[oncallthrowaway]

Someone was probably promoted for the adoption of this "frugal" hiring practice. This is a culture problem that permeates all of Amazon and goes all the way to the top.

Find a new job. The reputation of your company is going down the drain.

[amzn-throw]

With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about :)

I, and most people I know have mostly positive Amazon experiences. We are proud of the work we do, and the innovations of the company. I interview a LOT, and I make sure that 100% of my candidates come out with a positive experience, even if they do not get hired.

There are problems at every company, but right now it's fashionable to shit on Amazon, ever since the NYT hit-piece that got a TON of facts straight up wrong, and ever since then every negative Amazon story gets upvoted to the stratosphere. Every company makes mistakes, it's how you deal with them that counts.

Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time. It was still a bad decision, but it wasn't about being cheap.

[sfrailsdev]

Listen, your hiring process reflects your company culture. The fact that HR is in charge and you have to work to change it, rather then you, the people who will be teaching and supervising these interns, sitting down, telling HR "This is what we need, This is what we want, how can we make this scale" and having final approval says a lot.

Further, this expectation of a private quiet clean place to interview for several hours seems rather biased against poor people. Not to mention the test itself sounds like it doesn't account for the possibility of people with motor disabilities, the blind, the deaf and other disabled people.

Honestly, open book tests are a thing that has been extensively studied. Use IRT based adaptive multiple choice tests (like the computerized SAT or GRE where tests adapt to your ability), set a time limit, have a rolling set of questions to prevent knowledge transfer, and have an intern test day every quarter. You can calibrate test responses based on Amazon engineers at their desks.

[andrewflnr]

> rolling set of questions

This is the hard part, and I think it's why open book tests don't happen more. Coming up with good questions is hard. Don't forget that if they're not sufficiently work-like people on HN will still say that your hiring culture sucks.

[Bartweiss]

I haven't worked at Amazon, and I won't speak to whether things are uncommonly bad there. Certainly Microsoft seems to have produced plenty of similar stories while escaping the broad stigma Amazon has acquired.

I will say, though, that I think your bad-reputation timeline is totally off. By the time that NYT piece broke, I had heard "Amazon is a horrible employer" from a half-dozen different places. I didn't even finish the thing, I just shrugged and went "well, matches what people have told me, no new info here".

The first time I was warned away from Amazon, it was over specific (and probably unenforceable) pieces of their internship contract. A friend rejected his offer because it contained a bizarrely broad non-compete that could theoretically have barred him from ever starting a company with anyone else who had ever worked at Amazon. This was 2012.

The second time was from a friend-of-a-friend who spent one year as an SDE. He talked about bureaucracy, burnout, and made the Microsoft comparison. He said it Amazon was reasonable as a ~2 year cash out, but nothing more. This was 2013.

After that, I was still open enough to respond when I heard from a recruiter. The internship interview required invasive rules like the ones at issue here, which proved fundamentally incompatible with my machine/internet setup at the time. I declined it, and scratched off Amazon unless I got news that these things had improved. This was 2014.

How you deal with mistakes is what counts, agreed, but Amazon's reputation struggle is far older and more pervasive than the perception spread by the NYT story. Fair or not (and I honestly don't know), it's a long-standing issue.

[uiri]

I interned at Amazon in 2014 and in 2015. I have not worked there since.

The non-compete and non-solicit for customers & business partners lasted for 9 months from when my internship ended and the non-solicit (titled "Non-Interference") for Amazon employees, contractors & consultants lasted 6 months from when my internship ended.

The interview process was two back-to-back phone screens. I heard from other interns the following summer that it had changed to an online coding test and one phone screen. I had never heard of anything so invasive as what is mentioned here before this article (and the precursor a week or two ago) hit HN.

I was working at Amazon when the NYT hit piece broke. It read like it was about the business/sales/marketing side of the company and it did not at all reflect what I experienced at Amazon.

I have met a few interns who had bad experiences at Amazon but most had good experiences and were invited back. I can only think of one who was invited back but had such a bad experience that they refuse to ever work for Amazon again.

When it comes to things like this, the variation between teams within large companies is much much greater than the variation between large companies.

[amzn-336495]

I agree. If you read the glassdoor reviews, engineers were posting warnings about Amazon back in 2008.

[dsacco]

I don't work for Amazon or have any affiliation with the company, but I can confirm that everyone I know who does work there (or used to) thinks highly of the company overall, and more or less enjoyed their time there. This throwaway account seems to be fairly balanced in perspective.

I'm personally of the opinion that Amazon is not a perfect company, but reports of its "evilness" have been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, I think this is a case of people with negative experiences having more of a reason to chime in than people with positive experiences. That somewhat biases threads, unfortunately.

I'm throwing this comment in here because I think it's easy for people to forget than n=1 anecdotes don't really confirm or deny anything (positive or negative) about a company's overall culture.

[bbarn]

I've been told opposite stores from my n=2 sample size. One has said it's miserable and he couldn't wait to get out, the other that it's great and his group is doing really interesting work and I'd love working with him.

[maverick_iceman]

All of your arguments would apply to any other big tech company like Google/FB/MS. Then why don't we hear as many negative stories about them?

