I could without privileges and wrote detailed text files about what I would have done for the ones that required privileges. The autograder gave me a failing grade and the human that told me to take the exam didn't seem to care about the problem I encountered (or believe me).<p>Lesson learned: leave a terminal open in the background with "sudo -i" for later. You never know when you might need it. [this advice is for exams and not real sysadmin]. And while you're at it, go slowly and heed that warning from visudo. ;)
Jesus Christ! Even when I entered programming competitions, which were supposed to be arbitrarily constrained, we were allowed any printed material, as long as it fit in a 1 foot-square cube. The world-finals disallowed printed material, but still let you write notes during the event and the documentation for each allowed language's standard library is pre-installed on each machine.<p>There is no possible scenario where this is useful.
From the description this sounds very naive and stupid on the part of the hiring company.<p>What exactly are they wanting to test? Is it just a simple aptitude test to reduce (not eliminate) the chances of cheating? Do they also ask to look into the interviewee's ears for tiny bluetooth earpieces? What about the ceiling for hidden microphones and cameras?<p>The "show your room" part reminded me of (older) movies with funny situations where the person hiding is always behind the view of the person looking around.<p>If someone really wanted to cheat, I guess these people would need to do a much better job…or just get the person to an office and do the interview face-to-face.
You should come to Holland, you get to work tax free (for 5 years) and there are lots of interesting companies in Amsterdam.<p>We're the #1 place for English speakers in Europe because the local population are smart and bilingual.<p>Oh, and I've never seen douchy things like this (I rejected the Amazon recruiter, not worth taking a pay cut to work for them).
My alma mater had an interesting way of dealing with cheating. They would allow every kind of reference material you thought you may need. The test was just going to be that difficult and have questions no cheating (outside of copying) would help. There was one final in particular that averaged 17 hours to complete.
This is... the opposite of what I see sensible.<p>An opposite and goal:<p>tl;dr: Don't assume providing stress and isolation makes people work their best. Especially under stress. Taught a course in university, saw response to strict environments take a while for people to break out from.<p>Context: I have the chance to do quite a bit of campus work with local universities while working at a bank. Ops and IT. This usually involves working with final-year students, and can be quite hands-on.<p>Background: Working with a local finance university (top in country), I ran a final-year class on banking for around 40 students (and quite a bit of the faculty in attendance). Mainly banking operations, not technically hard. Visit the university with an AVP or VP expert in a varied function, different visitor and topic each week. Ops, Trade, Finance, HR, Tech, from fund transfer to letter of credit to dormant accounts to labor law. Basic banking and business but at a practitioner level.<p>Finals arrived: Not a member of the university, but asked to design and supervise the assessment. We'd covered a lot, and assigned essay answers for 3 of 10 questions over 2 hours, hand-written answers. Just answer it as fully as you liked. Some questions more numerical, some less. Really something for everyone.<p>I said I was busy with a call I couldn't refuse, and would be in the room next door. I wasn't. One hour later I returned to the room, to see each person hunched over their papers.<p>Books were not open. Phones were not doing checking. I was disappointed, but not unsurprised. To be caught 'cheating' in a university in China can mean the end of your degree. Still an hour to go, I encouraged opening of books (to protest) and full use of internet.<p>This seems the opposite of the Amazon policy.<p>The best papers that came in were a full 10 answers long (more than the required 3), photocopied, with multiple and varied signatures on each, and different handwriting in different paragraphs. Some individually submitted papers were very good. Choice had been achieved. Not only had books been opened, but collaboration had over-achieved. In only an hour remaining.<p>Hopefully this was a small lesson.
Is there a list of companies with over-the-top/invasive hiring practices somewhere?<p>It would make it easier to avoid them, and <i>maybe</i> send a message.
I'm impressed by the author's patience. I usually slam the door shut after "we need you to spend 5 hours on this take-home exercise", or "here is a link to coderank for you to show how well you know how to implement bubble-sort and quick-sort".
After reading this (and the previously posted piece from the same author) I'm thinking of applying to Amazon, not because I have any particular wish to work for them but because I just thought of a way to cheat their counter-cheating and I want to try it out.
The only way I'd agree to do that would be on a machine that I'd reimage before and after. Hopefully I'll never be that desperate for a job though.
I recently also interviewed with Amazon, the experience, as the blog states, was surreal. I was very surprised when I received an offer email without actually having any interaction with a human that worked at Amazon.
I a similar scenario for my "Linux Foundation Certified Engineer" exam. Except I had to show 2 forms of photo ID for the examiner through my webcam and then put them the other side of the room so I couldn't use them as notes.<p>I was repeatedly told off for tapping on the table whilst problem solving. (A hard habit to break after years of doing it)
Honestly, I'd have simply told them to bleep off. That is so far beyond acceptable behaviour that it would make me certain the company itself was bureaucratic beyond satire. If you don't have a level of basic trust in my probity, we can't negotiate.
