The following information will be collected during the duration of the exam:
Your microphone
Your webcam
Your physical location
Your head movements
Your eye movements
Your mouth movements
These companies are typically used in settings where some level of rigor is expected (e.g. administering an exam for an accredited university). In that context, I think these restrictions make sense in order to ensure some degree of validity in the test results (especially since you're only expected to run the software for the duration of the test).
If Amazon has chosen to use use Proctorio, with an understanding of how it operates, then it's very much Amazon's restrictions.
Why not do an onsite if you want to make sure of the validity?
I'd just take it naked. I'm a fat hairy guy. I'm sure it'll be fun for all of us.
Any website you visit
What a fantastic way of driving away virtually every candidate that's even remotely high-caliber.
These conditions only apply for the 24 minutes in which you take the test. How is this different than if a person were watching you during an interview?
It's kind of like when you notice someone staring at you in the subway -- you note to yourself that it's creepy (which it is), and you move on.
"Secure Exam Proctor Exam Environment: You can generally utilize the Secure Exam Proctor for taking a proctored examination without revealing any Personally Identifiable Information about yourself. The types of information collected depend on the exam settings and can include video, audio, desktop recording, and websites visited. The aforementioned data is encrypted and will not be used by Proctorio in anyway. This information may be used by "Authorized School Officials" to review the actions of Students during exam administration. Proctorio may collect additional information set forth below in the "Aggregate Information" and anonymous information. Aggregate and anonymous information will be used to improve the quality of the Secure Exam Service. Note: Proctorio utilizes zero-knowledge encryption to keep your information safe."
They’d be completely fooled.
It’s completely useless, and so needlessly invasive.
Also at an in-person interview, the interviewee has a symmetrical power relationship to the interviewer in that they can both observe on another. This practice slides the power relationship heavily toward the interviewer.
Furthermore, at an in-person interview, the information is not analyzed in an unspecified manner which further skews the power balance toward the large corporation.
Finally, at an in-person interview, the information is not digitally stored at an unspecified location for an unspecified time and transmitted to unspecified parties. Nor is it subject to unauthorized access by unspecified parties in unspecified countries due to unspecified security arrangements.
It's not so much the recording of these metrics that I'd be worried about, but them storing it to build profiles. Different story.
These particular metrics are now quite common for online exam systems.
Mind you, these are valid concerns, and anyone should feel free to reject them. But on the other hand it's nice to have a remote option (for certifications, exams, interviews...) and at the same time a cheat-prevention system.
You'd be creeped out by the stories I have of freelancers or even consulting companies having some "star" employees doing interviews and then other employees showing up at work instead (remotely or even physically). Once you've been burned by stuff like that, you understand they take precautions.
In OPs position, I'd ask for the storage and retention terms and conditions though.
They just want you to be able to take a test remotely without cheaters.
If this were a regular website, sure, but it's for a specific reason, during a specific event, that ultimately you are participating in.
If you were to go and 'take an exam' on Amazon campus - they'd be doing the same thing - but a human proctor would be looking for the same things :)
I think the contextualization of it (i.e. it's 'your home') definitely seems 'creepy' - but I don't think it's a cause for concern - there's a reason they are doing it, it's not nefarious, they are open about it.
Again - it may feel a little creep-show because we're not used to this, or rather, in any other situation it would be truly creepy ... but I don't think there is cause for concern here.
I also think that the logical questions are not unreasonable.
I did a post-grad interview for Epic (epic.com - healthcare software) in a similar fashion, that was at least as draconian.
After passing a 15 minute phone screen, they sent me a link to a service that:
* Installed their proprietary software on my Mac
* Connected me to a real person who verified my DL against who they were expecting
* Had me swing my laptop 360 degrees around the room I was taking the test in, to make sure there were no notes or people assisting me on the quiz
* Took remote control of my computer and force quit any programs in Activity Monitor that were on their 'blacklist' (including Dropbox, etc)
* Gave me what I imagine amounted to a three-hour SAT style test with English proficiency, math, logic, etc.
* The whole time, had that same person watching me through my webcam and watching my screen, to make sure that I was not cheating.
I passed, and during my in-person full-day interview in Wisconsin, they had me do a few more of these tests (that were slightly harder and more about communication skills), as well as some interviews with people in person.
It was an interesting experience for sure - definitely a different side of the coin compared to what a lot of HN is probably used to. I ended up getting an offer that was very good considering they are based outside of Madison, but ultimately decided to go somewhere else.
In one of them, my interviewer was a little late and found me trying to open .. and /. I could get a file list of a root file system. There was a file in / titled something like HACKING.txt and explained that you were in a container, but if you did find something, there was a bug bounty program.
