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Comment by manacit | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned this in the last post about this process, but this is not exclusive to Amazon. I did a ProctorU test for Epic a few years ago that followed the same requirements.

I installed LogMeIn, let them poke around my laptop, showed some ID and did a sweep of my room with my webcam. I did not quit however, and ended up taking a ~3 hour SAT-like test.

I don't dislike the idea of setting up a standard environment for a candidate to take an assessment, but this process feels a bit inhumane and intrusive, imho.

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> inhumane and intrusive

I guess they feel that if they can be inhumane and intrusive towards their minimum wage employees in the warehouses, they might as well treat everyone that way.

I completely agree, and I think this is the natural evolution of Amazon (and, to an extent, corporate America). Amazon gets to treat their min wage warehouse employees as fungible, and their process around hiring and firing shows that. Have they gotten to the point where a certain amount of their engineering resources are the same? It's looking like they are trying to get there.

It's a demonstration of our privilege on HN that we rally against these interviewing practices, yet they are a mainstay for a huge percentage of the USA.

I'm not sure I'm getting my point across well, but I think there's going to be a point where this becomes more and more normal across more and more companies. They'll hire people to abstract the very difficult parts of computers away, and bring people in en-masse to fill in the blanks.

I'd suggest getting organised as a preventative measure against this kind of thing, but that's likely to go down like a lead balloon here. As long as there's a shortage of developers, we're somewhat safe, but that position is very precarious.

Indeed, organization seems to be anathema to the tech-libertarian crowd around here (or, at least, the vocal part of the crowd). To a lesser extent, it is hard to think about this future when times are good, which they definitely are now.

I'm a youngin' around these parts, but it makes me anxious to think about what I'll be doing 30 to 40 years from now. Technology is moving sufficiently quickly and corporate humanity (for lack of a better term) is not keeping up.

Who knows!

I have been wanting a tech worker labor organization since 2002. It was unpopular on Slashdot, too, but that doesn't mean it isn't a smart move for our tribe as a whole, even at the expense of everyone else.

Too many of us think they can think their way out of any situation with sufficient amounts of cleverness, but eventually, clever goes up against brute force and overwhelming numbers and loses.

There is not a shortage of developers. And no, there isn't even a shortage of good developers.

There will always be a shortage of any type of worker...

  ...willing to commute from their home to your premises
  ...and work with your crazy cargo-cult process
  ...on your badly-architected, tech-debt-riddled legacy system
  ...for the crap salary you are offering.

Then why is it that most of the people I interview can barely write a for-loop?

Do you interview everyone who applies? Have you considered that your process of choosing who to interview may be flawed?

I wouldn't know because I don't choose the candidates; I just do the coding interviews

An engineer needs to be involved in the initial phone screening.

At my previous company we usually were able to find someone within a reasonable amount of time to fill an open position. One day, HR decided to seize control of the hiring process. They would conduct all of the resume and initial phone screening and then hand us a few "approved" resumes. It became impossible to find anyone after that.

My best guess has been that there's an oversupply of incompetent "developers" trying to play the numbers game, doing enormous numbers of interviews hoping they'll find a company that will hire them anyway.

If incompetent developers do 100 interviews per job, and only last at jobs for 6 months before being fired, and competent developers do single-digit interviews (or 0, getting hired through networking) and stay employed for years at a time, a very small proportion of bad actors can be severely over-represented in interviews.

I think this is correct, however, it doesn't completely explain why I'll go months without meeting a better applicant. If there were a surplus of capable mid-level engineers then wouldn't I see them too?

Location, the kind of position, perceived company reputation and pay...

I've been on your side of the table for a similar role and had the same experience. Literally 20-30 candidates who can't answer basic questions for every 1 who can (and usually the 1 is "just ok").

I think it's just due to the particular pool your company is dealing with. Maybe there is a surplus, maybe there isn't, but you're not able to judge that objectively from your vantage point.

Well, why would those capable mid-level engineers, who probably already have decent jobs, want to interview at your company?

I'm not saying this to be snarky. If you don't have a good answer to this, that probably points to your issue. If you have to think a bit to answer that, it's probably also an issue.

Nobody with talent wants to interview at your company. Either your company has a bad reputation, or you're offering crap pay.

People who can barely write a for-loop go to dozens of interviews per job they get. People who are very competent go to two or three, tops, per job they get.

It's pretty simple logic from there.

I'd recommend suggesting it. You might be pleasantly surprised.

(I'm not quit-my-job-level supportive, but I'd like to join such an effort (as long as it wasn't michaelochurch) - so what's the way forward? Joining a general union until there's a critical mass that can spin off as a software-specific one?)

There is at least one union for software developers: http://www.iww.org/no/unions/dept500/iu560

IWW can be a bit extreme for my tastes, but it's the only one I've found.

> Joining a general union until there's a critical mass that can spin off as a software-specific one?

There's a number of software workers in "general" unions already, particularly (but not exclusively) public sector workers. And there's arguably quite a bit of utility in being part of a bigger union like SEIU, IWW, etc.

If it was the natural evolution of "corporate America" then Amazon's behavior would be the norm, not the exception. Amazon has a reputation for being terrible in this regard, so that's actually a good thing. It means this kind of behavior hasn't been normalized.

Surely, Amazon isn't the only bad company and there are many workers elsewhere who should be treated better. But if there's an overall equilibrium, Amazon is one of the companies on the wrong side of it.

When I did a ProctorU test for Epic earlier this year I was instructed to tear my scrap paper up and to then throw the scraps into the air. It wasn't until after I did that was I told by the proctor that they were "just kidding" about throwing the scraps.

That's disappointing. When I interviewed and worked for Epic some years ago they just flew you onsite and gave you a machine to take the tests on.

They also made you do some strange IQ test, but I think they stopped that.

After passing the ProctorU portion of the test, I was flown in and did more computer exams, as well as interviewing with some people in person.

In chatting with people while I was there, it sounded like it was very expensive to fly everyone in for the entirety of the computer interviews, so they started outsourcing the first part to weed people out.

For what it's worth, I did have to do a "logic" assessment that felt very IQ test like, though I have never actually taken an IQ test

Makes sense, since I was there when it was smaller than it was today. Let me guess, the logic questions were along the lines of "You have two coins that equal $0.55, and one is not a nickle"?

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