Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.
edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.
For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
I'm glad you're fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon again. It was the second most frustrating interview I've ever been in. It was clear to me that 4 of my interviewers had no intention of even considering me.
Side note: The most frustrating interview I've ever had was with Microsoft Boulder: they just flat out insulted me in the interview and questioned why anyone would hire me based on not getting their trick question. That said my interviews with Microsoft Redmond were lovely.
I went for an interview in Redmond, for which the recruiting agency had clearly 'oversold' the job description (I should have known better, too) - it was billed as more of a PM position than what it was - line / UAT testing.
Anyway, I got into the interviews, and I could sense something was up. I was answering the questions but they didn't seem... enthusiastic... about them, or me. I like to think I usually interview decently, though of course I can improve.
Eventually someone says, "Hmm, can you wait here a minute?" and a new person comes in with him a few moments later.
"So... I'm not sure why the agency sent you to us." Okay...? "You're definitely over-qualified for this role, and frankly we think you'd be bored." I thought it was a good opportunity to get in the door (and MSFT is a great place to work), so I tried to offer a little placation, when he introduced the other person, "But I know that [name] here has been looking for a PM, so why don't you talk to her."
I walked out that afternoon with a different, better, higher paying job, because someone thought "outside the box".
That's "thinking for the company" which I had rarely seen during my 10 years working for a large company. "Thinking for myself / department" approach is much more common, unfortunately.
I'm suspicious based on something you said about the interviewers being disinterested and unenthusiastic. I am cynical, having seen this process played out many times, and having wasted more than a few days interviewing for jobs I had zero chance of earning because the employer had already (yet unofficially and potentially illegally) chosen a candidate. Let me explain:
What you've described sounds to me like a setup for hiring an H1B employee. The employer is legally required to interview everyone who meets the requirements, and must hire qualified domestic employees if they are available for work, but the employer will look for any reason to disqualify domestic candidates.
A whole industry of consultants popped up a decade ago that coached companies on how to use this "loophole" to favor H1B over domestic employees (which is on it's face, illegal. If a US employee is available, the employer must hire him so the trick is to find a way to disqualify this domestic candidate.)
Or maybe they already had an internal candidate and were required by HR to interview some additional people (e.g. you) before they discover, to everyone's surprise, the internal candidate is the very best one for the job. "Going through the motions" to interview others when their mind was made up before the job description was even written.
EDIT: Just so it's clear, I'm not saying Amazon does these things; and I don't know anything about this particular case. I am saying this sort of faux-interview happens in the industry, and has the same "feel" of the interviewers simply going through the motions.
This is a common misunderstanding about H-1B. For hiring someone on H-1B, the employer need not prove that they made attempts to hire a citizen or permanent resident first. But to sponsor an employee on H-1B for green card, they have to provide such a proof. What you describe happens during that process - you have an employee you are happy with, want to sponsor her for permanent residency in the country, and are willing to go through the expenses, but state insists that you have to try find another person first.
The right solution for this is to keep employers out of the skill-based immigration process.
That's a perfectly acceptable concern to have. Especially with Microsoft, and its use of the big three agencies, H1B in general, perma-temps, etc.
However, there was a bit more to the story - one, that I'd started discussions with them and the agency prior to moving from Australia to Seattle, and they'd been willing to sponsor a visa (that wasn't needed), and sure enough, a couple of weeks after, my team had some new testers who weren't H1B who'd filled the position.
And it might be a little misleading on my part, there wasn't a sense of absolute, outright apathy. But just a growing more deflated tiredness, perhaps.
Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too.
We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.
>We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.
That's funny. I don't know a single person who enjoyed interviewing at Amazon, and the one guy that did who got in quit a few weeks later and still won't stop talking about how bad it was until he's blue in the face. It was such a bad experience it seems to have partially fused with his identity!
Seems like every once in awhile there's some article taking a crap on Amazon, and then these types of green comments coming to the rescue.
Ex-Amazonian here. Amazon is big enough that there are actually a lot of people in the org who enjoy their jobs, think the company's generally doing the right thing (albeit possibly with caveats), and don't mind defending it. The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team.