What they're looking for, I think, is not necessarily your ability to "hack" and program, but that you fit the mold of someone they can put through a rigorous 6 week (or more? I forget) training program that will teach you the basics of their stack, and then have you banging away.
I think the only ones who really like their jobs are a barista and a cook.
For all of the flaws though, they had a fantastic and cheap cafeteria. It's surrounded by cow farms, though, so they have to have some sort of meal accommodation.
I had my resume up on several job sites. I got an email using the name (and a plausible email) for a real, quality software company that sent me a list of HR-type questions. I sent some answers (no PII involved), and they told me I had the job and asked for some bank account information.
That obviously set off some alarms, so I followed up with the company and found out that they were being impersonated. I would guess that someone spent 3+ hours just on hustling me - they'd clearly read my resume, which was ironically better than a lot of real interviews.
1) No
2) What if you don't have a web cam, say a desktop, not a MacBook?
> If you do not have a webcam, your computer doesn’t meet the technical requirements, or for any reason you'd prefer to take the exam at a proctored location near you, please let me know. I’ll need you to provide your full legal name and current address, and I’ll be able to make alternate arrangements.
I believe the company they use to proctor these tests offers physical locations if you do not have access to a computer with the requirements
What happens if you have a computer without a webcam? Do they just not hire those people?
Then again, I run i3wm atop Linux. Even if I wanted to take such a test, it would be... interesting.
In order to take the assessments from your home, you will need:
* a webcam (either internal or external is fine)
* a microphone
* a computer that meets the technical requirements and equipment test (most Macs and PCs meet these requirements – Linux and Unix are not compatible)
* a basic calculator (please do not plan to use your phone, computer, or graphing calculator)
* a government-issued photo ID
> If you do not have a webcam, your computer doesn’t meet the technical requirements, or for any reason you'd prefer to take the exam at a proctored location near you, please let me know. I’ll need you to provide your full legal name and current address, and I’ll be able to make alternate arrangements.
I think the company they do this through has testing locations around the USA to accommodate.
If I had to code purely from memory, without the benefit of language or library docs, I would not be able to write anything of use.
Personally when hiring, I'm not interested in a candidate's memory recall, but the ability to use resources when faced with a new challenge.
Personally, I'm doing mostly Python & C++ development at my new job (4 months in) after not using either for 2 years plus. I'm mostly fine with syntax for both, but constantly have my browser open for documentation, mostly for library related info.
The first is kind of a standard phone interview with a Google Doc. There is no expectation that the code you write would actually compile or run. When I conduct this interview I'm always sure to explicitly say that it's not a test of memory and they shouldn't worry about remembering specific standard library functions, etc. If they need something that they know exists but they don't remember the specifics, I encourage them to make up something that seems reasonable and just go with it.
The second is an onsite interview where we plop them at a desktop machine, give them a relatively simple programming task, and ask them to produce a runnable program. They have access to the internet and really the entire machine. They can Google whatever they want and even use Stack Overflow. Nobody is standing there hovering over their shoulder. This interview gets weighted more than the previous one.
Sorting a list of points or finding a simple pattern in an array will not. If you need SO to answer the types of questions they ask, you probably shouldn't be seeking an engineering position at a software company.
I know I might get shit for it from HN, but I don't remember jack shit about specifics of implementing sorting algorithms or how to invert a binary tree, because I don't need it right now. I know some of the ideas about why and when you need some sorts over others, but the ins and outs I can get if or when I need them.
Currently I could talk you damn ear off about 9 different ways of doing a topological sort (and which ones you can use if it's guaranteed to be a DAG, etc...), but that's only because I spent my last few days working very closely with stuff like that. Ask me in a month and I'll be back to knowing jack shit about the specifics.
I'm terrible at these kinds of interview questions, but I feel I'm a productive developer.
I left a nice note explaining how I spent a lot of time trying to do it with the language feature, but couldn't due to runtime restrictions, and gave them a working non-optimized solution.
I was emailed to schedule an interview the next day.
I think the anger comes because I see it as a cop out, and I feel I get the short end of the stick in interviews because of it.
I imagine part of this is a response to the very, very large amount of time we spend interviewing interns every winter (I know I typically do 2 or 3 sessions of 3 1-hour interviews in a row). There's just too many interviews to do.
Someone wants to innovate and find ways to sort the good from the bad without SDE time spent, I would guess. I hope this isn't the new system for everyone. Then again, if it saves me hours and hours of phone screens...
I get that the author cares about privacy, but without doing what they do there should be no way to make the process as smooth as it is without getting tons of cheating. (It sounds crazy, but being in uni, I've seen crazy amounts of people cheat, often on the order of >50% of the graduate cs program.)
