I have had two interviews with big companies Google and Amazon. After going to on campus interviews with both companies but only to here the word you are not qualified. I feel like a complete loser.
Take heart. The interview process is designed to say no. A common anecdote at Google goes like this: "I persuaded the best programmer I know to apply at Google. And we rejected him." These companies say no to all kinds of talented people every day.
Apply again next time you are looking for a job, if Amazon and Google really are the sort of companies you want to work for.
Think back on your interviews and figure out what you did wrong, then study up on that.
I know how you feel, but take solace in two facts:
1. Any good company will have a high false negative rate, because it's more expensive to hire a bad candidate than reject a good one. That's why the big ones (Amazon, Google, FB, etc) will keep re-interviewing you for the next few years. They know they make mistakes and want to try again under new circumstances.
2. If you actually are unqualified right now, you're very close to being qualified! If you've made it to onsite interviews then you're doing better than the majority of candidates. Most people are rejected at or before the phone screen. You're close, give yourself another year of improving your craft and interview again.
Background: I worked at Amazon, and conducted interviews while there. I've conducted lots of interviews at a startup, I just interviewed at Google for the third time and finally got an offer (now 6 years after graduation). At all places, we optimized for false negatives.
> Any good company will have a high false negative rate, because it's more expensive to hire a bad candidate than reject a good one.
As I usually do in these discussions, I would like to register that I think this is a load of crap.
First, a good company will have a high F-measure. Optimizing your hiring process for precision and ignoring recall is just a sign of having a really deep, really talented applicant pool (or being deluded about the depth and talent of your pool).
Second, when the costs of a bad hire come up lots of "cans" get thrown around without any grounding in reality. I view "optimiz[ing] for false negatives" the same way as I view security theater or overprotective parenting: attempts to stave off very low probability negative events that end up costing more than the events themselves would. Again, with a deep and talented pool this might not be the case, but if you are large enough to have that you are large enough that the damage a bad hire can cause is trivial to your business.
So you're actually arguing for companies to hire employees who will likely produce negative output (their code will be so bad as to take not only their own time, but other programmers' time to fix) just to ...what, not hurt the feelings of the bottom 80 percent of developers?
Your analogy is poor: Hiring a bad programmer is an extremely high probability event, even in a broad pool of candidates as would apply to a high-end company like Amazon, not a low priority event. There have been studies dating back to the 70's that show a 10-20x skill difference between average and great developers. If you're going to pay roughly the same for a 1x as a 10x developer, wouldn't you want the 10x? So they tune their hiring process to skew that number as high as possible.
OP above may be an exception who fell through the cracks, not really ragging on them in particular.
I did know at least one person who applied to Amazon and who was rejected -- and rightfully so, in my opinion. His skills were sub-par, and the interview process detected that. Most others that I worked with while I was at Amazon were also above average; people I've encountered at other jobs have been mediocre by comparison, with the exception of a number of game developers I know.
> Most others that I worked with while I was at Amazon were also above average;
> people I've encountered at other jobs have been mediocre by comparison
> people I've encountered at other jobs have been mediocre by comparison
> people I've encountered at other jobs have been mediocre by comparison
> people I've encountered at other jobs have been mediocre by comparison
Here you are flogging the horse of Amazonian
exceptionalism, and your own, of course, whilst simultaneously deriding most of your current and former co-workers at other businesses as merely average.
This raises an issue that is just as important as technical prowess: emotional intelligence. I'd personally green light ten or twenty 'inferior' ( by your standards ) developers over 1 technically superior ( again, by your standards ), but arrogant and morale-destroying, primadonna.
> simultaneously deriding most of your current and former co-workers at other businesses as merely average
I specifically excepted game developers because they're an above-average bunch, but yes, I'm merely relating the facts as I see them. And honestly I think, based on the kind words I've received from many coworkers over the years, that many would actually agree with my appraisal, and would report that I was helpful in teaching them better ways to accomplish things.
>This raises an issue that is just as important as technical prowess: emotional intelligence. I'd personally green light ten or twenty 'inferior' ( by your standards ) developers over 1 technically superior ( again, by your standards ), but arrogant and morale-destroying, primadonna.
I'm assuming for sake of civil discussion that you're not implying that I am the arrogant, morale-destroying prima donna, because that would have been rude and confrontational.
>Sorry, but technical chops aren't everything. Soft skills matter just as much.
Technical chops can get you 10x-100x-infinitely more productivity. I've frequently accomplished things in minutes that other developers have been blocked on for weeks. Extremely poor soft skills can disqualify an otherwise good developer, sure. I'd block the hiring of someone who was excessively arrogant, abrasive, or otherwise a harm to morale.
But many really good developers are actually really polite and helpful in a team setting -- I've worked with multiple developers that fit that description. And good technical chops are much more rare than decent soft skills, so the former is what's grilled most in an interview. The soft skills show through as well, though, and can equally get you disqualified.
It does depend on the domain whether you really need a great developer. Presumably you work in a domain where you can get away with average developers. That's fine, you can get away with paying them less, go for it.
But that attitude is a big part of why most companies' servers seem to get hacked sooner or later. Note that you don't hear about huge security breaches at Amazon revealing tons of private customer data, despite the fact that they likely are the top target for any exploit that could be used against them.
And part of that is, in fact, that they have a higher bar for developers.
> So you're actually arguing for companies to hire employees who will likely produce negative output (their code will be so bad as to take not only their own time, but other programmers' time to fix) just to ...what, not hurt the feelings of the bottom 80 percent of developers?
I did nothing of the sort. In fact, I am arguing that your hypothetical negative output employee is much rarer that some people think.
> Your analogy is poor: Hiring a bad programmer is an extremely high probability event, even in a broad pool of candidates as would apply to a high-end company like Amazon, not a low priority event.
I have seen no data to support this. My personal experience does not support this.
> There have been studies dating back to the 70's that show a 10-20x skill difference between average and great developers. If you're going to pay roughly the same for a 1x as a 10x developer, wouldn't you want the 10x? So they tune their hiring process to skew that number as high as possible.
