But all the jobs I've read so far on amazon.jobs seem to imply that a BS degree is required. Does anyone know if that is still the case? Is there any point in applying at Amazon if you don't have a BS degree? Any tips or tricks? (Besides signing up for the quickest online college degree program...)
Thanks.
My experience with Amazon's SDE hiring process has been pretty disappointing. It's a lot like Google's, where they bring in a bunch of devs and managers to tech-screen you, with nothing more than a "raising the bar" afternoon course in interviewing experience under their belt.
If they can see themselves in you, maybe a younger version, then it's a pretty good bet you'll get an offer. If not, they're perfectly happy to waste your afternoon, and maybe get back to you with a no. Ask yourself: "How you could tell if someone, who's a more experienced developer than you are, is more qualified than you are?" If you don't have a good answer, that's ok, but realize the ones making that decision are in exactly the same boat.
The problem with Amazon's "bar raiser" approach is that it ignores that your average rank-and-file employee does not know how to value a candidate. When you hire only the best, and you have no idea what that actually means (the best are who work here already?), then it becomes a self-fulfilling tautology. Lots of false negatives, and probably some false positives as well. If you follow history, Sears was probably like this at some point in time.
TLDR: No.
1. The person interviewing you is often less experienced and skilled than they let on. They can't make sense of your code, not because it's not any good, but because they don't code at your skill level in that language.
2. Showing off code, while making for a better interview than the behavioral stuff that passes for interviewing at the bigs, still isn't all that great a tool. There are a lot of people who might show it off, and might even talk the talk, but who didn't write all of it and might not even understand it.
3. The code is secondary to the job. How you come up with the code is primary to the job, and showing off code doesn't show off how you came up with it. Even the best code ever would be a bad hire if it took you six months to come up with it or annoyed your fellow devs for months in coming up with it.
4. The way you're used to coding will be different than the culture of the new firm. It just is. If hired, you're going to adapt to it, not the other way around.
So yes it can be done just be careful on your expectations. If you're in the Seattle area. There is a crack the coding interview meetup. Probably in other cities. Tailor the resume to their needs. Then knock the algorithm and big o questions out. I spent about a year studying to land the role.
Edit, from another HN post about Tim Cook saying you don't need a degree: Cook also added that about half of Apple's US employment last year was made up of people who did not have a four-year degree.
Note that getting an offer is also contingent on your eligibility to work in US. If you are not a US citizen or a green card holder, the requirements to get an H1 visa are to have the equivalent of four years of education, where each three years of work experience counted as a year of education. (There are other H1 class visas, but they are not as common in the computer industry) But the company has to like you really a lot to go through the trouble in that case...
And since you managed to pique my interest, Id be curious to look at your resume. I'll leave out the part of figuring out how to send it (without it being caught by the junk filters) as an exercise to you. Shouldn't be that hard..
BTW. I'm a US citizen.
I just got contacted by an AWS hiring manager. I had to fight to get a face to face with my proposed hiring manager at Google, and he was frankly quite offended I thought it necessary. So I thought that was at least mildly positive, any other anecdotes for someone considering entering the pipeline would be really helpful.
So yeah, they do hire folks without degrees, but it's one of those "don't know the position/team until after the interview" type of deals and it's tough to change roles internally.
