I applied directly on the website. A talent advisor reached out to schedule an interview with the hiring manager and included a "pre-interview assignment," which was to design a learning module on cloud computing. A different talent advisor reached out to send me the meeting details. I completed the assignment and sent it to the talent advisors two days before the interview. During the interview, the hiring manager never brought up the assignment. Then she noticed the meeting was running past the hour mark and immediately ended the meeting and signed off. Did not give me a chance to ask questions or close out the interview properly. Two weeks went by (including Christmas and New Year's), normal for holidays to drag things out. Right after the New Year, I got an email from a talent advisor saying someone would be reaching out with next steps! Well, no one reached out. I never heard from them again. I logged into the job portal two weeks after that, and found out I was "no longer under consideration." Very poor, unethical HR communication IMO. And, I don't even think the hiring manager knew about the pre-interview assignment they gave me. In sum, total waste of time and unprofessional process.

This was just a phone interview. They had previously reviewed my resume and reached out to me about the position. I did ask beforehand if they needed someone local, because I wasn't close to an office, and NYC is not a possibility for where I am. The recruiter said she'd check, then scheduled an interview, so I thought that maybe it was okay. The first interview they scheduled had to be canceled, because apparently the guy who was supposed to do the firing was leaving AWS that day. So they scheduled for the next week with the current hiring manager, his boss, who was apparently looking for a replacement. I used to live in the Bay area in California, and I had a cell phone number with an area code out there, so I guess the hiring manager was caught off-guard when I replied that I live and work in the state of New York. I let her know that NYC was not a possibility at this time, but she decided to go ahead with the interview anyway. So the interview actually went well, in my opinion, and I was asked a lot of questions about my skillset and why I was looking at AWS (while I didn't apply directly for this position, AWS is a place I was looking at). It was your standard phone interview, basically. She said that the recruiter that I was in communication with would contact me back sometime within the next few days. Well, I didn't hear anything from the recruiter until yesterday. I have no clue, because it could be that either I haven't done this specific job and she thought my skills didn't translate well enough, or it could be that my location was a deal-breaker. One of the questions was about working with groups of people that were spread all over the world, and I have, so I personally don't understand why, if I'm working with large groups of remote people, I have to physically be there, especially when the hiring manager would be across the country even if I could move to the NYC office. We still wouldn't be face-to-face. In today's world, when it comes to most software companies, you're working with lots of people that are remote. It's just a fact of life, but I'm not the hiring manager, and I'm not privy to her decisions. If you have the skills, and if you can be local, AWS is a good place to try for, I think. It does seem like a challenging environment, and you'd be surrounded by lots of hard workers, and I think that's a good place to be. They are really fixated on "customer obsession," so if you have a real passion for helping people understand AWS technologies, I recommend trying for a position with AWS. I do hope for two things: 1) That recruiters actually verify if a condition you have is a deal-breaker before setting up the interview, and 2) Hiring managers, if location is a dealbreaker, look at the location of the recipient and verify whether they can get to a location that's preferable. Both of those are fairly easy things to do, and it saves both you and the interviewee lots of time if you just do your homework, too. We don't want to waste your time just as much as we don't want to waste ours.