Citation needed. I have certainly seen this bandied about the Internet quite a bit, but the best the citations only claim a 10x difference between great and terrible developers, and even those studies are likely flawed.[1]
> I did know at least one person who applied to Amazon and who was rejected -- and rightfully so, in my opinion. His skills were sub-par, and the interview process detected that. Most others that I worked with while I was at Amazon were also above average; people I've encountered at other jobs have been mediocre by comparison, with the exception of a number of game developers I know.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be rejected or that bad developers should have jobs at places like Amazon. I'm saying that optimizing for false negatives because you are paranoid of false positives is an anti-pattern and that there are better ways to deal with false positives.
About the 10x difference in programmer productivity: it's a "leprechaun", a false myth emerged from misquoting of previous articles, poor review processes of the claims made and the generalized tendency to ape a scientific process in the software engineering world. Quite some tall claims but I have read a book that makes some good arguments supporting this as well as debunking a couple of these legends turned truths: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns
Mine does. Sometimes all the work done by a new developer ends up needing to be ripped out and redone. I've had that happen to me in the last year (a developer with high credentials and who answered the questions well!), and I just had a friend show me a developer who would copy-and-paste code from StackOverflow into different places until the result was what he wanted -- leaving all of the other references because he didn't really understand WTF he was doing.
>10x difference between great and terrible developers
It's 10x between great and average. The studies were done on actively employed developers at large companies, and also showed the 10x developers produced more easily readable code that was better optimized.
> ... a developer who would copy-and-paste code from StackOverflow into different places until the result was what he wanted -- leaving all of the other references because he didn't really understand WTF he was doing.
> Sometimes all the work done by a new developer ends up needing to be ripped out and redone. I've had that happen to me in the last year (a developer with high credentials and who answered the questions well!), and I just had a friend show me a developer who would copy-and-paste code from StackOverflow into different places until the result was what he wanted -- leaving all of the other references because he didn't really understand WTF he was doing.
How did that code get in there in the first place? Does your or your friend's companies not do code reviews, particularly for new team members?
> It's 10x between great and average. The studies were done on actively employed developers at large companies, and also showed the 10x developers produced more easily readable code that was better optimized.
I have the book. I've read it. Brooks has nothing other than conjecture on the subject. As Laurent Bossavit said in the Fog Creek interview,
> When I looked into it, what was advanced as evidence for those claims, what I found was not really what I had expected, what you think would be the case for something people say, and what you think is supported by tens of scientific studies and research into software engineering. In fact what I found when I actually investigated, all the citations that people give in support for that claim, was that in many cases the research was done on very small groups and not extremely representative, the research was old so this whole set of evidence was done in the seventies, on programs like Fortran or COBOL and in some cases on non-interactive programming, so systems where the program was input, you get results of the compiling the next day. The original study, the one cited as the first was actually one of those, it was designed initially not to investigate productivity differences but to investigate the difference between online and offline programming conditions.
Both my anecdotal experience and independent research into the subject corroborate what Laurent is saying in this interview.
>How did that code get in there in the first place? Does your or your friend's companies not do code reviews, particularly for new team members?
His company didn't do regular code reviews, no.
It's a game company. Game companies frequently don't follow the same set of best practices common in other industries. In part because typical game developers are a notch above app/web developers, though in part because it's just a lot more "wild west."
>Both my anecdotal experience and independent research into the subject corroborate what Laurent is saying in this interview.
All I know is that I was a better developer at 15 than most professional developers I encounter today, and I'm much better today than I was at 15.
I had no Internet to search for answers. I had no debugger. After I made a change to the game I was writing, it would take 30 minutes to run it (off of a tape). I had to reinvent the idea of linking because I couldn't edit all of the game in the memory I had available; I'd hand link the (ultimately four) app modules by setting constants. After running my game, it would take me 30 minutes to re-load the editor/assembler app and load up one of the modules of my game, so I learned to take careful notes of where things would fail so that I'd be able to fix them in the next editing cycle, and I learned to read the code and understand exactly what it all did and how it all interacted in my head so that it wouldn't break at runtime.
I found and fixed all the bugs in that assembly language game, and it was quite fun at the end, if not very deep (think Space Invaders crossed with breakout, with moving breakout bricks). It was more responsive and smooth in animation than many games are today, and it had no OS support: I was writing directly to the hardware. Hardware that totally sucked for doing games on, by the way.
I'd say 80% or more of professional developers today would have thrown up their hands at the assembly language manual and the hardware reference guide that I used to develop that game. My prior experience was in writing BASIC.
When I do web development or NodeJS or C++ or Python or Go today, everything is so easy by comparison that I can quickly put together much more sophisticated architecture in a few hours than a typical developer can do in weeks. The bar is much lower; people can accomplish simple tasks without much mental effort, and so many professional developers never learn the advanced design or debugging techniques at all.
There was a time when I hired a highly recommended team in the past few years, and they took easily 5x longer (and therefore cost 5x as much) as they should have based on the complexity of the problem I gave them. Painful lesson.
More importantly, I can design systems that are easy to use and understand for other developers, and I've received many compliments on the design of the most popular game library I wrote. You can see some of the game credits here [1]; there were over a hundred published games based on that library. At least half of those were developed by people who used the engine because it was free and good, not because the company I worked for was requiring it.
So I don't need external proof that 10x developers exist. NOTE I'm not claiming to be uniquely brilliant or a unicorn or a genius: I've also met many others who were easily as good or much better than myself at development, at Amazon and at other companies. But I'm at least in the top 5% if not the top 2% of developers, and at my level I really can do things that most developers just can't, and for the tasks an average developer can take on, a top developer can produce code more quickly and of better quality. Except for CSS. I hate writing CSS and I'm sure a CSS expert could write it more quickly than I can. :)
So I tend to speak out in protest at the idea that 10x developers don't exist. Being egalitarian and denying the skill range is popular because junior and average developers outnumber the experts. But it doesn't reflect the full reality. Just maybe 80% of the reality.
My personal experience doesn't support this either. There are many different kinds of skill and it's really a management issue to find the right roles for people, and to lead them in a healthy, humane, productive, and profitable direction.
