Note: you can find my comments here for the similar event held in 2015.
Another year, another AWS event; for this year they have changed the venue and brought in more speakers, unfortunately of inferior quality compared to Sebastien Stormacq, the sole speaker from 2015. This year twice as many people registered, roughly 500 people queuing up for the early morning registration.
The main difference from the last year was the presentation content being split into 2 tracks, the “technical” and the “business” rooms, each with their own focus. On the technical side the following topics were covered:
So – you got yourself an interview with Googamazbook and you are set on failing it. Or maybe you’re not set but you’re simply not trusting the 99.9+% failure rate that is typical for these companies and you want to be in some sort of control over you failing the interview. Either way, you got to the right place!
1st stage failing
Well, the 1st stage is the screening by the recruiter. This is actually pretty hard to fail if you are conditioned from school, like many of us, to always give the (expected) correct answers. Some people are failing at this stage due to not “speaking the same language” as the current employees of the company, but they are a minority.
So if:
you’re set on failing the recruiter screening;
you got yourself a lot of experience;
you were pretty good with quizzes during the school years:
… it’s basically impossible to fail on this one. Sure, you can make up wrong answers, but that’s just lame. Let’s simply forget about it and go to the next stage.
The original text, published in April 2016, can be found here. Business Insider has relayed the text 4 days ago (link), causing lots of debate. You can find my thoughts below.
First things first – the questions look typical for the recruiter screening stage at any large company. Some people know the answers, others lack the most basic concepts and fail such test from the beginning to its end. The purpose of this screening, at its very core, is to reduce the load on the subsequent “interview layers” – phone interviews with engineers and then on-site interviews. It is simply not economically feasible for any company to have a highly trained engineer administer such test; the engineer’s time simply costs more money, along with the mental wear and the likely alienation that is bound to happen due to the incredibly large percent of unsuitable candidates.
The second purpose of such screening, beyond the technical assesment, is to act early on a possible culture mismatch. Does the candidate speak the same language? No, not if they speak English – the question is: do they use the same words to describe technical concepts? “Knowledge”, in a broad sense, can be expressed in many forms, not all of them useful for everybody out there (e.g. the 0x02 – SYN representation, while undoubtely useful for low level debugging, is of no use during a formal or informal talk, even with an engineer with advanced knowledge of the TCP stack).