Am I Hired to Be Fired by Amazon?
During my interview with Amazon at the GHC, I was asked the well known two sum problem. But unfortunately I choked in the moment and provided a suboptimal solution with a time complexity of O(n^2). Despite this I received a job offer from them. I shared this with some friends and they mentioned rumors about Amazon hiring individuals only to later fire them as part of some quota driven strategy. Is there any validity to these claims. Are there ways for me to check if this might be the case in my situation?
add a 🍿 option to your pol, can help getting more realistic results
Can’t ppl just click View Results these days?
You can never know for sure. It depends on the team. It's a scummy thing from Amazon to play games like this to get you to work 60+ hours because you never know. The only surefire way is to be a rockstar and lick boots like crazy. If they notice how hardworking you are, they will instead pick someone else for the pip quota Have they really started asking easy queations like two sum since I've left?
Maybe they're asking easy questions at GHC? Which would explain why everyone paid for those $600+ tickets
I wouldn’t say they hired to fire you, but you will find their Pip culture to be strong…
All they asked you is 2 Sum? Also, don’t go with what your friends are saying sometimes people are just jealous if they couldn’t make it themselves. Anyways happy for you, join them worst case you’ll get a good severance package.
They also asked about my previous projects and questions related to the most challenging engineering task I've completed.
They asked me to implement reg ex, which I did and still didn't get the offer. I think it is related to the fact that all interviewers were Indians. They were probably looking for an Indian fellow to the team...
Is this for L4 full time?
They might be doing an internal experiment with hiring. To see who is a better performer on the job. Good leetcoder vs Bad leetcoder. Amazon in the past did something similar with Ai resume screenings but they scrapped the project because it was discriminating against women. That’s my theory. Amazon doesn’t have a problem with firing and replacing you quickly. So they got the time and money to do experiments like this. Regardless, everything I’ve said is just speculation.
This is the most ridiculous comment I'd read about hiring at any company let alone big tech. You might be from non-engineering background but firing an SDE is expensive because there is so much time lost with the ramp up for the fired guy, knowledge transfer to the rest of the team, and then hiring and ramping up the new guy. This sort of an experiment will probably lead to the guy proposing this experiment getting fired.
Actually, they did conduct an experiment like this in the pandemic. For student programs, those who did well in the online assessment only had one interview which was informal in nature. Others had 3. We'll now see the results of that soon enough given that those employees have been in the job for around 2 years. Frankly, the ones who got in with just one interview look worse off to me anecdotally.
Hire to fire is very org dependent. Specially the weaker and insecure managers do it. It’s hard to know, you could setup a 1:1 before you join with the manager to get a read of their mindset.
Please don't overthink it. They would have made the decision holistically after considering all aspects of all interviews. Congratulations and wish you the best
Regardless of hire to fire, Amazon is generally a shitty company to work for. I’d never work for banana factory
My only other offer is from a start up
Just take it and try your luck. They don’t keep track of your interview performance for a secret ‘to fire’ group so you just have to perform well enough to last a year or two and then you can jump