There is much to be said for being a solid programmer who can sketch out a system; there's also a lot to be said for being an average programmer who is great at taking direction and methodical. Most companies need both types of engineers.
The arguments used by people at certain tech companies are like saying "it's so hard to become President of the United States that anyone who becomes president is obviously the cream of the crop'.
Imagine if we said the same thing about doctors or lawyers, or really any other profession. We all know that such generalizations are total BS.
I think it's probably much truer that big tech companies are optimizing for false negatives because they do have a really deep, talented applicant pool. Some start ups do but it's definitely more of a risk. I completely agree with you that in general you're better off optimizing the F-measure, but I'm not sure it's empirically true that lots of companies thought of as good do this.
Thinking about this a little more, your final point may be right. It may be that companies become good by optimizing for F-measure, develop a talented and deep pool, then transition to optimizing for precision to manage the applicant load. Thus, most companies considered good have already transitioned while the ones who haven't aren't widely known.
In my experience, there is a large hidden cost in rejecting good candidates. I've seen first hand companies go under and projects fail, because too few employees really had the experience or ability to tackle challenging projects.
"Any good company will have a high false negative rate, because it's more expensive to hire a bad candidate than reject a good one."
Isn't part of good hiring practices to determine who is a good candidate? And beyond that, if the candidate is "bad", doesn't the company have the ability to work with the now employee to improve, and if things don't work out, to part ways? It seems like sending someone through endless loops of "maybe" interviews is a waste of both parties time.
Just making it to those on-site interviews is an accomplishment in my book. Just because you did not get the job does not mean you didn't gain anything. Use your experiences moving forward and you will land somewhere.
There are plenty of non-unicorn places that are awesome to work at. Maybe focus on some startups and other places, you don't have to take the job if they offer you. You are just as much interviewing them to see if it's a good fit.
The other thing too is the more you interview the more comfortable you are with it. You have already experienced probably the tougher interviews out there. Keep at it and you will land somewhere you love.
If you don't get a job I think interviewing is a waste of time. It might be an accomplishment, but you have to waste a a vacation day on not a vacation. A lot of time it is quite unorganized and sometimes the interviewer doesn't even seem interested.
I know when i am doing an interview I am prepared and make sure I know exactly how I am going to structure the interview and have read over the persons resume. I can't say the same for the places I have interviewed.
Last time I went to such an interview I got to spend a night in a very good hotel, in a very pretty town that I otherwise wouldn't have visted. I got to take in their summer festival, which I didn't even know was on.
And on the next day: I spent few hours talking about about programming to programmers. That done, I wondered about the town some more, eating local food and sipping foreign wine.
The time I interviewed at Google they flew me in the day before, once I got to my hotel room I had a couple of hours to mentally prepare for the next day before going to bed.
The next day I had about five or six hours of the toughest interview problems I have ever encountered and they had to end it a slightly early to make sure I had enough time to get back on the airport and make the flight they had scheduled for me to get back. About the only thing I got to experience besides Silicon Valley traffic was a meal at In-N-Out Burger (which was delicious, like always).
I still enjoyed the experience, mind you, and Google campus was really cool to see in person, but that didn't exactly feel like a holiday. I imagine most people's experiences would be more like this and less like your singular holiday-like experience.
At MS and FB they give you 2 nights if you're on the other coast and reimburse food - MS even gave a sightseeing stipend. This is for intern interviews, at least.
In a 50,000 person company there are way too many people for you to make any kind of generalizations. There is a probably a lot of good people and lot of dicks.
I've worked at Google and Facebook and I've been rejected from almost all of the top companies at one point or another (including Google, amusingly). It really doesn't mean much other than that not all the variables lined up during that particular interview process. It happens. Don't let it get you down!
Did this (having G & F in CV) help finding next jobs? i.e. possibilities to skip/ease further [tech] interviews? (in this case, it might be worthwhile to allocate some time preparing for interviews at G or F).
Nah most companies still insist on their process but I don't think I've ever been denied an interview (it's usually HR screening resumes and they won't pass on people with a background at companies like FB/Google). It helped a lot in convincing me working at a large tech company was not the right path for me personally (if you can't tolerate it at FB/Google, it's unlikely you would be able to do so anywhere else). Perhaps the biggest benefit is security: you can safely take startup risks without worrying about getting back into the industry. That's been the most important benefit I think.
Interview for a third time. Just getting to the point of an in-person interview with both Amazon and Google means you're clearly a qualified engineer. Chalk it up to practice. Tech interviewing is a skill, just like anything else.
They just have the luxury of being very picky and rejecting people for no real reason.
There are plenty of great tech companies out there, I promise you.
This is nothing to worry about. These companies do not blacklist candidates for not getting offers. You can try again in the future. Their interview processes are designed entirely around finding reasons to not hire someone, so much so that they very often make mistakes and reject talented applicants.
It's also important to understand that there are many great companies out there. In fact, I think Amazon has a fairly controversial reputation as an employer for programmers, so you very well may have dodged a bullet. I'm really not exaggerating on that either to try to make you feel better. I've legitimately heard lots of horror stories about Amazon.
Informal stats I've seen say that the big players still reject 80% of their onsite candidates - you're not a loser, it happens to a lot of people.
I failed 3 in a row in one week once - not fun. I know how you feel. I was pretty bummed for a few months and it took me a while to restore my confidence.
For me, my progression with tech interviews was definitely non-linear. I sucked at them and felt terrible and incompetent, and then suddenly things started to click very quickly and I'm alright at them now. The only real way to get better is practice.
I don't have much to add but "complete losers" don't get invited to Google's and Amazon's campuses, nor do they get several hours (at the least) of top talent devoted to finding and interviewing them.
But that perspective is hard to see right after being rejected. The worst thing you can do is let that drag you down into a self-fulfilling prophecy, unable to meet the plenty of opportunities that will come your way.
Remember, they don't actually know if you're qualified to work there or not. Interviewing is hardly a science. There's a lot of intuition and "gut feel" involved. Being reject could mean anything from "you actually are unqualified" to "the interviewer's dog got run over by a car this morning" or anything in between. More likely it means something closer to "these people don't actually know how to evaluate me to see if I'm qualified for their job or not, and the outcome of this process is closer to random chance than anything else.
