Interviewing for Amazon: a literal Orwellian experience

This likely had a lot more to do with it than citizenship.

Someone with existing SDE/SDET experience or a number of projects under their wing wouldn’t get as invasive of a screen.

Now now. Next you’ll be saying that he’s let war crimes apologists install creepy user-tracking code on this site!

That said, I don’t actually disagree with the headline here. Not many things are literally Orwellian, but when they gank your webcam and microphone so that you self-surveil, well, yeah.

Anyway, nice to know it’s not just the warehouse pickers at Amazon that get treated like disposable trash. Very egalitarian!

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[quote=“Gyrofrog, post:27, topic:90892”]I worked for a company who got around that by mostly hiring H1B labor, fresh out of college. 60+ hours/week wasn’t unusual
[/quote]

I spent most of the last decade working as a postgrad research scientist in psychopharmacology.

60hrs/wk was the bare minimum. 100+ was not unusual.

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I can’t “like” that…

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This was my experience, too. Since then, I’ve interviewed about 60 candidates, about half phone screens and half in-person. I’ve also participated in a few other protocols, but I’ve never heard of this.

And it’s entirely unnecessary. It’s pretty hard to cheat in a phone screen if they’re done right. I think I’ve had maybe three candidates try to cheat, one was probably an honest mistake (he told me he was looking up answers).

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How is that a mistake?

I would prefer whiteboard tests over some of the stuff I’ve seen. At least the whiteboard tests evaluate a candidate’s thought process. Anyone could claim to know even an entire programming language that they don’t know, and just memorize the answers to stock interview questions.

Someone tell them to hire QA for the Kindle!! :slight_smile:

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Sigh. Why are you even here?

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I don’t think he would have told me he was looking up the answer if he
thought that was against the rules. :slight_smile:

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Img-headexplodey.gif

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Good thing you had access to drugs!

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Momentarily serious: that lab had more than one grad student overdose themselves into hospital, plus at least one who didn’t even need drugs to put her in a psych ward for a month. Not via partying, via pressure; it was a scientific sweatshop, run by an unethical psychopath.

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Why do people not quit and find a livable life and career?

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Many of them did, eventually. Lots of ex-scientists out there.

Going in, though…the people who make it that far are usually doing it because they are passionately committed to science/medicine/truth. I had no problem with the hours required; I was happy to do it, because the work I was doing was contributing to saving lives.

Folks who are motivated by money and comfort usually don’t enter science in the first place.

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There’s a lot more money and comfort there than the humanities. I dropped out of my PhD when I realized (among other things) that I’d graduate at least $100,000 in debt with it and no job prospects. People with science degrees who pay attention at least have jobs on the other side and full funding along the way.

Not always.

I spent most of the year after my doctorate locked in my room, severely manic and Tourettic courtesy of an extreme negative reaction to Sertraline. These days, I’m visibly crazy enough that I have effectively zero chance of passing a job interview for anything.

If I lose my current (casual, low paid, not science) job, I’m permanently unemployed.

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Really? I thought the post was pretty funny and on point. And I don’t even need to explain the joke. You get it, I think.

It is the problem with jokes and sarcasm. There is always a chance you think serious is the joke or that the joke was meant as serious.

For example, a twitter friend, an hour or two ago, told me that the GOP in congress would police and possibly impeach Trump if Trump acted out of line or illegally…and my friend actually meant every word of it and believed it. I had read it as sarcasm at first until I had an epiphany.

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Ouch.
I’m sorry to hear that.

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