Addressing your experience directly - I really enjoyed my Amazon interview in Edinburgh eight years ago. Lots of interesting free-form problem solving, with the whiteboard there to jot down notes rather than to produce working code.
I'm guessing there are teams or entire orgs which just don't take interviewing as seriously, though - again, with Amazon's scale, it's not surprising.
I don't doubt what you say is true, but Amazon is the only big-3-ish company that I regularly hear some story like this about.
I think every company has a mix of horribleness and goodness, and based on the data I have, it seems like the mix at Amazon is more skewed towards horrible than other major companies.
I've made the same observation as you, but I think there are other factors at play. It seems that Amazon has become the new "cool" company to hate, just like Microsoft was a few years ago. I've personally heard a mix of positive and negative stories from all the big 3, but Amazon seems to be the only one that makes headlines.
I'm not trying to say that Amazon is perfect, or even better than Microsoft or Google, I'm just saying that maybe it is better to trust the opinions you hear from people you know rather than what makes the front page of HN, wherever that happens to take you.
During my Microsoft internship, I watched a male coworker verbally harass a female coworker to tears while she was giving a presentation and no one batted an eye. A friend told me to come check out Amazon, and I've never looked back. I would never go back to Microsoft, but I don't fault people for going there because I know that it is a huge company and that my experience isn't representative of the whole.
Which other big company have you heard of using interview technique described in the OP? The fact that Amazon thought up the process as described here says something about the as a company which you can't explain away as the "new cool company to hate".
Glad to hear that the practice has been stopped. The fact that SDEs can bring up such bad PR to the attention of management and get it rectified gives one good impression about Amazon.
My wife recently went through the hiring process at Amazon. She completed an online programing test, then went through an interview where a recruiter asked basic CS questions over the phone, and was then invited for an onsite interview. She took a day off from work, and spent about 4 hours doing the interview at Amazon's SF office. The interviewers had come from Seattle. This happened over 3 months ago, but she has not heard anything from her Amazon recruiter about the interview outcome. The recruiter had earlier promised to get back no later than 2 days after the onsite. My wife's emails to the recruiter were unanswered.
We understand why things are this way - the recruiter wants to utilize her time on candidates who convert; any time spent on a rejected candidate is time "wasted". But when a candidate takes a day off from their current place of work to attend an onsite to get treated without common courtesy is sad state of affairs. Imagine if the situation was reversed - once the interview was arranged, and my wife agreed to do it, how would all those interviewers who flew in from Seattle have felt had she not turned up?
You seem to be interested in fixing things at Amazon. I mentioned this incident to point out that recruiting at Amazon can do with much course correction. Take time to look in the mirror and understand why it is that only Amazon among large tech employers attracts such negative attention. Sweeping all of that under the "we are now the cool company to hate" category is dishonest. Again, I am glad that this particular incident posted by the OP has caused a positive change in the recruiting practices.
Microsoft's hyper-aggressive culture has contributed to its organizational dysfunction IMO, and frankly I am still having to recognize and deal with its effects on my interpersonal relations.
>>>The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team.
Presumably so that said PR team can create throw-away accounts and defend Amazon.
Well, possibly. I can't prove that that's not the case :) All I can say is that I've always taken them in good faith, because they match up with the temperament of some of the people I know and like inside the company.
That's really the problem with the social media policy. On the one hand, it protects the company from the worst possible outcomes of letting untrained employees loose on social media - and given the size of the company and the diverse views held by its employees, I could imagine those outcomes being pretty dire! But on the other hand there's a chilling effect on positive impressions of the company.
> The reason for the throwaway accounts is that the social media policy asks employees not to wade into discussions of Amazon, but rather to forward them to the PR team.
So, they are wading into discussions of Amazon, just in a way that's not directly linked with an existing nym? Following neither the letter nor the spirit of the rule?
Hi. Not a green comment, though admittedly I'm not using my real name here.
I worked at Amazon for many years and enjoyed it. Nice to meet you.
It's a huge company with a wide variety of teams and experiences. It's not for everyone. But I am still friends with lots of my former co-workers. Lots of them liked it and, believe it or not, many of them are still there. Some for over 10 years.
I've only heard bad things as well. I respect them as a company but it's clear they don't care about employee wellbeing. Everyone I know thats worked there said the hours and deadlines were unreal.
