I remember my own interview process with Amazon. I wasn't interviewing for an SDE position but a TPM role. I made it through the gauntlet and it all fell down due to Amazon's grossly unrealistic understanding of what the going rates for experienced PMs are.
I mostly had fun with it, but I was also frustrated.
The phone screens were the hardest in a purely technical sense, lots of algorithm questions that really didn't have anything to do with the job at all, I had to reach into my way-back machine to dig up some of the runtimes. But I made it through three of phone calls like that and had a bit of fun. After the phone calls and a chat with a senior person in the department, I was pretty sure I had a feel for where I was going to end up and what kind of projects I'd be managing. So I boned up on management theory and algorithms and a few other odds and ends.
Flying out to Amazon for the face-to-face, I realized I was wrong. Each face-to-face interview was wildly unfocused, I was interviewing in subjects the interviewer often didn't have any experience in and completely didn't reflect the nature of the phone interviews or the statements I had been given by the senior guy I spoke with. In one interview I'm designing Java APIs for movie tickets, in another I'm specifying contingency plans for overseas warehouse fulfillment issues. In another I was asked by two very junior people who frowned in confusion the entire time as I discussed complex employee and co-worker conflict resolution cases I've experienced over the last 18 years. In fact I was never asked a question about the first 15 years of my work experience, most of which would have been more relevant. But I was asked tons of questions about my side-startup, which was just me and my wife hacking around on the side and getting passive ad revenue and had no relevancy at all to the job.
The "lunch chat" was with somebody who couldn't have made small talk if he had a gun to his head. He just sat in silence and ate his soup the entire time while I uncomfortably ate one of the sloppiest turkey pesto sandwiches I've ever encountered.
I definitely didn't nail the face-to-face, but that's because I was playing trivial pursuit with the interviewers and the answers were arbitrary, instead of knuckling down on the job, the role, the department, the expectations of performance and the responsibilities of the position.
But I did something right because I was called in the next day to go over compensation and was blown away to find out the absolute max pay cap for the entire company was almost a 20% pay cut from what I'd been making in my previous job (a job that I was leaving because I was 10-15% under my peers and had been in a pay freeze for 3 years while the company worked towards profitability -- and yes it was from a metro area with a similar cost of living to Seattle).
Despite that, Amazon would have been good to work at, but even my absolute pay floor was 10% over. I even asked to make up the compensation difference with a mix of stocks or other methods, but eventually we had to agree that there was no way I could live the life I had become accustomed to with what Amazon was willing to pay.
The pay gap is probably because you did not pass the bar at the same "level" you were at in your old company, meaning Amazon was bringing you in at a demotion essentially.
Most people in general. A lot of people think they're much better at small talk than they are, and blame the other guy when an interaction doesn't go as smoothly as they hoped, or there's an awkward silence.
People who are excellent at small talk have to be very charismatic and seem genuinely interested in the conversation even when it's very boring. Very few people are capable of either of these things, and in my experience it's actually management & marketing types who are the worst at both.
My understanding is when they fly you out, you're pretty much a shoe-in and now they're letting their devs have a shot at trying to interview, while getting a feel how you work with others. i.e. are you sane or will you eat on of our disposable dev's face?
This was not my experience. I did not get an offer after being flown out and spending the day interviewing. I did not do well in the whiteboard coding, but I found the people I interacted with to generally be interested and smart.
I mostly had fun with it, but I was also frustrated.
The phone screens were the hardest in a purely technical sense, lots of algorithm questions that really didn't have anything to do with the job at all, I had to reach into my way-back machine to dig up some of the runtimes. But I made it through three of phone calls like that and had a bit of fun. After the phone calls and a chat with a senior person in the department, I was pretty sure I had a feel for where I was going to end up and what kind of projects I'd be managing. So I boned up on management theory and algorithms and a few other odds and ends.
Flying out to Amazon for the face-to-face, I realized I was wrong. Each face-to-face interview was wildly unfocused, I was interviewing in subjects the interviewer often didn't have any experience in and completely didn't reflect the nature of the phone interviews or the statements I had been given by the senior guy I spoke with. In one interview I'm designing Java APIs for movie tickets, in another I'm specifying contingency plans for overseas warehouse fulfillment issues. In another I was asked by two very junior people who frowned in confusion the entire time as I discussed complex employee and co-worker conflict resolution cases I've experienced over the last 18 years. In fact I was never asked a question about the first 15 years of my work experience, most of which would have been more relevant. But I was asked tons of questions about my side-startup, which was just me and my wife hacking around on the side and getting passive ad revenue and had no relevancy at all to the job.
The "lunch chat" was with somebody who couldn't have made small talk if he had a gun to his head. He just sat in silence and ate his soup the entire time while I uncomfortably ate one of the sloppiest turkey pesto sandwiches I've ever encountered.
I definitely didn't nail the face-to-face, but that's because I was playing trivial pursuit with the interviewers and the answers were arbitrary, instead of knuckling down on the job, the role, the department, the expectations of performance and the responsibilities of the position.
But I did something right because I was called in the next day to go over compensation and was blown away to find out the absolute max pay cap for the entire company was almost a 20% pay cut from what I'd been making in my previous job (a job that I was leaving because I was 10-15% under my peers and had been in a pay freeze for 3 years while the company worked towards profitability -- and yes it was from a metro area with a similar cost of living to Seattle).
Despite that, Amazon would have been good to work at, but even my absolute pay floor was 10% over. I even asked to make up the compensation difference with a mix of stocks or other methods, but eventually we had to agree that there was no way I could live the life I had become accustomed to with what Amazon was willing to pay.