Wait, I see nothing wrong with any of this. Obviously Amazon is trying to curb cheating on remote coding/compatibility tests. They don't actually care to collect any info about you beyond what you do during the test. They don't care which websites you visit before or after the test. Or how you use your clipboard - after the test. But during the test, it's not so unreasonable. People do cheat, especially if they can get away with it and when the payoff is potentially huge.
In a practical sense, it's not much different from a math instructor having you clear the memory on your graphing calculator before an exam; it's an anti-cheating measure and given that this is an online assessment, it almost makes sense.
However, from a philosophical point of view, it's Draconian and unnerving. What assurance does the interviewee have that Amazon isn't storing and using all this telemetry? Amazon is dictating the entire procedure, right down to the specific browser and extension, and the interviewee has no control over this. In fact, I have to wonder if the job seeker's acquiescence is part of the assessment; if they will bend over and take this massively invasive procedure, perhaps they will make for a good little subservient drone at Amazon.
> "it's not much different from a math instructor having you clear the memory on your graphing calculator before an exam"
This sort of behavior by teachers is exactly what got me to write my first serious z80 assembly program to mimic all of the menus on the TI-83 circa 1996. Teachers had already caught on to the fact that there were programs that would display the "Mem Cleared" message on the calculators, so mandated they had to do it manually. I never used my program to cheat, I just didn't want to lose my games (had a really good zelda clone & penguins).
I can assure you that, for the vast majority of the population, it has the intended effect of keeping the calculator from storing digital cheat sheets.
I do not disagree with your assessment, but it was a great motivator for me to learn z80 assembly. I just wish I knew how to use the stack. Modern me shudders at how horrible that code was - it worked, but god damn was it ugly. I still have the Z80 assembly reference manual on my bookshelf. It just hasn't been opened in close to 20 years. I've never had a physical x86(_64) reference manual, but I usually keep PDFs handy - just in case while debugging. I think I still have Atmel AVR & Motorola 68k docs physically somewhere...
I'm sure that the candidate has no such guarantee. But does some kid barely out of college care more about potentially landing a job at Amazon or about the small chance that Amazon will retain some info collected during the test? It's a tradeoff, but it's nothing compared to the tradeoff we make by using Facebook or Google services.
> It's a tradeoff, but it's nothing compared to the tradeoff we make by using Facebook or Google services.
I don't disagree, and I recently stopped using all Google products in part because of how much information they have collected and still want to collect from me. After the account suspension drama from several days back, I was spooked and came to realize just how dependent I was on the company, and what I stood to lose should I come into the crosshairs over a simple ToS violation or even just a random bug in their service.
But that only strengthens my point of view about this hiring process and how wrong it is. When a company wants to exert that much control over someone who doesn't even work there yet, it speaks volumes about their overall culture and attitude towards people in general.
> However, from a philosophical point of view, it's Draconian and unnerving. What assurance does the interviewee have that Amazon isn't storing and using all this telemetry?
How is that different from being recorded by multiple cameras during an on-site interview?
I honestly don't see why the information they're collecting is a big deal. They are remotely interviewing you for a position, and would like to minimize cheating as much as possible. Instead of sitting you in a room, they use the technology available on your computer, while clearly telling you upfront what kind data will be collected. If you don't like it, get an interview elsewhere.
saying "if you don't like it get an interview elsewhere" is pretty unhelpful, because that's pretty much what he did; refused to continue with the current process. it also doesn't really work in the real world, because nothing would ever get fixed. if there were awful terms in a license agreement and someone found out, it's all well and good to say "go somewhere else", but what if it's in something like, say, windows that many people are forced to use for various reasons. sure, you might be able to go somewhere else but the practice still needs to be criticised and shown to others
well, as i said in another comment as well, if your questions can be answered by a quick web search, then maybe they should think about how you actually work; you web search a LOT. ask questions that filter on something less obvious
there are still in person stages; this is just a filter for them. it's not like it's the only data you get to hire or not hire someone
Why is everyone assuming that a cheater will only do a "quick web search"? You could call someone to walk you through it over Skype, or get a person to solve it over remote desktop, or even have a friend sit in and do it for you, etc.
These are the cases where monitoring is needed. Whether or not what Amazon is doing is actually effective is another issue entirely. All I'm saying is that it's not as huge a deal as a lot of people on this thread are making it out to be.
>while clearly telling you upfront what kind data will be collected
It doesn't even satisfy the legal requirements for informing people their personal data is going to be collected (in my country at least). They don't tell you what happens to the data, who has access to it, they don't provide a way to let them know you want it deleted, and so on.
'What if Amazon is using the data for nefarious purposes'.
It's a reasonable conclusion, but also a big 'what if' :)
Their motivation is pretty reasonable - they just want you to be able to take a test remotely.
