A friend told me about his AWS interview experience. It was a case study describing a potential client, their needs, limitations, etc - trying to be “realistic”.
In the end it came down to either pressuring the client to embark on a complex cloud transition in time for a major sports event (that was a make or break event for the customer) or, as my friend recommended, start with a PoC but do the risky transition after the sporting event to minimize the potential for a catastrophic failure if things didn’t go to plan.
He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
My takeaway was that interviews are a game with their own rules, and you have to play by those rules - demonstrating some sense of judgement outside the parameters of the game will not be tolerated.
> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture.
IMHO he shouldn't change his answer to please the interviewer, the process is working as intended and I'd assume he found a job that better matched him somewhere else, where his mindset will be better valued.
I've too many wacky interview stories to list here, but the first time I came to this same conclusion was when I had an interviewer interrupt me mid-answer to correct my pronunciation of "idempotent" (because I said it in what is apparently a more British fashion). I asked him to repeat himself to see if he'd apologize or brush it off as a tic and he repeated himself with an elevated level of contempt. I declined the offer, that company got bought by McKinsey a year later, and everybody lived happily ever after.
A long time ago, maybe 2016, I interviewed at Paperless Post. The interviewer asked me explain the concept of a promise in javascript, then asked me to implement it from scratch, then asked me to extend it with different features like promise.all.
About 45 minutes into doing this I decided that any company that screened candidate like this was not somewhere I wanted to work so I told the interviewer that I didn't think this was the right fit and I appreciated them taking the time to consider me for the role but I wouldn't be continuing on.
I'll never forget he was like, "But you're doing great!" ... like yes, I know. I'm not stopping because I'm failing, I'm stopping because you are.
I had an interviewer once interrupt me and say that there was no way I could remember the techincal details of a 10 year old project I was the architect for, thus any details I did offer would likely be lies. Needless to say, I didn't get an offer nor would I have accepted it.
I had an interviewer once interrupt me and say there was no way I would have studied gray codes in college. I still don't know if that was some bias that I went to a "provincial school" in their mind or that they hadn't noticed my Master's degree or that my degree program also involved a lot of hardware and electronics work or just that they didn't study it in college and were secretly telling me how useless their fancy "West Coast Ivy" degree program was for them.
I made the mistake of letting that company bring me back for a second "less technical" round of interviews, but I shouldn't have.
that's true, being lucky enough to have one's basic food and shelter needs covered does really help one refuse employments that might be unpleasant, and it's very true that many people are not lucky enough to have that freedom and may end up having to put up with difficult working environments.
> I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture.
But how do you differentiate between if it is just this one interviewer or if it is the team or the whole company? I had interviewed at places that my friend referred me to, and after the fact, my friend told me it is just this one interviewer with their weird preference that screwed the whole process…
The only goal of an interview for the interviewee is to get as much money as possible. If they're offering really good money, you need to pass whatever obstacles they have. If they're not, why are you there?
Money is a factor, but not the only one, and for some, not the most important one. Beyond a certain point, there are diminishing returns. Does driving a car that costs twice as much make you twice as happy? Maybe for the first month, then it's just normal again.
For me personally, quality of life is important, so is vibing with my coworkers, and management that respects work-life balance. I have this at my current job. My salary is good, not amazing but comfortable. Would I trade double the salary for an environment where I'm stressed, expected to work 50 hour weeks, and answer calls on my own time? Nah. No way.
I have kind of the same personal experience - a couple of days answering questions about the scalability and resilience of a fictional web app and enterprise integrations.
I’m very much a generalist and kept to standards and terms not specific to AWS infra.
They ”passed” me but wanted a follow-up after going through some training packages to make sure I could translate everything to AWS.
At the time I was leaving a bigger software company
, largely because I felt we completely locked down customers in solutions perhaps not in their best interest - so this put me off.
I realized AWS would be just the same, just on a different level.
And of course this makes sense - they want to sell their stuff!
I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.
> I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.
While this resonates with me and probably the majority of the HN readership, I also want to be paid (handsomely) to build things. But in every case where someone pays me to build things, they want to sell it to someone (if they haven’t already sold it before I built it).
I think the important difference is whether you believe the thing you’re building is good for the people that are buying it. Never have I ever seen vendor lock-in become a net benefit for those who have found themselves in its grasp.
Well, if you work in an enterprise setting, and if this setting is just right, you can get paid well to build a lot of interesting things, and have all the choices in how to build.
Certainly not every enterprise setting is like this, but they do exist, or the setting can even be created if just enough people of the right stuff end up together.
And when you break the rules, you get absolutely no feedback. You don't even know if you break the rules, or you were just beat by a candidate the interviewers preferred. I had to go through the process last year and hated almost every microsecond of it, except my interview with the place that actually hired me.
Back in the 90s, looking for a job wasn't so bad. Now it's a nightmare.
If you consider getting hired despite value mismatch winning the interview game, then good judgement would be recognizing that you're expected to push the products aggressively even when it's bad for the client.
I can see both sides but it depends on the position. Was he interviewing for something like a Sales Engineer role or strictly a technical role? If you're doing Sales Engineering or going for a Solution Architect on a PS team then sales is part of the role. If it's strictly a technical role that is not a part of the selling process then it doesn't make much sense to me.
/edit: now that i think about it, they may prefer a sales mindset in all roles which i can also understand
> He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
This is hearsay, and smells like bullshit to me. I've given dozens of interviews during my tenure at AWS (in which I had a sales-adjacent role) and we never made a decision based on that. Plus, we'd never give that kind of feedback to a candidate.
Interviews at Amazon are highly structured and there's a Bar Raiser assigned to oversee every one of them to make sure they follow the rules during the debrief. The BR, who is usually not even on the same team or organization that's hiring, would not have allowed this to be the cause for rejection. It's far more likely the candidate was reported weak on one or more of the Leadership Principles evaluation sessions.
1) I rarely get any feedback, particularly not feedback as detailed as this, with a single reason for failure
2) Employers habitually bend the truth around interviews: interviewing for jobs that don't exist, that are already filled, reneging offers
3) Not being hired after an interview doesn't mean you failed it. They're more like dates than exams.
I actually don't think it's good to ask for feedback. Mainly for the reason you said here:
> They're more like dates than exams
It's much better to look at your own performance critically than to trust the feedback you get. Because the feedback you get (if you get any at all) is unlikely to be that useful or that trustworthy.
Plot twist: the interviewer despises the internal culture and did this as a way to send a signal that the interviewee shouldn't work there regardless of how well the interview went.
In the end it came down to either pressuring the client to embark on a complex cloud transition in time for a major sports event (that was a make or break event for the customer) or, as my friend recommended, start with a PoC but do the risky transition after the sporting event to minimize the potential for a catastrophic failure if things didn’t go to plan.
He didn’t get the job because even though the technical attributes were all good, he should have pressured the customer.
My takeaway was that interviews are a game with their own rules, and you have to play by those rules - demonstrating some sense of judgement outside the parameters of the game will not be tolerated.