I interviewed at Amazon and it was fine. The questions were interesting (albeit maybe a few too many graph questions). One of the interviewers showed up in a bathrobe or something I think, due to a bad oncall the previous night or something.
Given that Amazon interviews by team, I think it depends on what team you end up interviewing with...
I didn't take the offer because it was like $20k or more less than another offer, but the process was fine.
There's also going to be selection bias, in that most people who have reasonable interview process aren't going to write blog posts about it...
Not mandatory? In my time at Lab126 (a couple of years ago now), you had to take Making Great Hiring Decisions before you were ever included on an interview loop.
This was in 2013 so it's out of date now, but it was very clear from the line of questions and the attitudes of the interviewers that they were being made to be there and saw no point. They were in general completely disengaged with me. Of the interviewers all but the last were fairly professional. The last pair I had were more junior and made it clear that I was wasting their time as far as they were concerned.
To be fair I interview poorly, but I would would have much preferred for the person managing the interviews to cut off the process as soon as they were sure that I wasn't a fit. By failing to do so it just created an awkward and frustrating situation.
Sorry to be a broken record, but can you give some specific examples?
I ask because elsewhere on this thread you have people bitching that they were asked some low level CS questions about inverting binary trees and the like, and how insulting they found that.
While I sympathize, it's not going to change the fact that the company does want to hire engineers that are equally competent at contributing to some sexy new high-scale AWS services as some boring business reporting features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all do exactly the same thing.
On the other hand, if you had people that were actively rude, did not give you hints when you got stuck, and made you feel unwelcome, that would definitely warrant feedback. Though, as you said, it's too late since it's 2013.
I advise anyone in the future who runs into this kind of situation to contact your recruiter with feedback, and be very clear if you had a bad experience. Amazon takes customer feedback super seriously, and when we interview, the candidates are customers.
I wish I could, but it's been three years so I don't recall specifics.
I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question.
While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library.
EX of good question: Facebook has their own COW C++ string with small string optimization because libstdc++ didn't used to have that. It can also provide massive speed improvements on multi-threaded code, what are some ways to implement this?
>While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library.
Seriously, you're bothered because someone asked you to solve a toy problem? Most interview problems are things one wouldn't do in the real job; that's because all real job problems take more than an hour to solve.
Implementing a stringbuilder is a bad question because there's not much depth to it (after you get the basic implementation down, where do you take the question next?), not because there's a stringbuilder in the stdlib.
> I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question.
Allow me to respectfully disagree.
Even if they ask you something you or they don't think you can do, it's not just about really solving it but at looking at how you approach such a problem.
No one can really solve important, long term problems in an interview but you sure can reason about them and talk/try toy solutions.
> Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.
You can always say "I probably wouldn't do this unless I had a good reason but, If i had to roll my own, I'd approach it this way:"
We'll have to agree to disagree. I think implement a string builder is a GREAT interview question.
The point is to have a discussion. Why? What are the benefits of a string builder? When is it necessary? What performance characteristics should it have. What kind of questions do you ask, what kind of edge cases do you consider?
It's an interview - if you are not sure why the interviewer is asking you to re implement a standard library, ASK.
This is not unusual for Amazon - most tech companies these days ask these kinds of questions
We used to ask people to implement standard date-related functions. "That's stupid, all the date functions are already written, and they handle all the weird edge cases for you!" That's right - we want to see if you can think about all the weird edge cases.
It's not about the obvious functions, it's about whether or not you can plan reasonable interfaces and think about edge cases.
> We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.
I don't recall the exact question, but I recall they were only looking for the answer that used bit manipulation. Which was not necessarily intuitive in the context.
I know a common one is how to switch the values of two variables without using a temporary third variable. One way (method 2 here [1]) is to use repeated bitwise XORs.
Glad that SDES internally are upset but the damage has already been done. Amazon is becoming a place where serious tech talent will not work. No senior or serious talent in their right mind would go through this, so you are going to end up with just junior or desperate devs applying.
Not to mention the turn over. What is that like in most tech depts?
I suppose however, Amazon can simply use the excuse of: we can't find qualified devs so we need more H-1B workers. Heck I am starting to think that this is the plan all along.