I work for one of the big 5 in demand software companies to work for - originally I would do a live-programming question on Coderpad as part of a first round pass with candidates. I used a pretty basic question as sort of a fizzbuzz - build a Pascal's triangle. The amount of people who took the exact top sample direct from StackOverflow without even attempting to change anything or mask their cheating was astounding.
We've since adopted a better heuristic approach that more accurately reflects the day-to-day work and abandoned the smoke test, but as everyone knows, the most valuable resource any interviewer has is time - the more of that you can save, the better off you are.
aka "I wasn't the one being violated, so I don't care."
I didn't take up SDE time, but my friend did. I'd be curious whether it's costing you more time because you need more candidates to fill a slot...
So perhaps a big part of the problem is figuring out what candidates you want to interview first. A lot of these questions are designed just to rule out people who aren't very logical or won't take the time to do it properly, and I understand that.
A manager once told me about a hire they had to fire on the first day. They did a lot of interviews remotely as he was in India. When they finally flew the guy in and put him in the chair, he was a different person. Literally. He had someone else do all the interviews for him so he could get in the door. Pretty weird that he thought they wouldn't notice, but people are that weird sometimes.
If you have too many hires to do, it sounds like you either need to outsource hiring, or build an internal hiring team that can do the technical interviews. This could be a semi-global or traveling team if you're often looking at non-local talent. Or they could do a lot of interviewing via webcam, perhaps with a second webcam shipped by Amazon (it's not like you don't have cheap shipping already) the user could point at their own screen for extra security.
It's about finding someone who can see things more generally, but then implement solutions with the tools on hand. It's really hard to do, but it means I get to work with incredible people.
(Also, I did a webcam interview this week. It's not a great format.)
However, from a philosophical point of view, it's Draconian and unnerving. What assurance does the interviewee have that Amazon isn't storing and using all this telemetry? Amazon is dictating the entire procedure, right down to the specific browser and extension, and the interviewee has no control over this. In fact, I have to wonder if the job seeker's acquiescence is part of the assessment; if they will bend over and take this massively invasive procedure, perhaps they will make for a good little subservient drone at Amazon.
I'm with the author, screw that shit.
This sort of behavior by teachers is exactly what got me to write my first serious z80 assembly program to mimic all of the menus on the TI-83 circa 1996. Teachers had already caught on to the fact that there were programs that would display the "Mem Cleared" message on the calculators, so mandated they had to do it manually. I never used my program to cheat, I just didn't want to lose my games (had a really good zelda clone & penguins).
How is that different from being recorded by multiple cameras during an on-site interview?
I honestly don't see why the information they're collecting is a big deal. They are remotely interviewing you for a position, and would like to minimize cheating as much as possible. Instead of sitting you in a room, they use the technology available on your computer, while clearly telling you upfront what kind data will be collected. If you don't like it, get an interview elsewhere.
Let's chill here, 'Draconian' is a strong word.
'What if Amazon is using the data for nefarious purposes'.
It's a reasonable conclusion, but also a big 'what if' :)
Their motivation is pretty reasonable - they just want you to be able to take a test remotely.
They 'dictate the process, right down to the extension' for reasonable cause.
It's reasonable to ponder the ways in which there could be bad things going on, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume that there is, or even malicious intent here.
It just 'seems' creepy.
Unless you are working with a really small API surface then it is unlikely that a programmer is going to have much of the API memorized than the ones he uses on a daily basis. And with people radically changing their stacks every few years it is unreasonable to expect it.
Also, people copy/paste/tweak things from StackOverflow all the time. Disabling clipboard is unreasonable for that reason.
What a programmer can do using only things completely in their head is quite different than what programmers do in reality. Programmers are constantly looking up things they don't know throughout the entire day.
Keep in mind too that online tests are for screening, not a complete interview. You bring people in after that and do several rounds of interviews. Under that circumstance having a friend next to you or supplying you the answers doesn't really get you far if you know you have to do similar tests once you get into the office. There's isn't a lot of incentive to cheat.
The bigger concern is that this is a red flag about the work environment / culture. If I saw that I wouldn't go anywhere near it as well. In fact I deliberately put things in resume that some companies might find objectionable in order to purposely weed out with such cultures.
Of course, I think that the real answer for that is to use a human to interview everyone. It's crazy to treat potential future employees this way.
I've even had a candidate whisper the question to someone else in the room with them. Seriously, it's ridiculous what some have done.
But what you can say is: "If you want me to jump through all of those hoops, send me a $99 tablet that's already configured for the test conditions you want to subject me to."
Allegedly.
I took the first test just like the OP, the logical reasoning part seemed kind of irrelevant and a waste of time for me. That was nothing compared to the second online test.
