I was contacted by a recruiter from AWS. They had a few questions for me and wanted to have me meet over the phone with someone in the same department. Schedule a time and met with another Director of Software Development. I passed the questions and was offered to meet in person in Seattle WA. Met with people all day, it really is an all day interview, even at lunch. Left feeling pretty good I gave it my best.

The recruiter and recruiting process seemed well-organized in terms of scheduling and being accommodating to my schedule. I had watched a few Amazon-focused interview prep videos and received some tips from colleagues who had interviewed at Amazon. Interestingly, my experience did not match the kind of interview that I was expecting from watching those videos. The interview questions that I was asked seemed incredibly shallow. There were actually no hypothetical problem solving questions at all, no questions on system design or organizational design, which is what I would expect in a technical director level role at Amazon. Half of the interviewers wanted to drill down into in my employment history, asking probing questions that seemed like they were trying to fit squares into round holes. Using the STAR format works to a certain extent to describe how one approached a scenario in the past, but it does little to give signal on how someone draws from multiple experiences to solve problems they haven’t seen before in the future. I thought about the caliber of interview questions I expected from the technology leaders in my own org, and these were nowhere close. A few of the questions I was asked have probably been in the “bad interview questions” list for a good 10 years or more. I had never considered interviewing at Amazon before because of what I had heard through the grapevine from colleagues and really only did it because the recruiter was persistent and seemed like a kind person. I regretted putting myself through it after the last interviewer seemed to talk down to me from the start of our interview. At the end, the recruiter sent an overcompensating, infantilizing email talking about how positive it was but that they are going in a different direction and that they’d be open to considering me for a NON-TECHNICAL role. It was bad form all around.