Sometimes you need to prioritize yourself. This is one of those times: tell them “no”. Assuming they aren’t robotic enough to hang up on you immediately for refusing, politely educate them on how <i>no other company on Earth</i> has asked you to do anything remotely similar to this, and suggest that their process is way out of line. If they won’t listen, send a polite letter to someone else (heck, even the CEO). They deserve a clue, at least.<p>Remember that there are a ton of companies out there and you owe it to yourself to explore as much as possible before submitting to any one company’s ridiculous process.<p>Heck, years ago I used to look elsewhere just for being asked to format my <i>résumé</i> in a particular way.
I'm honestly shocked that someone would give them such access to their machine.<p>More than the absurd test rules, which seem quite common in some educational or testing environments, the fact the he would relinquish so much of his privacy and security makes me think he doesn't know his own worth.<p>It's OK to indulge them in some things but it's not OK to lose perspective and forget it's a negotiation. If you surrender to every demand, how can you negotiate later on? With what?
I'm a cheater too. I confess to using Google, Stackoverflow, Hacker News, and tons of other online resources to look up stuff every day. This is obviously stuff I should know already, and be able to recall on-demand. I'm so ashamed.<p>Seriously, though, that is one of the most surreal things I've ever read about our industry. I would have quit the interview too, but probably earlier in the process.
That's why I only work for myself and rather fail at my company until I die, than to work for someone else and be treated like this!<p>This is the main reason I quit university to start my own company and the main reason I will never look for investors.<p>If I had no choice I would work part-time at a non-tech company for as long as it took for my company to take off.
Why would you do this to yourself, in this market for engineers?<p>If you're going to work at a BigCo, go for one that doesn't abuse you. Otherwise, work at a startup where at least you'll learn a ton and maybe get some equity. I can't see any advantage to working at Amazon.
Is this at a specific location or something? From what I can tell, NYC and Seattle just do the standard code test on your own time (and allow you to use whatever external resources you want) then if you pass that, a day of in person interviews.
At my last job a candidate was hired after having done their interview by moving their mouth on camera while someone off screen was actually talking. I believe they did the spin the computer around thing too, no system is foolproof
Universities are moving towards using software like proctor u and other computer lockdown programs for online education. It's absolutely absurd and every single work around get patched up real quick.
The funny thing about this type of bullshit is that it's really similar to the stuff that Civil Service exams do -- quantitative evaluations of your reactions to workplace events, exams of your subject matter expertise.<p>Except when fast-mover companies like Amazon or their lobbyists show up to peddle their products to governments, the conversation ultimately moves to this topic. They usually get to a point where they're telling the government employees how dumb they are, and that they don't have archaic processes like exams for jobs, etc.
FYI: same topic (not dupe) a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076073" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076073</a>
I've interviewed twice with Amazon and came away both times with bizarre stories to tell. Some great people work there but I wouldn't want to with the folks that interviewed me!
I can't help but wonder, what was the test like that you could prepare cheat sheets for? most dev interviews are problem solving that you can't simply lookup in 5 seconds<p>just curious why they are so paranoid about that.
i do phone screens where i can hear people type to google for answers but it's usually pretty easy to tell that they don't know something and then they come back with textbook answer. but most questions are not the kind you can just ask google.
Amazon recruiters contact me all the time because I've worked with some big name companies and movie studios in and around the LA area. I immediately tell them I only have an associate's degree so they stop calling, texting, and emailing me.<p>That tells me everything I need to know about working for that company. I just wish they would just blacklist me and pass it around to their outsourced headhunters.<p>Wells Fargo is another one that has a love/hate relationship with my resume.
I went through the AWS interview for an SDE position. And the whole experience wasn't that bad.<p>The online test didn't use ProctorU. I was told that a working webcam was required, but it actually wasn't. I didn't had to give them full control of my laptop.<p>I received clear explanations about every step of the process.<p>The onsite interview was well organized, although very impersonal and predictable.
If this was an article about a startup I'd write it up as the (quite reasonable) fear of the cost of a bad hire. When you've only got 6 months cash in the bank having someone who isn't up to their job on board could end your business. Amazon need to understand they can afford to make mistakes now so long as their review processes are good.
Amazon is doing many great things, however the way they are going about it is starting to freak me out a little bit. This is how we end up in the corporate dysutopias described in Neuromancer and Snowcrash...
Don't we somehow have to take a step back and try to avoid this, rather than keep trying to optimise our hiring processes ?