The environment of the second test was like a scenario out of Black Mirror. Not only did they want to have the webcam and microphone on the entire time, I also had to install their custom software so the proctors could monitor my screen and control my computer. They opened up the macOS system preferences so they could disable all shortcuts to take screenshots, and they also manually closed all the background services I had running (even f.lux!).
Then they asked me to pick up my laptop and show them around my room with the webcam. They specifically asked to see the contents of my desk and the walls and ceiling of my room. I had some pencil and paper on my desk to use as scratch paper for the obvious reasons and they told me that wasn't allowed. Obviously that made me a little upset because I use it to sketch out examples and concepts. They also saw my phone on the desk and asked me to put it out of arm's reach.
After that they told me I couldn't leave the room until the 5 minute bathroom break allowed half-way through the test. I had forgotten to tell my roommate I was taking this test and he was making a bit of a ruckus playing L4D2 online (obviously a bit distracting). I asked the proctor if I could briefly leave the room to ask him to quiet down. They said I couldn't leave until the bathroom break so there was nothing I could do. Later on, I was busy thinking about a problem and had adjusted how I was sitting in my chair and moved my face slightly out of the camera's view. The proctor messaged me again telling me to move so they could see my entire face.
The whole experience was degrading. If you're wondering why I did it, well, I've been using various AWS services for five years and I admired the work that the AWS team had done. Furthermore, I need the income to support my parents and Amazon was the best chance I had at the time. I got invited to do an on-site interview but I declined once I had another offer, and I'm glad I did.
EDIT: Small detail I forgot to mention. When I was showing them my desk, I had the monitor for my desktop (I was using my laptop for the test) and they asked me to turn the monitor so it was facing backwards.
Even when I was in college my university (Rice) had an honor code which meant, among other things: (1) professors didn't have to be present in-class during exams, and in fact they were encouraged to leave; (2) professors could give take-home exams and students were trusted to not cheat or otherwise violate the terms of the exam.
It wasn't just theoretical; most of my exams were not directly proctored in college, and I never personally knew of anyone who cheated. If you did cheat and got caught, though, you would have a trial before the entirely student-run Honor Council. If found guilty the punishments were extremely severe.
I know Rice is not the only school with this sort of honor code. I believe Caltech has one as well, and there are definitely some others.
Justifying this as "just to make sure people aren't cheating" is like justifying the police putting a camera in everyone's living room "just to make sure people aren't criminals" or putting a GPS collar on your spouse "just to make sure she's not having an affair". Totally unacceptable.
While you might have good reason to get offended and find this to be a big privacy invasion, probably like 90% of people here, the comparison you use here is invalid. Putting a camera in people living room or a GPS tracker is a permanent surveillance. This in comparison is only for the duration of the exam. In many schools, especially in some cultures where cheating is more common and accepted , there's pretty strict measures implemented for exams, including humans checking all of the same things that tool is checking.
Again, it's definetely a big privacy invasion, but it's Amazon tentative at scaling/automating the first phase of the job interview process. I'm sure anyone with proven credentials could bypass this step, but if it gives a chance to prove one's skills for a job without having any special degree, I'm sure some people would be fine with the temporary privacy invasion.
To make a comparison like your comparison: Apple stole $500 from me when I bought my iPhone! Thieves!
Giving something up of your own free will (in exchange for something else), is very different than having it taken from you.
If you disagree, argue with the actual facts of situation.
This is a completely false comparison.
You are taking a test remotely, they want to make sure you are not cheating, it's completely reasonable - during the duration of a test.
It's beyond unfair to suggest that this is in the same category of 'state authorities putting cameras in your house to arbitrarily spy on you' or putting a GPS collar on you.
I suggest it would help if in the terms that Amazon spelled out that they are not storing any data or what-not.
We live in a new world of tech, we have to think a little bit about what these things mean, and when we can apply tech reasonably and when we cannot, we can't just be knee-jerk about it.
The scamming is unbelievable. I've personally seen outright fraud... the guy in the video was a redhead with freckles, his name was an ethnic Vietnamese. Somehow they brought him in for an in-person interview, a Vietnamese dude shows up.
- Clueless. Guy was literally reading a manual.
- One guy offered me a bribe.
- one guy asked if his status as an illegal and conviction for hacking a phone company back home would effect things.
> Hire Success does not offer nor provide any option where an Applicant is required to submit a photograph or video response to questions because we believe it violates EEOC Guidelines.
I wonder how Proctorio + Amazon reconcile that viewpoint.
Furthermore, if you read the EEOC, some of Proctorio's questions seem to really push the rule: If an employer requires job applicants to take a test, the test must be necessary and related to the job. How is 27:24::64:X related to the job, again?