I apologize if I am coming off as negative but this kind of stuff really has to stop. I don't understand how it got to this point and how anyone would be willing to give up their privacy or self-respect like this. How did we get here?
> Amazon is becoming a place where serious tech talent will not work.
It's not becoming it. It already is.
Doesn't everyone have conversations with their tech friends about how everyone who's been there is trying to go away and interviewing at Amazon was terrible?
I'm not even kidding. That "never work for amazon" is the image we have from amazon, it's to the point it could be a meme.
I really home recruiting at Amazon takes this comment to heart. They won't, because they're too busy milking the college newgrad pipieline and that looks fat and happy, but experienced engineers in general won't work or even interview for Amazon. You get the naive people, everyone who knows better stays far away.
Someone was probably promoted for the adoption of this "frugal" hiring practice. This is a culture problem that permeates all of Amazon and goes all the way to the top.
Find a new job. The reputation of your company is going down the drain.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about :)
I, and most people I know have mostly positive Amazon experiences. We are proud of the work we do, and the innovations of the company. I interview a LOT, and I make sure that 100% of my candidates come out with a positive experience, even if they do not get hired.
There are problems at every company, but right now it's fashionable to shit on Amazon, ever since the NYT hit-piece that got a TON of facts straight up wrong, and ever since then every negative Amazon story gets upvoted to the stratosphere. Every company makes mistakes, it's how you deal with them that counts.
Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time. It was still a bad decision, but it wasn't about being cheap.
Listen, your hiring process reflects your company culture. The fact that HR is in charge and you have to work to change it, rather then you, the people who will be teaching and supervising these interns, sitting down, telling HR "This is what we need, This is what we want, how can we make this scale" and having final approval says a lot.
Further, this expectation of a private quiet clean place to interview for several hours seems rather biased against poor people. Not to mention the test itself sounds like it doesn't account for the possibility of people with motor disabilities, the blind, the deaf and other disabled people.
Honestly, open book tests are a thing that has been extensively studied. Use IRT based adaptive multiple choice tests (like the computerized SAT or GRE where tests adapt to your ability), set a time limit, have a rolling set of questions to prevent knowledge transfer, and have an intern test day every quarter. You can calibrate test responses based on Amazon engineers at their desks.
This is the hard part, and I think it's why open book tests don't happen more. Coming up with good questions is hard. Don't forget that if they're not sufficiently work-like people on HN will still say that your hiring culture sucks.
I haven't worked at Amazon, and I won't speak to whether things are uncommonly bad there. Certainly Microsoft seems to have produced plenty of similar stories while escaping the broad stigma Amazon has acquired.
I will say, though, that I think your bad-reputation timeline is totally off. By the time that NYT piece broke, I had heard "Amazon is a horrible employer" from a half-dozen different places. I didn't even finish the thing, I just shrugged and went "well, matches what people have told me, no new info here".
The first time I was warned away from Amazon, it was over specific (and probably unenforceable) pieces of their internship contract. A friend rejected his offer because it contained a bizarrely broad non-compete that could theoretically have barred him from ever starting a company with anyone else who had ever worked at Amazon. This was 2012.
The second time was from a friend-of-a-friend who spent one year as an SDE. He talked about bureaucracy, burnout, and made the Microsoft comparison. He said it Amazon was reasonable as a ~2 year cash out, but nothing more. This was 2013.
After that, I was still open enough to respond when I heard from a recruiter. The internship interview required invasive rules like the ones at issue here, which proved fundamentally incompatible with my machine/internet setup at the time. I declined it, and scratched off Amazon unless I got news that these things had improved. This was 2014.
How you deal with mistakes is what counts, agreed, but Amazon's reputation struggle is far older and more pervasive than the perception spread by the NYT story. Fair or not (and I honestly don't know), it's a long-standing issue.
I interned at Amazon in 2014 and in 2015. I have not worked there since.
The non-compete and non-solicit for customers & business partners lasted for 9 months from when my internship ended and the non-solicit (titled "Non-Interference") for Amazon employees, contractors & consultants lasted 6 months from when my internship ended.
The interview process was two back-to-back phone screens. I heard from other interns the following summer that it had changed to an online coding test and one phone screen. I had never heard of anything so invasive as what is mentioned here before this article (and the precursor a week or two ago) hit HN.