IOW, don't let it get you down. If you feel the need, continue studying, working hard, learning new stuff, etc. as that can only help you in general. But there's no need to feel like a loser.
As someone who has been rejected after a Google onsite, an Amazon hiring event, and (as of a few hours ago) an Amazon onsite the thing that gets me down is these companies are among the few who actually want to interview me.
I'm in Dallas. I get hit up by someone affiliated with Amazon once every couple months, Google and Microsoft about once a year, and Facebook occasionally. Getting a company not listed in the previous sentence and not located in DFW to acknowledge my existence, let alone interview me, is like pulling teeth. Based on OP's visa situation he may be in a similar boat.
Yes well, big companies WANT to hire you but they also are culturally not able to. When they get too big it's all about politics and money. They want to hire you but lack the will to hire people that cost a lot and may be a political liability. The company as a whole is like a drug addict. They want to stop but can't and will never admit they have a problem. Big companies are addicted to larger numbers of cheaper employees because headcount determines each managers rank and salary not results.
But how? How could anyone's enthusiasm not be diminished by failure? Not even a little bit? If there are really people like that, that sounds like a genetic advantage.
I'm not sure if it's learned or innate but it goes a little like this:
No matter what happens, I'll still be breathing tomorrow, unless I die in which case it doesn't matter anyway.
I approach everything in life under the assumption that I'll reach my goal. Some things go wrong, of course, but mostly the world gets out of my way and lets me pass.
A "failure" means that your success doesn't lie with them. Move on.
Also, take some time to think about WHY you have the goals that you do. Are they really what you want, or just something that other people told you to want? The world is full of successfully miserable people.
The question is how you interpret the decision of the other party not to move forward. Call it a failure on your side, and it will be a failure. There really is some deeper truth to the remarks in the other comments to frame it as a learning moment, and to gain experience. By framing these random facts in another way, you can come out without a scratch on your soul, and this tiny bit of extra wisdom that will make you understand that (a) this random outcome of the process is nothing personal, and (b) you will be able to approach the random processes a bit better next time.
Usually if you learn something that builds constructively upon who you are, then you can chalk failures up as successes. Early-stage startups very much feel this way: like a process of developing an intuition for understanding how to make something the market wants and then get it to grow. A failure-resilient mindset is actually essential if you want to go into startups. So many people test the water, get scalded, and then give up entirely, which ends up being a huge waste of time.
I don't think it has much to do with genetics. You just need to develop a certain mindset. (I lean heavily on nurture) We live in a world that doesn't cherish failure... Reframe failure to mean one step closer to success. After all, not every experiment will prove your hypothesis, but if you want to make progress you have to keep trying.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is what you need to read up on...
Some people think differently to you and I, really differently, and have no ability to empathise with others. Not being loved as a child is no genetic advantage though.
Ah, that's a great documentary! I found one of the subjects kind of too overly-enthusiastic all the time, but it's still a good documentary nonetheless. And good advice!
In my experience, the majority of people who interview at the big tech companies don't get offers. It's not even necessarily because the interviewee made any mistakes, just for whatever reason many companies like that are super picky because they can afford to be.
You shouldn't feel bad about it at all, but I know the feeling- it sucks, especially if you really got your hopes up. However, the fact that you got those interviews reflects very well on you, and the fact that you didn't get the jobs does not reflect poorly on you.
Just going through the interview process is a really useful learning experience. It builds confidence for future interviews and gives you a feel for how you might want to further develop your professional and/or interpersonal skills.
Sometimes job-seekers get lucky and get an offer right away. Sometimes people interview at 10-20 different companies before it works out. All you can do is not take it personally, learn what you can from each experience, and keep trying. If you keep trying you are guaranteed to eventually succeed (well, on an infinite timescale :), but if you give up you are guaranteed to fail immediately. Good luck!
OK, you revealed only far down this thread that you actually are a special case, not just some random local who got an interview. That does add complexity.
But (and I am no expert, and I have never come within a million miles of this level of employer), I decided decades ago that anyone who didn't have the brains to hire me was someone I didn't want to work with. No, really - what you see and what you think you want might not be what you need, and a different employer could be a better match.
I've found in my life that unexpected and unanticipated opportunities usually turn out better for me than ones I think I ought to pursue. Maybe that's only me, maybe not.
And finally, as others have said, interviewing gives you more practice at interviewing, which makes you better at interviewing, and more likely to make it through the inevitable random fluctuations that reject qualified candidates. Randomness is not your fault, but practice at recognizing it and dancing around it will help you.
About Us: 3-year old NYC-based enterprise fintech startup. We create web-based tools that help investment banks use data to automate workflows and sell fixed income and equity securities.
You can very loosely think of us as an Angelist for institutional investors. Every month, $10-20 billion of financings are exclusively marketed through our platform (Angelist did $150 million in 2015). We work with all the leading bulge bracket investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citi, JPM, Barclays, etc) and hundreds of the nations leading corporations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ford, Hyundai, etc.
We are bootstrapped and profitable and believe we are in a very unique position to significantly impact an extremely valuable segment of Wall Street (new issue offerings).
What We're Looking For: Full stack is ideal but we are flexible. Most important for us is someone who enjoys coding and is self-organized. We are a very lean team and need a lot of help - we don't have bandwidth to do a lot of hand holding so we need people excited about taking ownership over their work. We have great clients who are supportive and we have a roadmap that can easily get us into 2017. We know what we need to do, need help doing it...
Stack: Front-end: angular and express Backend: laravel, php, node.js Database: MYSQL Deployments: chef and docker
Interview Process: 1. Resume screen 2. Phone screen with hiring manager 3. Onsite interview with team (expect some technicals) 4. Done.
The thing to remember is, there are maybe 10+ possible reasons you didn't get an offer, and only one of them (doing badly in the interview) is under your control. The others (position got cut, somebody else was a better fit, internal requirements changed, position filled by an internal transfer, etc) are, if not random, at least indistinguishable from random from your perspective.