[0] http://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/is-employment-testing-legal/
On the other hand, if submitting a photograph or video of the applicant violated EEOC Guidelines, in-house interviews, which are the vast majority of interviews, would also be in violation, so this is an untenable position relative to the status quo.
Setting aside their predictive power, questions related to logical reasoning are most definitely job-related in an interview process for a technical position that explicitly requires logical and deductive reasoning skills.
Creepy - recording a dude's facial reactions, eye movements, mouth movements.. All this for a remote interview screening?
Stupid - I believe quickly Googling for some documentation, or even better solutions can save loads of a developer time in this day and age with StackOverflow. I would instead consider a person that was smart enough to cheat in a code test like this as a great choice. This reminds me so much of schooling system in India where the kid who memorizes essays verbatim scores higher than the kid who actually understood it and reproduced in own words.
Funny - Did they really think no one would object to this and post this on social media or HN?
My current manager who hired me right out of Grad school tells me, "Interview is a two-way process. A candidate need to be tested whether is talented and is a good fit for the team. Equally importantly, the candidate should be sold on the idea of working for us(company)."
On that case, Amazon has even tougher job of convincing a candidate. Not all sane people would want to work for above average pay while putting up with ridiculous work pressure [thinking about that guy who jumped off of Amazon work place].
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-28/amazon-wo...
There's more to life than working for a big tech company. Big tech companies are the worst. If you value your life and you're a creative person and good at what you do, find yourself a (good) medium size company that pays well.
They're out there.
Not true! atleast not in bay area. I have worked for many years on H-1 here, along with others on the same visa.
That's because for every job advertised they'll get a flood of applications from around the world.
Nothing about Amazon has ever appealed. Not their pay, certainly not their track record for hardware products (all terrible with the exception of the Echo), and not their other software with the exception of some of the stuff AWS has done.
I loved my job as an intern there. My manager was great. My team was great. Everyone worked between 8 and 10 hours per hours, with those on the latter end of the spectrum being intense, CS-in-your-veins types.
I can respect your perspective if you've worked there and your experience left much to be desired, but it is still a bit silly to make sweeping generalizations for a company as large and expansive as Amazon.
The post clearly states these clauses were part of an exam taken on https://proctorio.com/ for the Amazon interview. So it's doubtful Amazon HR is fully aware of these clauses.
I would happily bash Amazon interview loops all day long, but in this particular case, I would also need to criticize anyone else that uses https://proctorio.com/ for these practices.
By all accounts, Amazon is a pretty tightly-run organization. And given the scale of the hiring they do, you be pretty sure that in fact, yes they are exactly aware of what proctorio is doing -- and chose them for precisely that reason.
The whole point of having a responsible person is that the buck stops with them.
To what extent should personal ethics play in deciding where a (software) engineer should work? What if the engineer has no other choices for a job, and needs to (make rent/pay the bills/eat food)?
It is true that it'd be pretty easy to circumvent the tracking, by placing paper over the webcam, running the browser in a virtual machine, spoofing data to the browser, and so on. However these are infeasible for most non-technical people, so I don't think it's a real solution. Freedom shouldn't be only for those with extremely technical knowledge.
You work for a Thai ISP and the government orders you to block everything that insults the king and royal family?
You do network enginering for a mobile phone network operator in a developing African nation and they want to redesign parts of their network to support participation in the Facebook "free basics" walled garden internet for your GSM/UMTS/HSPA+/LTE type customers?
edit: there are a lot of things you can do to mess with a properly functioning internet, on the behalf of autocratic regimes or greedy corporations, just at OSI layers 2, 3 and 4... That's before you even get to the level of operating system and applications/software engineering.
Kinda like, "haha! I secretly got messages delivered to me during the steganography test! It's obviously not a legit test."
Maybe you could record yourself staring intently at the screen and play that back to the webcam during the exam.
Coming to your question. First question is easy. In a business environment, subjected to international rules and regulations; ethics are a priority. Second one not so. Kind of similar to when does it become acceptable to rob someone if robber can't make ends meet. Depending on jurisdiction; court will decide level of leniency.
1. The passage is about the good and bad of fanfiction which is posted on the internet. I pedantically disagree with the exact reading of response 2, but it's the correct one, I believe.
2. Only conclusion 1 is necessarily true, because of the transitive property of inequalities; X ? Y and Z/Y can be rewritten as X < Y <= Z. However, we cannot relate any magnitude information to V and it is not necessarily true that a number becomes larger when multiplied by another number (if we assume X is zero and V is positive, for instance).
3. These kinds of spot-the-pattern questions are incredibly arbitrary. However, the most obvious thing to associate with the alphabet is a numerical association with the letters based on it's placement in the common (but not universal) ordering of the Latin alphabet. When you do that, you see that UVS is the only sequence of letters that aren't "descending" even though letters can't truly be ordered.