I was working at Amazon when the NYT hit piece broke. It read like it was about the business/sales/marketing side of the company and it did not at all reflect what I experienced at Amazon.
I have met a few interns who had bad experiences at Amazon but most had good experiences and were invited back. I can only think of one who was invited back but had such a bad experience that they refuse to ever work for Amazon again.
When it comes to things like this, the variation between teams within large companies is much much greater than the variation between large companies.
I don't work for Amazon or have any affiliation with the company, but I can confirm that everyone I know who does work there (or used to) thinks highly of the company overall, and more or less enjoyed their time there. This throwaway account seems to be fairly balanced in perspective.
I'm personally of the opinion that Amazon is not a perfect company, but reports of its "evilness" have been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, I think this is a case of people with negative experiences having more of a reason to chime in than people with positive experiences. That somewhat biases threads, unfortunately.
I'm throwing this comment in here because I think it's easy for people to forget than n=1 anecdotes don't really confirm or deny anything (positive or negative) about a company's overall culture.
I've been told opposite stores from my n=2 sample size. One has said it's miserable and he couldn't wait to get out, the other that it's great and his group is doing really interesting work and I'd love working with him.
As someone who left Microsoft for Amazon, most of the things I hear about Amazon align much more closely with my experiences at Microsoft. We're talking about companies that employ thousands of people, you're going to hear different stories from different parts of the company.
It's entirely possible for a "publicity bubble" to cause all this. A big article got published ripping Amazon, got a lot of shares and views. For a while after that, anything negative about Amazon that seems authentic gets upvoted hard because it's what people want to read, and it lets them feel what they would call justified rage. People like that and people who just want forum karma and attention aggressively seek out or sometimes even make up stories to meet what these upvoters want to read. Stories that buck the narrative get downvoted and ignored. And just like that, you form a big popular impression of something that may be false or grossly exaggerated.
I don't know that the impression is actually false in this particular case, but these things can happen, and you'd be wise to not take the "internet consensus" too seriously.
The closest sibling to the grandparent of your comment, just -four-or-five- [Edit -- went back and counted:] seven comments higher in the thread, explicitly refutes your "publicity bubble" thesis.
> Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time.
I've interviewed for Google and Apple internships and the process has been extremely pleasant, with the interviewers happy to give their time. With Apple, I got to meet the entire team and spend time with them. I've heard similar stories about the Microsoft interview process (I mean, they even fly you out to Redmond).
What makes Amazon incapable of interviewing their interns adequately?
The only people who I've met in real life who say that Amazon is a good place to work are people trying to hire me (with one exception). Everyone else tells me that either that they hated it and quit, or that they hate it and will quit soon. I work for a competitor so there's absolutely some bias in the people I'm exposed to, but the complete lack of positive experiences related to me by humans in real life is surprising and compelling.
The one exception is a friend who started working at Amazon a few months ago. She loves it. But she's also been handed a pile of money and told to basically do what she wants. They hired her to create a new product line (not tech related) and the execs apparently don't know enough to get involved so she's basically got signoff to just do what she thinks is appropriate. So she loves it. Her husband also works for Amazon and hates it.
I'm sure there are other people at Amazon who like their jobs. I just haven't met any and I'm not sure they constitute a majority.
I had 2 friends working at Amazon and both of them were reasonably satisfied with their jobs. Overworked sure, but not depressed. I did ask them about the negative stories about Amazon's working conditions but both said that it didn't match with their experience. I know I shouldn't generalize from n=2 but I don't know how to reconcile their evidence with what I read online.
Amazon's social media policy discourages employees from posting about their experiences in reply to negative PR. I'm guessing that means that the employees who hate their job anyway disregard the policy, while the ones who care either don't take action or post on anonymous accounts :P
It's a big company. How you experience varies based on what stage your product is at (greenfield? possibly being cancelled next month? Launching? Stable?), whether your direct manager is a nice person, what career stage your manager is at, and what five people you spend most of your time with.
I'm sure it's not the hell that you read about online. If Amazon were as bad as some stories indicate, they wouldn't be able to retain anyone decent. Still, I have heard almost exclusively negative stories about Amazon, even in person.
