I was contacted by the hiring manager on LinkedIn who presented me with an interesting role on his team.
I was vaguely looking around, and this perked my interest. We spoke casually for 30 minutes, and reconnected on a more official interview call.
I was then connected with an engineering lead. Following this meeting, I submitted a writing sample and had 5 more interviews.
In between the meetings, I spoke to the recruiting manager several times.
Amazon interviews people based on their leadership principles, which I gather are treated rather like dogma. Because of this, the questions themselves are based on your experience and tend to be quite pedantic. And if you didn't have that exact experience, it's hard to demonstrate the ability.
Two examples:
- I was asked to explain the technical details of something I worked on. It wasn't a highly scalable cloud solution. Because of this, there was concern that I wouldn't be able to work on a highly scaleable cloud solution. Had I been asked questions about scalability, availability, and the tradeoffs involved, etc, I would have been happy to answer them.
- I was asked about a time that I had to make decisions without data. This is quite common, since my current company sells to enterprise and quantification of anything where customers number in the dozens is either difficult or futile. Because of this, there was concern that I wouldn't be able to make decisions from data. Huh? Why not ask me about all the other times that I *was* able to make decisions with data? Or ask me to analyze a dataset?
This style of interviewing made very little sense to me, versus a case study approach. But maybe it works for Amazon. Good for them.
What I found most frustrating were the following,
- Despite spending hours on my writing sample, it was clear from the interview that the hiring manager did not read it. (I was asked to submit in advance so that his questions could build on the writing sample). Nope. He re-asked me the question and asked follow up questions that were already extensively covered in writing.
- People I met seemed bored by my answers, and the follow up questions were largely perfunctory. Meant to check some kind of boxes on the interview score card.
- The questions tend to be negatively phrased or draw you in to talking about failure, and you end up in a trap of spending 10 hours talking about situations that were emotionally challenging, instead of talking about your achievements. It's really tiring.
- No one cared to answer my own questions with the care that I took to answer theirs. I felt fobbed off by some of the individuals when asking specific questions about the role. If you spend 50 minutes grilling me about my portfolio strategy skills, and then ask you "What are the exciting opportunities for X feature I would work on?", I do hope to hear something more than, "Oh, it's huge and complex."
In the end, it turned out that the role was really around grooming the backlog for a single badge on the website. Does it really need someone with 10+ years of experience?
Doing the interviews gave me some interesting insight into the culture and values at Amazon. And they clearly did not line up with my own. Maybe next time I'll check if there's a former military guy in charge of the team, and skip the exercise entirely.
Also, during the process, they were only able to share the lower end of the salary which were shockingly uncompetitive.