4. The No Free Lunch Theorem says that no statistical method can find a pattern on the set of all possible inputs, which is why these questions are all bullshit, mathematically speaking. The only thing that makes 4 a better next step for the sequence 1, 2, 3, is that our own personal experience tells us that counting is fairly common, but enumerating the squarefree numbers isn't. You could also make the case that 27:24 has the pattern of 3^3:3^3-3, so maybe 64:x is 4^3:4^3-4 making it 60, but this doesn't feel in any way obvious to me, so I have no idea what they're thinking.
It says that the product of X and V is greater than or equal to the sum of X and V. Conclusion 2 is that the sum of X and V is less than the product of X and V. How could the latter claim be false if the former premise is true?
I agree with you on 4 and came to it another way: 3^3 : 3 * (3-1) * (3+1) :: 4^3 : 4 * (4-1) * (4+1)
4 * 3 = 12 * 5 = 60
It's been a while since I took the GRE and LSAT, which I tutored for a while, but they have questions much like the ones listed here. Some of these tests take place on a computer now, others are still large proctored exams. I'm pretty sure I was fingerprinted before taking them.
I thought that it was potentially illegal to use exams like this to hire, which is why it's convenient to use universities. I'm not so cynical as to believe that universities don't impart valuable knowledge and critical thinking to some of their student. However, the quality of education doesn't vary nearly as much as people claim between a very very elite university and a strong state school.
The real value is largely in the filter, high standardized testing scores, along with (at elite privates) a number of students admitted because they come from powerful and wealthy families.
Supposedly research shows that people who post these kinds of numbers but attend less prestigious universities do about as well as the people who post these numbers and attend a prestigious university (I'm figuring this is because they almost always attend a reasonably good university, and the quality of teaching doesn't really drop off much).
Anyway, I think that companies can't ask for SAT scores, but maybe they can just administer their own SAT? Having an outside company do this is probably valuable from a liability point of view. My guess is that some kind of end-run is going on here...
Any place where it would be illegal to use this kind of question (at least, for anti-discrimination reasons) it would be illegal, on the same basis, to use university background (or anything else) that acted as a proxy for the same type of questions.
Even then only about 15% of the people pass my question. I'm sure there are plenty of fair interview questions you could ask where you don't have to care about cheating, and just see if they can come up with an answer.
What the hell does cheating mean in software development.
Management. At Amazon there are literally thousands of managers that don't know what the hell they are doing just waiting for you to code up something they can take credit for and keep their jobs. They hired YOU to do a real project that they can't cheat. If there was a cheat they would have already done it or gotten one of Amazons 15,000 other devs to do it. If they hire you its some combination of no one else can do it or no one better wants to expend the effort in a long drawn out assignment with low payoff.
Lets say you are smarter than 15,000 other people and actually found a cheat. Congratulations, that cheat is now the baseline expectations. You better have more tricks up your sleeve.
But serious question: Who's the fucked up creep that decided to sell this idea? And who are the fucked up creeps that went along with it?
Why is this okay?
Have people lost their minds?
Whatever happened to Scantrons and a #2HB pencil?
For one, the general radio silence around ethical issues from the same folks who jump in with gusto on technical issues is both the most fascinating and the most creepy thing I have seen recently, and I am guessing the signal (people debating ethics) over noise (people debating technicals) ratio is low when you consider the implications of people taking these things for granted.
I guess someone will be asking if the signal and noise should be the other way around, given that HN is mainly for discussing technical issues. Maybe, but it emboldens the general attitude from these folks, which I will sum up thus:
"We have more insight into this issue than you because we are on the inside. We are probably smart enough to know what we are doing because we are working at these companies in the first place. And no one really knows the answer to these questions anyway, so what is the use discussing them endlessly?"
Another way to rephrase the above is: "We know what is best for you, and if you are questioning this assumption, you are just hating".
This reminds me of Eric Schmidt's comment on privacy:
What surprised me are two things:
1. the hiring personnel emailed me a few times saying she will call me on the results, it is a 1~2 minute call actually but it took her a few days calling me back saying I was not selected, not sure why this practice is preferred and I would appreciate a simple email or a quick call after the decision was made.
2. more importantly, during the interview, I feel all of them(6 of them in total) are reciting the amazon principles all the time, it made me feel the employees are totally brain-washed, yes I understand company cultures and such, but Amazon just made me feel weird, I somehow sense I'm talking with a group of robots who all repeat the same "principles" with no soul, and they're proud of that.
The second item made me concerned, honestly if I got an offer, I won't go anyways.
(I'll just paste it here and add some more to it):
* Personality cult: Bezos = Stalin
* You sing praises to the great leader: the 14 leadership principles.