They 'dictate the process, right down to the extension' for reasonable cause.
It's reasonable to ponder the ways in which there could be bad things going on, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume that there is, or even malicious intent here.
What's wrong with it is that real programmers constantly use whatever means possible to get the answer to questions as fast as possible. What they describe as "cheating" is what real programmers do all day long.
Unless you are working with a really small API surface then it is unlikely that a programmer is going to have much of the API memorized than the ones he uses on a daily basis. And with people radically changing their stacks every few years it is unreasonable to expect it.
Also, people copy/paste/tweak things from StackOverflow all the time. Disabling clipboard is unreasonable for that reason.
What a programmer can do using only things completely in their head is quite different than what programmers do in reality. Programmers are constantly looking up things they don't know throughout the entire day.
Keep in mind too that online tests are for screening, not a complete interview. You bring people in after that and do several rounds of interviews. Under that circumstance having a friend next to you or supplying you the answers doesn't really get you far if you know you have to do similar tests once you get into the office. There's isn't a lot of incentive to cheat.
The bigger concern is that this is a red flag about the work environment / culture. If I saw that I wouldn't go anywhere near it as well. In fact I deliberately put things in resume that some companies might find objectionable in order to purposely weed out with such cultures.
Yes, I agree that cheating should be curbed. But not at the expense of tracking every running application on a computer, or the exact location of interviewees. Videochat and on-site interviews exist and don't have these kind of problems.
Ok, but any techie should have little problem preparing an environment for such a test. Use that freshly formatted, dusted off laptop from college? Maybe even consider using a VM, like others suggested. Or how about install a portable version of Google Chrome, so no existing browser data or extensions would be a cause for concern (or worse, imagine a buggy extension crashing the browser and, thus, ending the test session)?
This is a great point, and I address it at the end of my post. The basic idea is that freedom shouldn't be limited to people who 1) have the technical knowledge to do all this and 2) have the time to set up such an environment. Freedom should be default. By being OK with these kinds of testing platforms, these could eventually be used for non-technical positions very easily, and those applications wouldn't know how to circumvent this.
But Amazon is primarily a tech company. Hate to say it, but non-techies comprise a very small percentage and they're an edge case. I also think that there is little chance that Amazon would care much to impose such strict oversights during non-technical remote tests.
But the real question is: should they have to? Quantumtremor already listed several alternatives that indeed don't have the same problems. Why would you risk ruining the goodwill of your privacy-conscious applicants by making them format a laptop, create a VM, or even install another application. None of that is going to make me want to do your interview.
Video and on-site interviews are much more expensive and leave employers open to lawsuits. Not that I necessarily agree with this practice, but I could see why this approach would be considered.
And yet...I have seen people cheat on technical interviews conducted over video chat. It's pretty obvious in that situation — oh, where did that come from? — but I can see it being an issue in a highly automated interview process with minimal human oversight.
Of course, I think that the real answer for that is to use a human to interview everyone. It's crazy to treat potential future employees this way.
Had something similar while interviewing Chinese offshore developers from Accenture. We caught on that the translator was basically answering the questions, and not the candidate. As a result of that experience, I will not work with anyone that does not speak English (I don't care if it's not their first language - I can work with poor grammar & broken English and I can handle heavy accents over a phone), but I will not go through a translator (and I don't want to have to go through a translator for day-to-day work, anyway).
More than once I've conducted phone screens and heard candidates attempting to look up the answers to questions online. (Hint: it's hilariously obvious when you ask something that follows the previous answer, the connection goes silent except for a few clicks of the keyboard, and the candidate then suddenly has the answer that sounds a LOT like it came from StackOverflow.)
I've even had a candidate whisper the question to someone else in the room with them. Seriously, it's ridiculous what some have done.
We used to give people with no real experience or portfolio small homework assignments to do - one of them forwarded it to his friend, asking him to complete it for him - but accidentally CCed my boss...
While it's true that a follow-up interview would further determine a candidate proficiency, the remote interview is meant to be a weed-out test. If enough people cheat, then it becomes useless for Amazon. And yes, I've heard of people cheating on interviews, including for Amazon.
But what you can say is: "If you want me to jump through all of those hoops, send me a $99 tablet that's already configured for the test conditions you want to subject me to."
Asking questions that give an incentive to cheat are typically poor questions in my experience. Or maybe an indication that the job is gonna suck a little bit.
If this test was happening at their own premises on their own machines then sure. But if I personally had to do this on my own machine on my own premises without being notified beforehand? My response would have been "Please erase my details and never contact me again". My current employer has very strict privacy and confidentiality concerns which I respect. But a prospective employee who has no contract with me? They can kindly GTFO.
