Awful Amazon Interview Experince

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2SiWh2o

I just wanted to share my recent experience interviewing with Amazon. I hope it helps everyone. About myself: I am a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, work at a financial company as a senior engineer, and teaching part-time at my university courses such as compiler, algorithm and data structures. I live in the midwest, USA. I love doing interviews and solving algorithm questions. Background: I interviewed at Palo Alto, CA office about a year ago and although it went well and I answered all the questions I was told: "this position wasn't a best fit for me" ... A few weeks ago I was reached out by an Amazon recruiter about an opportunity in the Seattle area and I was told the previous recruiter did not find a best match for me and she apologized for wasting my time. She said they would like to do a another round of interviews. As I love challenging myself, I said yes and I did a screening which I was given 2 algorithm questions and about 2 hours and I solved both of them and all my unit tests passed. For the second round of the interview, it was all online for 4 hours and I solved all questions and my code passed all unit tests for all their algorithm problems. Today I got a call from the recruiter saying that I was rejected because "my technical skills were lacking". I didn't want to argue with the recruiter so I accepted the feedback. I just wanted to share my story because I always saw these interviews with Amazon and Google as a challenge but now I feel like they are a complete joke. People who interviewed me were so arrogant and clueless. They had no clue how to calculate time complexity. No clue why provided unit tests were not enough and etc. They were just looking at the solution and thinking they know everything. I am so disappointed at Amazon and their interviewing process.