* Officially they have a zero-tolerance policy for harshness. But I bet if anyone complains to HR they get sent to Siberia (i.e. put on performance improvement plan) or shot (terminated). https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for...
* The top management is the Central Committee. They wield massive power. Officially it is a meritocracy but it is all about gaining favors with the ruling party.
* In the warehouses I hear they do these group exercises: Stalin loved public performances
* They like to monitor your microphone, eye, head, and mouth movements : NKVD (the secret police is watching you)
Who wants to add more?
Our society has become so obsessed with quantification that we have become blind to any other ways of understanding the world around us, and made us poorer in our analysis, instead of being more informed with more information.
It is like saying that if something cannot be measured, then it does not exist.
Not to mention... this is just the interview. Imagine what it must be like for the people who actually work there.
Imagine they put the "eye movements / mouth movements / head movements" through a machine learning system and discover that certain head movements lead to poorer results (or maybe not poorer results, but slightly slower results). Only it turns out these particular head movements, etc. are due to a disability protected by the americans with disabilities act. They may not have fed this into the system directly, but if the decision was made based solely (or primarily) on these things, are they not breaking the law?
And how could it even be traced in this case if the person doesn't yet know they are going to have said disability, but the ML algorithm somehow learned that the person is likely to (for example) become deaf within the next few years.
64 is 4 * 4 * 4 and _60_ is (4 - 1) * 4 * (4 + 1)
Given that they've defined "::" differently to the usual "as" the answer could be anything. More specifically, the answer is f(64), where f(x) is wharever was in the head of the guy who made the question.
The same goes for the "what is the next number in this sequence" questions: unknowable given the information provided.
That said, with employees literally throwing themselves off of buildings to get away from Amazon [1], I'm not sure how much nonsense I'd put up with to get a job there anyway.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-28/amazon-wo...
It's required that you take the test with these enabled.
The cycle times make no sense to me when it comes to big companies. I don't know how Amazon hires and retains programmers.
I think if anything the logic portion is the biggest travesty here. It doesn't have to do anything with programming and it boils down to a reading comprehension test that does not bode well with non-native speakers. But I guess that is there goal.
I know some people in bay area who are making > $100k in cash (no taxes paid) just by answering screening interviews on other people's behalf.
This is called "interview by proxy" and the person generally takes first month's salary as remuneration in cash.
The only hit for "interview by proxy" relevant to technical interviewing seems to be a TDWTF article.
However, I was disqualified for being out of the frame for less than a second (I grabbed a bottle of water and it was a bit further from my laptop)
I don't mind getting disqualified but I'd have appreciated either of the following:
1. mentioning that you should be in the frame at all times (this was not mentioned what so ever)
2. displaying the frame so you knew you were going out
oh also, I think the author will have issues getting hired by Amazon again (when I took the test, they made me accept an agreement that basically stated that I could not share the questions with anyone - online or otherwise)
Still, this is hilarious because only the truly desperate will put up with this crap, everyone else will just get their jobs somewhere else.
A significant one, surely.
> What if the engineer has no other choices for a job, and needs to (make rent/pay the bills/eat food)?
Look, sometimes you can compromise for practicality. But even then there's pretty much always more than one option. Almost anyone can get a low wage job at department store/grocery store/restaurant/whatever so they can eat, guilt-free, and there are still degrees. You don't have to immediately go for the extreme of selling your soul to the devil, you have other options. (To bring it back to the concrete, especially as a tech intern; there are tons of companies that aren't Amazon.)
You could always just see how it is contacting your webcam and then just change the stream of data to some other source that is not hte webcam
Mic -> maybe mess around with how it is contacting your mic and (ports? idk) and load some really annoying music to pipe through to it.
Physical Locaiton -> do laptops have built in GPS or is it just off your ip address? if so could you just use VPN? Have it come from like some random place.
I participated in the interview as well. 5 hour long face to face interview. Hour each with 5 different engineers Did not get an offer.
But as other's have pointed out, these are not restrictions from Amazon, rather from the third-party they have decided to hire. I guess there might be alternatives that could restrict some of the access that is not needed.
Either way, you need a way to determine who is playing fair and who is not. Flying someone out for an on-campus interview will be significantly more expensive (considering as well how many people apply), and there is only so much you can achieve with a skype interview.
Why would you interview someone you don't trust?
1) Fan fiction websites have pros and cons for the authors
2) Both the conclusions are true
3) UVS (the only one not in reverse alphabetical order)
4) 60 (because 3^3=27, 3^3-3=24, 4^4=64, 4^4-4=60)
1) Some authors feel that they created a good story, but it is not appreciated as much as the fan fiction versions.