Of course, they usually don't tell you the reason in your case, so all you can do is guess - if you think you bombed the interview then study what you missed, and if you don't, chalk it up to randomness.
I got rejected at 7 final onsites before landing an offer. There is hope for you. Just keep working on projects and whiteboarding. Don't underestimate how much focused interview prep can help. Good luck!
Amazon aggressively recruits people all over the country. If you have a pulse, you can probably get through their initial phone screen and they will pay to fly you out to Seattle for a day of interviews. You typically won't have a lot of time to see the city, but you can roll the dice and "miss" your return flight and try to get a standby booking which might buy you a few hours or an overnight - which you can then book a hotel on your dime.
If you didn't get any feedback as to why you were rejected, there's no point in feeling bad about it.
There are all kinds of reasons companies reject candidates. A lot of them have nothing to do with your competence.
Maybe they had a better or cheaper candidate come along. Maybe the open position was closed. Maybe they thought you were overqualified. Maybe the interviewer(s) had a bad day and rejected everyone. Maybe one of the interviewers is an asshole and vetoed your candidacy over the objections of everyone else.
You have no idea of knowing what happened, even if they did give you feedback. They are certainly not going to tell you that everyone but the asshole wanted to hire you.
Furthermore, all companies are different. They all value different things and strengths and types of people. Getting rejected by Amazon doesn't mean you are "not the top 1%", it doesn't even mean you aren't Amazon's top 1%. It means that on that specific day, those specific people didn't think you were the specific top 1% they were looking for right then.
You might be Amazon top 1% tomorrow. You might be Facebook top 1% right now. You might have been Uber's top 1% yesterday. You might be everything a founder somewhere is looking for right this second.
Hiring is not an objective game, never read anything personal into it.
Stop reading Hacker News and everything like it. Such echo-chambers have persuaded you that working for one of a handful of companies is all that counts, and that your worth is measured by doing so. It's damaging your mind.
I recently quit my job because of burnout and management problems. Since then, I applied to 39 jobs. I pulled out of the process with four, 34 rejected me, and the last one was the offer I accepted. Out of the 34 that rejected me, 11 rejected me after a full loop. I don't know what was more insulting, doing 11 full loops (3 of which required air travel!) without getting an offer, or getting rejected by 23 companies without even reaching the full loop step.
Big companies have fixed interview processes that are designed to weed out false positives at the expense of having a lot of false negatives. Startups by and large don't know WTF they are doing when it comes to hiring. Companies in the middle deceive themselves into thinking they have a process when they really don't know what they're doing. Some companies experiment with their hiring process, which is a lot like not knowing what you're doing except they get usable data out of it afterwards (at the expense of you, the applicant). And some companies don't even have a clear idea of what roles they need to hire for when they bring you to a full loop. Twice I've received interview feedback to the effect of, "we like you, but we can't actually move forward with the role we interviewed you for because we lost budget/want to rework the role requirements".
If you're interviewing with places like Google and Amazon, you're in a career that pays six figures. A six figure career isn't treated like a five figure career, and tech is a pathological example of this. Most six figure careers--doctor, dentist, longshoreman--have some sort of barrier to entry where you go through years of hazing, high expenses, and unreliable income. Other six figure careers are really just the top of a five figure career. With tech, I don't know how it is if you have some sort of marker that you've already been through years of expensive hazing (i.e. a degree from MIT or CMU) but for a guy like me who went to a mid-rate state university, there's the same instinct to have a high barrier to entry but instead of making that barrier to entry something that you can spend a few years climbing through, it's a gigantic wall that you get one chance to jump over. And that wall is the interview process.
You were not rejected by Google and Amazon, you were rejected by fallible, biased, and hopefully well-intentioned representatives at Google and Amazon as part of their human-driven internal processes.
You should not feel like a complete loser because the interviewers are just people like you and their decision says nothing about you as a person, they just think they didn't see what they were looking for, they may be wrong and even if they are not wrong, it says nothing about your potential.
That said I don't think any advice here will really help. I've been in a similar position years ago and you have to experience actually getting into one of these places and then realizing everyone's just the same as you to feel better about this. I'm in the opposite situation to you now and trying to get out of a large tech company and do my own thing. I would say keep applying if this is what you want and keep practicing the interview style questions - personally going over algorithms and data structures without any other motivation besides interviews is hard for me. If you can work on something of your own, even a game or something not important do so, because when you finally do get in to one of these companies, you might find out (perhaps sooner than you expected) that you want to get out and having experience doing your own thing might make that easier.
Practice! Books like Programming Pearls and Cracking the Coding Interview will be useful for you. Meet with friends and do mock interviews.
Developer interviews are similar to the SATs/GREs/any other standardized test. It's not a test of your general ability so much as it is a test of your ability to do well on a standardized testing format. And in general, the best way to ace those is to practice interview problems a lot.
When I didn't manage to make it past my Amazon interviews, I hit a wall. It was a harsh realization that I was either not my best self or that I was not good enough. After a two month slump, I decided that I was just not up to the standards of a rigorous technical interview, but that I could get there with hard work and a new mindset.
I can't tell you not to feel badly about it, but I do want to tell you that 4 years on, it doesn't matter whether I would have been hired by Amazon. In fact, I probably would not have my own company if I had been given an offer.
You didn't say anything about your skill level or experience, or what level you were looking for. Interviewers are often given a target level to interview you at, and if you are not at that level you will get low marks (though better interviewers will often suggest you be hired at a lower level).
You should have a pretty good idea of how you did on each question. Did you check edge cases? Solid test coverage? Did you ask clarifying questions? How good were your answers? If the obvious answer is O(n^2) then there's an answer that is O(n log n). If the obvious answer is O(2^n) then there's an answer that is O(n^2). Look for infinite loops. Memoization. Recursion, and unrolling that recursion into a loop.
Don't get discouraged. You were just handed a study guide for your next interview in 6 months.
Remember to ask questions about the company. Even if you know the answers. An interviewee that's asking questions looks more engaged and is more likely to get more attention. I like asking questions like "What's the best/worst part of working here?" Things that it's legit to ask more than one interviewer, in case they talk and share your questions.