[andrewflnr]

Amazon can be worse than GooFaceSoft, thus getting more stories, and still be pretty good.

My impression has been that Amazon is highly variable internally, a bit like MS (which I actually do read horror stories about).

[andrewguenther]

As someone who left Microsoft for Amazon, most of the things I hear about Amazon align much more closely with my experiences at Microsoft. We're talking about companies that employ thousands of people, you're going to hear different stories from different parts of the company.

[ufmace]

It's entirely possible for a "publicity bubble" to cause all this. A big article got published ripping Amazon, got a lot of shares and views. For a while after that, anything negative about Amazon that seems authentic gets upvoted hard because it's what people want to read, and it lets them feel what they would call justified rage. People like that and people who just want forum karma and attention aggressively seek out or sometimes even make up stories to meet what these upvoters want to read. Stories that buck the narrative get downvoted and ignored. And just like that, you form a big popular impression of something that may be false or grossly exaggerated.

I don't know that the impression is actually false in this particular case, but these things can happen, and you'd be wise to not take the "internet consensus" too seriously.

[1_2__3]

> It's entirely possible for a "publicity bubble" to cause all this.

Possible, but also staggeringly unlikely. Occam's Razor suggests it's a shit place to interview, nothing more complicated necessary.

[CRConrad]

The closest sibling to the grandparent of your comment, just -four-or-five- [Edit -- went back and counted:] seven comments higher in the thread, explicitly refutes your "publicity bubble" thesis.

[JamilD]

> Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time.

I've interviewed for Google and Apple internships and the process has been extremely pleasant, with the interviewers happy to give their time. With Apple, I got to meet the entire team and spend time with them. I've heard similar stories about the Microsoft interview process (I mean, they even fly you out to Redmond).

What makes Amazon incapable of interviewing their interns adequately?

[dpark]

The only people who I've met in real life who say that Amazon is a good place to work are people trying to hire me (with one exception). Everyone else tells me that either that they hated it and quit, or that they hate it and will quit soon. I work for a competitor so there's absolutely some bias in the people I'm exposed to, but the complete lack of positive experiences related to me by humans in real life is surprising and compelling.

The one exception is a friend who started working at Amazon a few months ago. She loves it. But she's also been handed a pile of money and told to basically do what she wants. They hired her to create a new product line (not tech related) and the execs apparently don't know enough to get involved so she's basically got signoff to just do what she thinks is appropriate. So she loves it. Her husband also works for Amazon and hates it.

I'm sure there are other people at Amazon who like their jobs. I just haven't met any and I'm not sure they constitute a majority.

[influx]

I loved working at Amazon so much that I'm going back to work there. I've also worked for Twitter and Uber to give you a comparison.

Happy to chat about it more, this isn't a throw away account.

[maverick_iceman]

I had 2 friends working at Amazon and both of them were reasonably satisfied with their jobs. Overworked sure, but not depressed. I did ask them about the negative stories about Amazon's working conditions but both said that it didn't match with their experience. I know I shouldn't generalize from n=2 but I don't know how to reconcile their evidence with what I read online.

[camtarn]

Amazon's social media policy discourages employees from posting about their experiences in reply to negative PR. I'm guessing that means that the employees who hate their job anyway disregard the policy, while the ones who care either don't take action or post on anonymous accounts :P

[maverick_iceman]

I was referring to private face to face conversations, not through social media.

[jacalata]

It's a big company. How you experience varies based on what stage your product is at (greenfield? possibly being cancelled next month? Launching? Stable?), whether your direct manager is a nice person, what career stage your manager is at, and what five people you spend most of your time with.

[dpark]

I'm sure it's not the hell that you read about online. If Amazon were as bad as some stories indicate, they wouldn't be able to retain anyone decent. Still, I have heard almost exclusively negative stories about Amazon, even in person.

[tobltobs]

> Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling.

Just throw 95% of all applications into the bin before even reading them. That scales as good and you don't look so awful.

[jrnichols]

> ever since the NYT hit-piece that got a TON of facts straight up wrong

The one about the Seattle culture or the warehouse side? I remember both, and I remember the warehouse one being a lot of garbage too. I was working as a contractor doing Amcare stuff and found a lot of issues with the article.

[nojvek]

And an engineer jumping out of the 12th floor because he couldn't handle the culture? You don't hear this coming out of APPL, MSFT, GOOG, FB e.t.c

[brohee]

Someone shot himself in Apple's Cupertino HQ. That does't mean much, as we are not even in the plural of anecdote yet, let alone data.

[WhiteWanderer]

With all due respect to you too, didn't one of your employee's commit suicide? I think something must be wrong if so many people feel perpetually miserable there.

[sleepybrett]

Attempted, he jumped and landed on a balcony 2 stories down or some such.

I don't hold that against amazonm. Any company of a size like amazon is going to have people that may be a bit unstable that get pushed over the edge.

I do however hold their treatment of their warehouse employees against them. When I look at a company I look at all their employees and see how they are treated. When a whole class of employees are treated as replaceable automation its probably the case that they will treat ALL their employees in that way eventually.