2) Only conclusion 1 is true (assume X = 0, then conclusion 2 is false).
3) POM, the only one that doesn't have two consonants in a row.
4) 63, because it's always an even number and an odd number.
If companies hadn't been burned many times, they wouldn't resort to such drastic measures.
Presumably they have a cunning plan to use eye movements to decide which candidates are better programmers because eye movements suffice to tell apart the expert from the novices, in programming:
http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1539-9/u...
(...allegedly)
[0]https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/anderson-coope...
Just fine. The "tabs" permission is a blanket perm across all tabs in all windows. Extensions run at a higher level of trust than Joe Random Blog's JS and accordingly have access to more powerful APIs.
That way they only get the microphone, webcam and physical location which is annoying but not as worst
If you cancel the microphone and the webcam, will they still let you do the test? What if I have a desktop computer with no webcam?
Not suggesting these as feasible solutions, but something like this deserves to be trolled.
I believe you should use your personal code of ethics as a compass to guide you in your life, including where you work.
> What if the engineer has no other choices for a job, and needs to (make rent/pay the bills/eat food)?
You're describing a clash of personal ethics and social ethics. Social ethics are saying this kind of tracking is alright, your personal ethics no. So, how strongly do you believe in your conviction? Would it be worth going hungry to stand up for what you believe?
Sort of a sliding scale, huh? The more you are pushed towards survival, the less options you have to exercise your personal ethics. On the other hand, maybe this point isn't as important as it seemed at first thought and you'll decide you're willing to be subjected to monitoring for the duration of the test (but not before or after of course)
My first full-time job, I encountered this. I was less than a week away from quitting because of ethical concerns, and my boss got fired first. After that, I decided to give the company a chance, and I ended up being there for +9 years (was at a hedge fund).
I guess my advice is: are the ethics violations due to the company or your manager. If company, leave. If manager, report the violation. If no response, or retribution, leave. I held my manager's ethics violations in for ~6 months and it took an emotional toll. Not worth it. What he'd asked me to do was illegal and if I'd done it and been caught, I would have gone to jail. Fuck that, turn them in immediately.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-acquires-eye-tracking-...
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/24/google-buys-eyefluence-eye...
THE INTERNSHIP IS THE INTERVIEW.
These are just screenings.
The first part of the interview was exactly like the linked experience. No coding questions just reasoning. The second part I had to use ProctorU instead of Proctorio. Personally I thought the experience was super weird but understandable, I'll get to that later, somebody watched me through my webcam the entire time with my microphone on. They needed to check my ID before the test. They needed me to show them the entire room I was in (which was my bedroom). My desktop computer was on behind my laptop so I turned off my computer (I don't remember if I offered to or if they asked me to) but they also asked me to cover my monitors up with something which I thought was silly after I turned them off so I covered them with a towel. They then used LogMeIn to remote into my machine so they could check running programs. I quit all my personal chat programs and pretty much only had the Chrome window running.
The proctored section involved a work simulation and coding questions. Before the coding section started they opened up the Java 7 and 8 docs, C++ docs, and an online calculator in my browser so I could use those for reference. I could take a break in between the two parts but I didn't need to. In total it took about 3 hours for me to finish everything but they said to block out 4 hours. After that I got an offer.
I didn't talk a real person who actually worked at Amazon (by email or through webcam) until I received an offer.
I can understand why people would be bothered or disturbed by these practices but I just thought that Amazon has a ton of applicants and it would take more time for engineers to talk to applicants. In total it took about a month from when I first applied to when I got an offer. I was then flown out to visit Amazon (not for more interviews because I already had an offer) and I actually got a chance to talk to people and learn about teams and ask questions. Yes, I asked multiple different people about Amazon's problems and they all said that their personal experience has been fine but a few said that they know of people who have had bad experiences. Seems like it's dependent on your manager. I know somebody who works there now (not in engineering but works in Seattle) and they love it. I found a team I liked, I talked to people who worked on the team and they all greatly enjoyed it so I accepted after my visit. Everyone who I talked to seemed very passionate about what they do and all take ownership over their projects.
I also applied to other large companies at the same time as Amazon (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter). Microsoft and Facebook haven't sent me anything. There was a mixup with Google's emails so that delayed my interview process but by the time I started talking to them I had already pretty much made my mind up about Amazon. I didn't go through any real interview rounds with Google, just preliminary screening questions. Twitter sent me a coding challenge but their email also said that they wouldn't get back to people until mid December.
It's a rather blatant IQ test, though of course they would never call it that because that would open them up to disparate impact lawsuits.
Most non-technical people wouldn't be applying for a software internship at Amazon!
Of course you're going to try and justify it.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076359 and marked it off-topic.