My Amazon interview experience consisted of scheduling a time for a recruiter to call and having them not call, then reaching out to them to see if they needed to reschedule and set up a second time to call and having them (surprise!) not call a second time.<p>Fuck Amazon for the collective amount of wasted time they've caused.
This reminds me of a case when we were hiring for a programming slot.<p>I have a simple set of tests on paper that you take in person. This guy came in, looked at the tests, handed them back to me and said he looks stuff up in books. He was a consultant, but he refused to take simple tests and just walked out.
lol what a joke, I'm never going to apply to Amazon if this is the interview experience. If this meant that I could avoid the onsite coding exercise, then I might be okay with it, but my guess is that I'd still have to whiteboard onsite, so what's the point.
I would argue if the candidate is taking their security light enough that they would submit to such invasive software to be installed on their machine, they should be automatically disqualified but I guessed Amazon has different opinion about it...
Sorry for my language but this is just fucked up. I honestly don't get how Amazon got so successful at what they're doing(I mostly mean cloud services), if this is the corporate culture they promote. Something just doesn't add up.
What happens if you don't have a webcam? Do they just deny you the position? I don't have a webcam or mic on my desktop currently... I guess I'm never going to work for Amazon :/
Wouldn't it be possible to start a VM and connect to the proctor using the VM? Then the software you have to download would only be able to get control of the VM, but not the whole laptop.
If this had been me it would have been a really short setup mostly consisting of me saying "go fuck yourself" and then writing an angry email telling Amazon to go fuck itself too.
I am sorry but this saga is tiresome. I have taken online certifications before and had similar trouble with my FIRST one. The proctor paused my test and called me to confirm everything was clear from my desk, my floor, etc. Even had to stand up and walk around. At the end of the day I had no choice which made me feel wronged but in hindsight this is their process for certifying you didn't cheat on a test.<p>They are allowed to have that process, if you don't like it don't use it. Better yet, if you don't like it how about brainstorming better solutions instead of being overly dramatic on the internet about someone closing your applications on your computer for you?
Alright, so I had one HR smalltalk, a one technical over the phone with the manager, I am having onsite soon - none of these funny proctor stuff, but yeah your mileage may vary.
I'm very glad people are speaking up about this. This is horrifying. Good job on stopping the process when you felt uncomfortable, we should all be doing this.
1. could the user run this in a VM and avoid some of the hassle?<p>2. part of the hate should go toward the proctorU company too right? they're the company who made the software
This sounds like a perfect opportunity to outsource this job to a webcam guy/girl. Just pay the person to pretend to get off on this kind of humilation.
Watching Amazon reps try to sugar coat everything in this thread is hysterical. I've heard bad things from several people I know who worked there briefly. Good to see this article and confirm I'll never apply there.
Amazon SDE interviews were some of the biggest shit shows I've ever been through personally so this article really hits home.<p>The furthest I was qualified for with Amazon was in their warehouse, walking 10 hours every day from 8pm to 6 am with two 20 minute for eating and resting. We were not allowed to sit or stop at any point, even going to the bathroom to take a piss or shit were being factored into time. There were cameras everywhere, something like out of 1984. I was treated like a criminal when I had new pair of steel toe boots they paid for in a box and I couldn't represent a receipt. I was scanned with metal detectors, told to take off my shoes, and all in all it was a dehumanizing experience <i>after 10 hours of work</i> consistently.<p>I felt like HR and everybody else who were sitting around were looking down at us. One time, when a bunch of pickers were walking up stairs, one of the HR guys had a microphone and shouted "both hands on the rails" <i>as he followed right behind the group of workers</i>.<p>All while I couldn't get Jeff Bezo's smiling face laughing in my head. Fuck Amazon, seriously, except AWS.
I don't mean this in an offensive way at all, but for me and a lot of my coworkers this would be extremely abnormal. About the time they asked to take full control of my machine I would've told them politely that there was no way on God's green Earth they were getting no holds barred access to my machine for any duration of time, especially with someone who I did not know, and if the security restrictions were so tight they were more than welcome to Fedex me a laptop on which I could take my interview tests.<p>Maybe it's just my privilege showing, I don't know. But employers need to have boundaries too. Just because you're giving me a paycheck (or at this point, just considering it) doesn't give you carte blanche to my fucking life.
How is this even a point of such outrage? No one is compelling you to interview with Amazon. If you don't like their conditions, just don't do it. Why write about it as if it was such a huge burden? It's their job, their rules, their conditions. If you don't like it, simply move on.
Amazon: Where we are all terrible and we kill puppies (probably, I don't know, I think I read it in an article somewhere)<p>^ I've summarized the comments