p*u
发帖数: 2454 | 1 I had a very interesting experience a few months ago. I've waited a while to
post about this, for obvious reasons.
Amazon contacted me to interview for a senior position, as they tend to do,
and I thought 'Why not?' I went through the standard process, and they flew
me out to Seattle, along with three other candidates.
When we got there, the entire interview team consisted of developers from
the same country. For the interviewees:
I'm American, with 10+ years of experience, and a heavy focus on a certain
field very relevant to this team.
Another was British, with much more experience than I have; I actually knew
him from StackOverflow, though I'd never met him in person.
The other two were the same ethnicity as the interviewers. One had one year
of experience, the other had three years. Both thought they performed poorly
in the screening, and weren't quite sure why they were brought on-site.
We were all talking because the interviewers were running late, and
exchanged contact information. The interviewers finally arrived, and we went
through pretty standard interviews.
The next week, I was contacted and told that they didn't want to extend an
offer. The British guy also wasn't extended an offer. Both of the foreign
guys were extended offers. This was extremely surprising, because both of us
had been extended offers by Amazon in the past, more than once.
We discussed how the interviews went. We were all asked the same questions,
but we found that the interviewers went much easier on the two foreign
candidates.
One huge discrepancy we found was that a large portion of mine and the
British guy's interviews were spent on the interviewers asking us to
implement data structures from scratch, then implement algorithms that
operate on the data structures both iterative and recursively, and then
optimize both the data structure's storage and the algorithm's complexity.
The optimization portion, in particular, didn't end. We were certain we
couldn't optimize any more, but the interviewers wouldn't move on from the
question.
In the case of the foreign guys, they were both given the data structures'
interfaces, and asked just to write the algorithms either recursively or
iteratively. They wrote a naive implementation, and the interviewers said '
Good job' and moved on to talk about their previous projects and interests
for the remainder of the interview.
I was honestly extremely surprised by this. It's the first time either I or
the British guy had experienced this, and we especially weren't expecting it
from Amazon. Thinking back, even in previous interviews, I've always had
trouble with a large portion of foreign interviewers refusing to clarify
requirements, or not seeming uninterested in the interview.
Has anyone else had similar experiences at larger companies? In hindsight,
it does make sense that this would happen in some teams, but it's still a
little surprising. |
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