Acting calm and relaxed, and being able to hold a conversation helps a lot. You're not just interviewing for your ability. You're going to be part of a team, and if your interviewer can't imagine working with you, that may translate into a pass.
Learn something new. Disjoint sets are a great tool for interviews. I've taken questions that the interviewer thought was O(n^2) and solved it in O(α(n)) which grows so slowly it might as well be O(1). I boned up on proof by induction before my Google interviews and it helped carry me through.
Practice interviewing. I went on half a dozen interviews to prep for my interview at Google. I occasionally interview even if I'm not looking. I've had 10 jobs (I used to jump around a lot) and I've probably gone on well over a hundred interviews. Most were practice ones I didn't particularly care about, some were practices that turned into jobs. Very few were specific jobs I was working to get.
You might have just gotten unlucky. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog... has a good synopsis of the stress and dejection that not getting hired holds, particularly at Google, and how you might have just happened to get the wrong interviewers.
Since this question is specifically about in-person interviews, I wonder if you could work on your attention to detail regarding language skills. For example, in this very question you wrote "After going to on campus interviews with both companies but only to here the word you are not qualified", which contains multiple mistakes (the punctuation is incorrect and "here" should be "hear").
Totally true. Spelling is about respect for the reader, it is not about using fancy words or merely conveying a message or being brainy. Some people just do not like lousy spelling without having a deep reason for why, however, spelling says a lot about ones attitude towards others.
I think it could be an issue. Dozens/hundreds/thousands of people interview at Google. If I was interviewing for a programming position, and they were misspelling words in the e-mails and mangling their English, and English language communication was important in the job (as it has been for every job I've had), that would be a red flag. With so many others of a probably equivalent competence interviewing, it wouldn't take many red flags for them to be passed on for an offer.
As a lot of people have already said, even getting to an on-site with either of these companies is an accomplishment in itself. I've had on-sites at both and like you, I've been turned down. Doesn't stop Amazon from coming back to me with different job opportunities about once a year.
Keep in mind that in most cases you will not be given the real reason for rejection (mostly as a lawsuit-avoidance measure) but something vague like "not qualified" (which can mean anything starting from a wrong haircut to the interviewer bearing a grudge against your school) or "decided to go with another candidate". Heck, I've been told by an employer that they'd found an internal candidate for the position only to find out nine months later via the grapevine that the rejection happened the exact day a hiring freeze with "rightsizing" had been instituted.
You're not a loser, otherwise you wouldn't have made it in there in first place. What it means is that on this particular day, the stars didn't align for you.
H1B story. I was contracting as a middleware software engineer a while back.
They posted job descriptions for two senior-level programmers, both positions requiring Masters degrees.
These two 'job opening' announcements were placed in the break room so everyone saw them.
The pay? $65,000 a year.
The steps to hire an HIB require:
- the employer make a documented effort to hire a U.S. national first
- by posting a 'Job opening'
- by interviewing
A lot of times, tech firms are hiring H1Bs from India etc.
Right? Just take a look at the over-representation of foreign nationals, compared to U.S. college grads/citizens, at the tech firms you've worked at.
When I saw "$65,000 annual salary" well my goodness. Do you think they'll find someone, a U.S. national, to take that position? No.
It's an unhappy truth, but if you know you're qualified, not too old, and felt a lot of rapport with the interviewers, and did well on the tech part of the interview, and don't get an offer, the firm my not WANT to even be doing that interview but they must before hiring an H1B.
There is a contract opening at Apple Sunnyvale. Somehow, TCS/Infosys/Wipro is trying to fill this spot, yet these couldn't find a candidate for the last 3 months. You know why? These (TCS/Infosys/Wipro/etc) companies are trying to fill the spot with $55 per hour on 1099. Yet they need senior level candidates.
I am like, you can't find a candidate with those rates. So, the story goes on: not enough qualified people. Tech labor is going the route of restaurant/construction industries: they are always people available for the rate you want to fill, but they are on H1B or some farm visa, illegal, etc.
Exact reason I won't interview at Microsoft. I went to a hiring event a few years ago and was the only American on either side of the table. They needed to be seen trying to hire Americans, and I felt stupid for having fallen for this scheme.
In the eyes of the interviewers, you were not the most qualified candidate for the position they were hiring for. That's nothing to feel bad about, it just means that if your goal is to be hired by Amazon or Google (or etc.), you need to improve your qualifications (work a different job), and/or improve your ability to communicate your qualifications (work on your "whiteboarding" skills. Also if English was the language the interview was conducted in, work on your conversational English with a language swap partner). You may even "run better" if you re-apply without any improvement, but why take that risk?
There is no penalty to you for re-applying to different jobs at Google or Amazon, and you may find a team for which you are a better fit, you may have better interview luck, or you may be evaluated against a less competitive pool. In the meantime, get a different job and don't let your skills rust.
> In the eyes of the interviewers, you were not the most qualified candidate for the position they were hiring for.
For Amazon, this is not a correct conclusion. Having done well into the low-hundreds of on-site interviews for Amazon, I do not recall a single instance of a debrief discussion comparing one candidate against another. At Amazon it is simply a matter of making the bar or not making the bar. While it may seem like you are interviewing for a specific position, in reality at Amazon you are interviewing for a given role and level. Generally the level is targeted based on the candidate's experience and if the candidate barely doesn't make the bar but the interview loop agrees they have growth potential they may get an offer at one level lower, though this is not particularly common. Amazon will extend an offer to any candidate who meets the bar regardless of how many good candidates are interviewing for a specific "opening". Between the company's growth rate and the high attrition Amazon needs more new hires than can be found that meet the bar.
I accept the Amazon specific revision that "in the eyes of the reviewers, you did not meet the bar." The rest of the advice follows just as naturally from this premise. The only variable that is eliminated is the current application pool, which the candidate has no control over anyway. Performed ability level, interviewer perception, and "resume traits" are the variables any candidate should manipulate to increase the odds of being hired. The first two are very noisy, the later can also be a function of effort (the same information can be presented better or worse in a resume).
