Ask HN: Does Amazon Hire Without BS?

[halfnibble]

I'm starting to look at established companies (i.e. exit the startup world). Microsoft recently began adding "or equivalent experience" to the end of BS in Computer Science, or completely removing the mention of a CS degree altogether in their job postings.

But all the jobs I've read so far on amazon.jobs seem to imply that a BS degree is required. Does anyone know if that is still the case? Is there any point in applying at Amazon if you don't have a BS degree? Any tips or tricks? (Besides signing up for the quickest online college degree program...)

Thanks.

[dhruvkar]

To clarify, the OP is talking about a Bachelor of Science (not bull poop).

[qualsiasi → dhruvkar]

I totally clicked on the title because I thought the thread was about whiteboard interviews (aka BS for someone)

[cmauniada → qualsiasi]

Do people not prefer those anymore?

[halfnibble → dhruvkar]

Thank you for clarifying. Yes. I meant Bachelor of Science.

[muzani → dhruvkar]

This is why we often call it BSc.

[tmemfnskdj]

I don’t think they care. When I applied, the recruiter specifically mentioned it’s factory style recruitment process. They just put you through the grinder and then assign you a team. As long as you are comfortable being hire like this, you should get an interview. They also try to push you to Sde2 no matter how senior you are. It’s to save cost. I rejected their follow up request. Other companies have a better recruitment process without treating candidates like an object.

[soulnothing]

I have an associates and did a stint with Amazon. That comes with a caveat. I interviewed for a senior software engineer, and got placed as a system engineer. With an understanding that I'd move to software within six months. That never came to pass, and I found it was due to my lack of education. I had been in the field for ~7 years at this point and was a team lead / architect for the past ~2 years.

So yes it can be done just be careful on your expectations. If you're in the Seattle area. There is a crack the coding interview meetup. Probably in other cities. Tailor the resume to their needs. Then knock the algorithm and big o questions out. I spent about a year studying to land the role.

[halfnibble → soulnothing]

That's kind of disheartening. I want to be a software engineer. I love writing code.

[cityzen → halfnibble]

So write code! You don't need to work at Amazon or Google to be a software engineer. I've been independent my whole career and I'm working on multiple things that aren't mired in bureaucratic nonsense. The more code you write on your terms the more you can understand how long things take. You can identify opportunities and build or improve on them.

Edit, from another HN post about Tim Cook saying you don't need a degree: Cook also added that about half of Apple's US employment last year was made up of people who did not have a four-year degree.

[user68858788 → cityzen]

He's hiring a lot of non-devs lately. When I look at the new hire emails for software devs I see a lot more master's than bachelor's - none without a degree. That's anecdotal though, so it might just be my department.

[convolvatron]

any and all stories are welcome. google for me was horrific in terms of the time (calendar and amount), and the constant bait and switch.

I just got contacted by an AWS hiring manager. I had to fight to get a face to face with my proposed hiring manager at Google, and he was frankly quite offended I thought it necessary. So I thought that was at least mildly positive, any other anecdotes for someone considering entering the pipeline would be really helpful.

[larkfofty]

I was given an offer from Amazon with a BA in a completely unrelated field. They never even asked about my education. This was for a Front End Engineer role though, not sure if that makes a difference.

[user68858788]

I was hired without a BS. I had 4 years prior experience and applied as a SDE. I got hired as a support engineer and stayed for two years. When I told my manager switching to SDE they said the path was support -> SRE -> Sysadmin -> SDE. I'm now at a different company.

So yeah, they do hire folks without degrees, but it's one of those "don't know the position/team until after the interview" type of deals and it's tough to change roles internally.

[mchannon]

Imagine you are talking about an Amazon SDE (software development engineer) or similar role, and not just the warehouse workers, the latter of which I would seriously hope could care less about your advanced education.

My experience with Amazon's SDE hiring process has been pretty disappointing. It's a lot like Google's, where they bring in a bunch of devs and managers to tech-screen you, with nothing more than a "raising the bar" afternoon course in interviewing experience under their belt.

If they can see themselves in you, maybe a younger version, then it's a pretty good bet you'll get an offer. If not, they're perfectly happy to waste your afternoon, and maybe get back to you with a no. Ask yourself: "How you could tell if someone, who's a more experienced developer than you are, is more qualified than you are?" If you don't have a good answer, that's ok, but realize the ones making that decision are in exactly the same boat.

The problem with Amazon's "bar raiser" approach is that it ignores that your average rank-and-file employee does not know how to value a candidate. When you hire only the best, and you have no idea what that actually means (the best are who work here already?), then it becomes a self-fulfilling tautology. Lots of false negatives, and probably some false positives as well. If you follow history, Sears was probably like this at some point in time.

TLDR: No.

[halfnibble → mchannon]

Thank you for the response. That's good to know. I don't understand why interviewing isn't just, "Did you work yesterday? Great. Open up your laptop and show me the code you wrote yesterday."

[mchannon → halfnibble]

A few reasons it's not like that:

1. The person interviewing you is often less experienced and skilled than they let on. They can't make sense of your code, not because it's not any good, but because they don't code at your skill level in that language.

2. Showing off code, while making for a better interview than the behavioral stuff that passes for interviewing at the bigs, still isn't all that great a tool. There are a lot of people who might show it off, and might even talk the talk, but who didn't write all of it and might not even understand it.

3. The code is secondary to the job. How you come up with the code is primary to the job, and showing off code doesn't show off how you came up with it. Even the best code ever would be a bad hire if it took you six months to come up with it or annoyed your fellow devs for months in coming up with it.

4. The way you're used to coding will be different than the culture of the new firm. It just is. If hired, you're going to adapt to it, not the other way around.

[halfnibble → mchannon]

Ok. How about, "Show me your personal git commit log from yesterday?" That deals with most of 2 and 3—granted not all of the scenarios.

As for 1, there are many languages and frameworks that I wouldn't be able to say if they used best practices for, but I think I could generally recognize good vs. bad code with no prior knowledge of the language.

[gamblor956 → halfnibble]

Most people don't make commits to their "personal git" every day. Or even every week. Or hell, ever.

[QuinnyPig → halfnibble]

Because "show me what you wrote for your employer" gets you blacklisted and theoretically sued?

[ryanthedev]

They don’t care. Study basic data structures and alogrithums.

[expopinions]

It is possible. As others said, you will have a somewhat of a tough time getting an interview, but if you get one and nail it, you will get an offer just the same. As to how to get an interview in such situation? - be very proactive and find alternative ways to get your resume in front of the eyes of engineers or engineering managers. If you rely only on submitting through the standard Jobs page, your resume will most likely never make it through the layers of automated software and recruiters filtering. Find a friend that works in one of these companies and ask them to help you out, lurk in the groups where employes frequent and try to make a name for yourself, make sure one of your apps is moderately successful and meets a need for one of these companies.

Note that getting an offer is also contingent on your eligibility to work in US. If you are not a US citizen or a green card holder, the requirements to get an H1 visa are to have the equivalent of four years of education, where each three years of work experience counted as a year of education. (There are other H1 class visas, but they are not as common in the computer industry) But the company has to like you really a lot to go through the trouble in that case...

And since you managed to pique my interest, Id be curious to look at your resume. I'll leave out the part of figuring out how to send it (without it being caught by the junk filters) as an exercise to you. Shouldn't be that hard..

[halfnibble → expopinions]

I would love to get feedback on my resume. However, I'm not entirely sure how to solve your exercise. Your HN account is only 5 days old. There is no twitter handle "@expopinions", and expopinions[dot]com is a new site with an article about hair products.

BTW. I'm a US citizen.