> ever since the NYT hit-piece that got a TON of facts straight up wrong
The one about the Seattle culture or the warehouse side? I remember both, and I remember the warehouse one being a lot of garbage too. I was working as a contractor doing Amcare stuff and found a lot of issues with the article.
With all due respect to you too, didn't one of your employee's commit suicide? I think something must be wrong if so many people feel perpetually miserable there.
Attempted, he jumped and landed on a balcony 2 stories down or some such.
I don't hold that against amazonm. Any company of a size like amazon is going to have people that may be a bit unstable that get pushed over the edge.
I do however hold their treatment of their warehouse employees against them. When I look at a company I look at all their employees and see how they are treated. When a whole class of employees are treated as replaceable automation its probably the case that they will treat ALL their employees in that way eventually.
I'm glad you guys are pissed, it's insane! I just hope you have enough influence to actually change something about it; as it stands this process is horrifying.
I get contacted by Amazon recruiters every couple months or so. They can be a bit aggressive and will sometimes try to get me to attend one of their hiring events in my city. I would possibly consider a SDE opportunity but they want me to relocate to Seattle. I just feel that if you are going to spend all this time and resources trying to poach devs from other cities, you'd at least open a local office or let them work remotely.
I can't speak for the others, but I'll get contacted by a Microsoft hiring manager (not a recruiter) about once a year. Microsoft's recruiting process seems very decentralized; one group may have a totally different culture than another group. Some allow you to work remote, others don't. And they have offices spread around Seattle. (disclaimer: I used to work there as a consultant about 10 years ago)
Amazon is the total opposite. Like this dev said, HR has totally taken over the process. To work there you need to go through their meat grinder.
I would never consider Amazon based on what has been posted in the past, but I would also walk away from any interview process that began like this. Stupid.
Lets at least pretend to apply Occam's Razor to things first before jumping on a company.
It's much more likely those responsible for choosing the ProctorU solution didn't realise everything around what the approach entailed, or necessarily the ramifications. That's especially true if it came out of HR/Recruiting who aren't necessarily the most technical people.
They have a very real problem, with thousands of people in the recruitment pipeline (especially during intern interview season), and they saw a way to significantly filter them out, without having to turn half the business over to more of a recruiting pipeline than it already is.
> It's much more likely those responsible for choosing the ProctorU solution didn't realise everything around what the approach entailed, or necessarily the ramifications. That's especially true if it came out of HR/Recruiting who aren't necessarily the most technical people.
OK, sure. My reasoning there would be that ultimately they don't really care. All due respect to Friar Ockham.
For some reason (in my experience) HR has a lot of power in companies. They can institute painful processes that nobody likes even director/executives and nobody seems to question it or if they do they are powerless to change it. The company I currently work for I wouldn't have a hope in hell of passing through all the hoops the interview process inflicts.
So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action.
The thing is, one suspects it wasn't "someone in HR" who thought up the idea of using draconian new system that's pissing everyone off, and driving candidates away in droves. But rather, Bezos himself, personally. In fact it seems to represent the very essence of his "everything will be automated" philosophy, to the letter.
So was this an interview for an Intern position? Is this ProtorU thing used for anything else? Should anyone be worried about an interview for a full time non intern position? There seems to be some confusion about this in the comments.
Yes, ProctorU is also used for full-time interviews.
Source: a friend applied, and they made her use it - except it didn't work, so she ended up not even having a second round screen before getting her onsite invitation.
That said, I have to wonder whether the interviews are really necessary in most cases. For institutions that it is familiar with, I suspect Amazon could do just as well hiring interns purely based on their grades in relevant courses. If you reliably take 100 interns from Berkeley or Waterloo, say, it shouldn't be hard to figure out which courses count.
At worst, doing things this way would be much easier. Who knows, maybe it would work even better, by eliminating unconscious bias or something.
By all means keep the interview path for special cases with odd backgrounds.
It's pretty much standing policy that to be hired at Amazon you must be able to write correct code with no aid whatsoever, no documentation, not even a compiler to check your work. If they don't use proctors, they will go back to what they were doing before: having people write code on a piece of paper and then read it back to them over the phone.
edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.
For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.