I reject the notion that Amazon's hiring practices are neither implicitly nor explicitly comparative. The notion of hiring candidates that "raise the bar" is explicitly comparative to existing employees. That said, I do not know the details of Amazon's hiring philosophy. I do know that internal promotion within Amazon is quota constrained and therefore implicitly comparative.
> I reject the notion that Amazon's hiring practices are neither implicitly nor explicitly comparative.
You are absolutely right on that. The core question that needs to be answered at each interview debrief is "when the next review process roles around, do we believe this candidate will end up in the upper half of the stack rank for their role/level?" It's a little more complicated than that as Amazon's stack rank is a two-dimensional rank that looks both at contribution-in-level and perceived growth potential, but in the end it's still a judgment call of "is this candidate better than half the people currently in this role."
Try applying for an internship if applicable, the barrier of entry is lower.
Don't get discouraged, I got rejected 4 times at the phone interview level before getting an offer. You should feel proud for going on-site with Google and Amazon already. Try to reflect on your mistakes during those 2 events to make the 3rd on-site interview a success.
Don't feel like a complete loser (yes, that is easier said than done). You failed two interviews, but an equally valid way to look at that is that you go so far as the interview stage at two companies, one of which is legendary for being monsterously difficult to interview for. You just did something 99.9% of the world will never ever have the change to do.
Did they tell you why you didn't pass the interview? If so work on that, if not, know that there are tons of companies out there that will want to hire you.
I never applied for anything like Google, but I had companies that wouldn't take a second look at my application and companies that spent the entire interview stage trying to wow me to sign the employment contract. Most companies (probably in particular Google) have an employment pipeline that has _nothing_ to do with whether you would be a good employee.
Don't be discouraged by a few companies choosing not to hire you.
First off, you are not a loser just because you weren't selected by some of the most elite tech companies. Google will never know how many talented people they have accidentally turned away over the years because of trivial things like the whiteboard test.
My advice to you is pick a language and just program anything and everything. Make it a point to master one language rather then learn 10 for a resumes sake. No one cares how well Shakespeare wrote Spanish and no one will care if you don't know perl if you are a c++ guru.
Finally, don't let your opinion of yourself and your capabilities be dictated by someone who barely even knows you and what you are capable of. Google is a fantastic company but even they make mistakes. Focus your energy on trying to prove them wrong.
It's so important for you to be rejected from many places because it helps build your rejection "tolerance". If you read about people you admire, you will see their paths absolutely paved with rejection.
Lot of companies support H-1B. Moving on is the only thing you can do. You need to pick yourself up as soon as possible and apply for other positions. Keep in mind there are people who can not even land a phone interview at those companies.
Are you looking for a H1B sponsorship? A lot of tech companies do this if you have speciality skills. Even some small ones. The only catch is the visa process is long and you have a 1/3 chance of getting one.
Yes I am looking for companies. But the only companies which I knew who offered a lot were google and amazon. And doing something I like while working for them
Happens - I failed interviewing with Google 5 times this past year, the last time being my first in-person with them (feedback was inconsistent performance).
I've learned at least with Google, sometimes you get bad luck with the draw...and in my case, I had some quite bad luck with recruiters who weren't the greatest communicators. One technical phone screen was waived due to the team's familiarity with my work, only to be rejected as not what they were looking for for that specific role.
Also, sometimes rejection is a blessing. The important thing is to make the most of your experiences.
These interviews were mostly initiated by Google - in particular, I have a special level of expertise with Angular, which they highly covet and which is likely why they've been contacting me roughly every two months or so to interview for various engineering roles.
Also, I had a typo - I didn't mean recruiters, I meant interviewers.
1) That's two companies. And presumably for two roles total. There are probably 50k other options.
2) If you can get feedback from friends who work at either on how the interviews went, and specifically what they found unqualified about you, you can try either remedying those deficiencies (which might be real, or might be perception -- different ways to fix), or you could apply for roles/companies where those matter less.
Amazon and Google are pretty different, aside from both being "big", so it would be helpful to know what you liked about each and their roles.
You are not a loser. Getting in the door at these companies is an accomplishment in itself, and puts you in the top tier of applicants.
Treat every interview as a learning experience for the next.
One thing you can do when you start looking for jobs is to accept interviews for roles you are interested in but wouldn't feel terrible turning down. This will give you some experience before you interview for the roles you deeply want. Interviewing is a skill, one that I've found needs to be relearned for every job search.
The measure of an engineer is what he builds. There is plenty of top notch engineering going on outside Google. Think WhatsApp, CoreOS, Rust at Mozilla, Azul JVM, etc.
AFAICT no one actually believes this. There are plenty of places where building something important will get you in the door for an interview. There don't appear to be any employers that would be satisfied by track record without whiteboard performance.
I think that is correct, that most employers today insist on the monkey show interview process. I meant it more as countering what OP said about feeling like garbage. Being a great engineer in fact (building reliable and durable systems) is at best correlated and at worst completely orthogonal to what is measured in interviews today.
If you like to work for one of these companies, then try again. You should try until you get it. Also, it helps to remember that, cracking the interview is just one part and you will be able to do it at some point in time with practice, but working as a software developer is a different story. You could aim to become a good software developer at anytime, irrespective of where you work. I hope you give preference to the later.
Realize that even if you're doing well, interviewers can still perceive you poorly, and the process is weighted to reflect how much more painful a bad hire is than rejecting a good hire.
Practice is going to improve your performance and put you at ease with the process, and give you a better understanding of when your performance was not up to snuff versus just not meshing with how the interviewers wanted to interact with you.
As others have said... Keep trying. If you really want to work at one of the large players its often a multi year process of interviewing and getting turned down until you dont.
As far as feeling line a loser... Interview more. I'm sure there are plenty of smaller shops that will throw plenty of money and praise at you if you need a ego boost.
Like others said - keep trying. I was rejected by both companies once, and now I work for Amazon. You get better with time.
Also, both companies have quite different styles of interviews (whiteboard programming aside). Really pay attention to what the recruiters suggest to study up before the interview.
