Comment by Kapura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kapura | Hacker News Reader

After reading this story, it's remarkable how much it reminds me of my own experience. I worked for Amazon.com as an intern for 3 months, then at the end I wasn't offered the position. They said that I showed "excellent technical skill," but they didn't feel that I embodied an Amazon.com employee. One specific criticism was that "For some of the interns, it was difficult to get them to stop working and go home. Not so for [me]."

I figured out the system mostly independently, because the senior developers were always under fire due to the over-large workload for our team. So while other interns would need help for an hour or two every few days, I'd ask something about the data type of a certain value in a function and be on my way. My mentor was especially impressed, but he was the only one because nobody else saw how much code I was writing or its quality. They would just see me getting up to pace about when the problem was very difficult, or opening up hn when I needed to give my brain a break.

Long story short, my manager said that they weren't going to hire me full time, which came as a shock because I thought that producing quality code to the deadline was the important part. He cited early mistakes in writing documentation (I'd never written a functional spec before the internship, but I posit what I eventually produced was of the highest quality) and my perceived lack of motivation. This despite me working as well and energetically as I ever had. I decided to look at it through a lens of another article I'd read on HN: Any company that doesn't want to hire me is a company I probably don't want to work for.

So while I'm dismayed that this pattern will continue, it's nice to know that there are some people who know the difference between a good programmer and one who puts in overlong hours.

An internship is a fit assessment that goes both ways. You and Amazon mutually agreed that it wasn't a good fit (Amazon wanted someone that worked silly hours, and you didn't want to work somewhere which measures you by hours worked). Congratulations on a successful internship.

I'm convinced that "playing the game" and "office politics" are much more about being seen to be working hard (or the illusion of it) than actually getting stuff done well.

Even if you can churn out more quality output in 4 hours than your peers can in 8, you better make sure you're seen to be working hard for those entire 8 hours, and make sure to continually mention to everyone possible just how hard you are working at all times.

Once you've learned how to "look busy", you've got it made.

This isn't necessary. Just notify your immediate manager every time you hit a milestone (e.g. complete a piece of assigned work), and notify them every time you've run out of work.

Part of the issue with the perception of developer effort seems to be the fact that the developers aren't communicating their success to the manager. The manager sees the failures (admittedly he fails to recognise them as failures), because they're working late and looking stressed. The manager doesn't see the successes, because he fails to understand what success looks like.

The solution isn't to emulate a failure, the solution is to educate the manager (through gentle notifications of work done) as to what success looks like.

George Costanza taught me this.

This probably varies greatly team-by-team. After all, it's a big company. I interned at Amazon over the summer, too, and basically did the same thing you did. However, I did get a return offer at the end. Sounds like you were unlucky and had a bad experience with your team, and I'm sorry about that. But I will say that what makes the difference probably is communication. You were probably working enthusiastically and producing great code, but did your manager know that? Meanwhile, I wasn't so enthusiastic about my intern project (it was an accounting system, so yawn...), and I didn't really produce all that much code (it was mainly just gluing some existing systems together). Hell, for a whole week, I was blocked waiting for information from a team in India and spent the entire week working on a side project. However, my team had daily standup, and I always had something to say about what I was doing at the time and what I was stuck on. Perhaps you actually were good about communicating what you were doing and your manager just ascribed to the "time of butt in chair" method of measuring programmer productivity, which is unfortunate. But if you didn't, it's something to think about.

That's awful. I would expect more from Amazon. I guess they've decided that, in absence of looking at your actual work, they have to find other metrics by which to measure your performance -- like how many minutes per day your butt is in your seat. What a faulty metric. I'm sorry you wasted your time there, but just know that they'll get the programmers they deserve, and 95% of the places out there will appreciate the qualities you describe.

This could also be the result of some office politics, perhaps they knew you were a productive developer and that's exactly why they didn't hire you.

From what I've read of Amazon, this kind of stuff happens on some teams and not others? It sounds like the balkanization of their product teams create wildly different expectations for employees?

I think that's absolutely the truth with me. My team was smaller by Amazon standards, but the role of the team was such that a very large number of responsibilities fell under their scope. I wasn't involved in much of the other stuff, but the full time employees were working very long hours just to keep up with their "normal" duties. I would meet with other interns for drinks after work, and their stories were much different than mine. Stuff like taking a few hours to drink w/ coworkers and brainstorm patents. My team members rarely engaged in any of the office social life simply because the expectations were so much higher.

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