Screw 'em. Take the opportunity now to learn that a career in software development is far more than cranking out code on bullshit deadlines where you're just another numbered drone in the hive. It can also be making colossal mistakes at small to medium sized organizations where you deal with stupid politics and influence major architecture and platform decisions because business people don't know what they're doing:)
Seriously though: get involved with a local users group & meet people interested in your language/stack of choice. Get to know a bit about the smaller places they work & why they do it. Network, look for new opportunities & take a run at some place where you can have some impact.
Disclaimer: due to personal biases and the shared experiences of friends & colleagues, I would _NEVER_ recommend someone who loves their CAREER filed get pulled into a JOB at a big U.S. company. Take my advice with a grain of salt (or perhaps a full kilogram).
Understand that the success rate is probably something like 5% for high tier companies, being 1 of the other 19 that failed isn't anything to be ashamed of.
What's important is that you reflect on things you could have done better in your interviews and learn from it.
I wouldn't call these companies "high tier." They are big and have a lot of money but mainly rely on interns to keep their decades old cash cows going.
Often times its really hard to say no to someone, especially if they've gotten that far into the interview process. Just keep moving forward. You'll find something that you like and you'll forget all about Amazon.
Every Google interviewer I've spoken to has told me the same thing: most Googlers got in on their 3rd or 4th attempt. Don't take it personally; there are a ton of opportunities for Software Developers in the US.
These companies have a very high rate of false negatives and are often happy to have people reapply next year. Apply to more companies and get as many rejections as you can!
if feasible, try to have a debriefing conversation (on the phone) with your google recruiter. obviously will depending on their individual style, but they can sometimes provide vital feedback that you can use to get better for when you interview with google again in the future (which you definitely will at some point.)
above all, get back on the horse! and again, and again, and again. don't let feelings stand in the way of what you want to accomplish.
it's not about what the other say. They try to judge you in a few minutes, even though a real judge needs months or years. I still figure out a lot of positve aspects of people working with me, as well as negative, after months in the same company.
The truth is that it's all about what you think you can make, not what the other say. Just smile and keep going on your road, always with head up! =)
Build something the world has never seen and carve your own path. Nothing builds confidence like productivity and it helps you learn new things to boot!
How is that odd - the whole point of interviews, and especially on-site ones, is to decide whether or not someone is 1) qualified to do the job, and 2) a good fit for the role/team/company.
I think that any candidate who is not "qualified" for a job would either have the qualifications on their CV or not. You might say that the candidate hasn't got the right experience or hasn't demonstrated the capabilities required - but "not qualified" doesn't make sense for a mature organisation interviewing candidates. If it was followed with " and we have sacked the bozos who invited you for an interview. I'm really sorry for wasting your time. Best..." then fair enough.
Everything is relative. At a company, I was a top dog, by an order of magnitude (if such things can be quantified) at developing software in my field. I thought I was pretty damn good at it, and put something to that effect on my resume.
Later on, I applied to a different company, and while I got hired...holy shit. I have one hell of an imposer syndrome, because an "average" dev there can seriously show me a trick or two...or a hundred. The top of the food chains might as well be gods among mortals in my view.
So really, a resume only tells you what the applicant THINKS their qualifications are. Nothing more.
3. You got the interviews, lots of people didn't. That's a pat on the back there.
4. There are lots of other companies.
5. Focus on your strengths. Keep going, push on, and you can come back to these companies in a year or less with much more strength and steel than now.
After having interviewed many people (and having been interviewed), I eventually modeled in my head the average technical competence of candidates as a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. The lower part of that curve got weeded out by headhunters and HR. Then we go through resumes and weed more out - you need to have a certain level of competence (or a friend with such) to know enough to put a resume that looks good, even if it is puffed up some. Then we weed more out with phone interviews.
By that point, unless someone slips through, usually we are interviewing people on the right half of the curve. Which means the bulk of people will be average - as good as the average programmer, or admin, or what have you.
About one in six will be one standard deviation above the mean. About one in twenty will be two standard deviations above the mean. About one in three hundred or so will be three standard deviations above the mean. Bruno Bowden said the top leadership at Google was at least three standard deviations above the mean.
So that's the answer. Are they interviewing six people, or twenty (or three hundred)? Without a reference from someone in the group, the person they hire will probably be the one who is one or two standard deviations above the mean.
I think one example of this is in answering questions. Usually the first three questions I ask are the same for each person. People who stumble over the questions, who kind of can answer them, barely, rarely recover after them. People who hit all the questions out of the park right off the bat usually hit all the other questions asked out of the park. In a sense, for people who don't hit the first three questions out of the park, I'm only continuing the interview to not be rude (also usually my opinion is one of several, but no one ever said someone was competent that I said was not).
So I think that's one thing. You should be able to answer 100% of the questions asked, in detail. Because that was the hit rate of the people we thought were good. Not stumble over a sort-of answer, but answer in full, and explain whatever area is asked about in full detail if asked.
The one in six or one in twenty who could do this were given offers, unless they had severe personality issues. In my experience, here being average is good enough, although different places have different ideas on fit.
Flipping this model around, maybe one out of twenty interviews I've gone on have I been asked inane questions, where me not doing well was more the interviewers fault than mine. But for the other nineteen of twenty times, I would say if I didn't get the offer it was either because I applied for a position I was not qualified for, or I just was not prepared and filled-in on the subjects as I should have been.
Also, your English language and spelling skills are lacking, as someone has noted here. Were the interviews in the English language? If they were, that's something to work on.
What I hate about Google onsites is that EVERYONE YOU EVER KNOW is invested in the outcome, without consider what you think is right for you.
You could be interviewing full time at 20 companies through Hired.com and nobody bats an eye - no matter if they are interesting, pay extremely well (or not), are located in a cool place - Google's interview has people in lalaland. Which makes a non-offer outcome much more compounded than actual.
Apply again next time you are looking for a job, if Amazon and Google really are the sort of companies you want to work for.
Think back on your interviews and figure out what you did wrong, then study up on that.
And next time, prepare very carefully, with a focus on algorithms and data structures. I would use this book, although it's a bit dated now: https://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Algorithms-Alfred-Aho...
This one may also be useful: https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp...