If he signed an NDA, I probably wouldn't write a blog post about the interview process, that's a good way of getting fired for cause, since the late 1990s.
I don't think you need to treat an NDA as a blanket 'you can say absolutely nothing'. The post is 90% about his own preparation process, and 10% about the day-of schedule for interviews. The schedule of the day-of process is not exactly a secret, everyone that has interviewed at Amazon went through something like it. The recruiters should be telling you what to expect before you even get there. It's not like he gave a hint as to what the questions were.
Here's the thing, posts like this are just making searchable what many people already know. The difference is that the tribal knowledge of how to get through interviews is one of the reasons why our profession has a diversity problem. If you don't know that you should read those books and plan for those questions, how well do you think you will do? Plenty of this wisdom travels over beers among the circles of friends in the industry, but putting it on the internet democratizes the knowledge for everyone.
Yeah, there really wasn't anything surprising in the blog post. The prep work was somewhat interesting. But all the info looks like stuff easily available elsewhere. And I didn't really learn anything unexpected about Amazon's process. Besides I think NDA's for tech interviews generally just cover specific questions.
He has a footnote that the blog post was discussed. I'm sure nothing important was revealed. Frankly, there wasn't a whole lot to the article that I haven't read elsewhere anyway. No trade secrets there. Amazon wants people who, unlike me, don't find data structures and algorithms to be boring and sleep-inducing. That's about it.
I wouldn't say that's what Amazon "wants", and often the interviews have little correlation with the actual job.
We all know the interview process (across many companies) is a difficult / broken process. I think it gets even more difficult with scale the size of Google, Amazon, etc. How do you offer a consistent candidate experience and stable hiring bar without severely limiting the number of candidates processed or eating up too much developer time?
I'm sure we could find a dozen threads already discussing this on HN though.
I've never signed one, but I'm imagining that the NDA would probably cover any upcoming technologies or products that might come up during an interview, not an NDA about the interview process itself. The latter seems kinda silly IMO
I've signed a few, and they usually explicitly cover the details of the questions themselves. In other words, you can say you had to solve an algorithmic problem, but you can't mention the specific details or wording of that problem.
This is primarily so their questions don't end up on LeetCode or other practice websites; they always end up there anyway, so it really just slows down that process and prevents them from having to think up new questions quite as often.
I've signed Amazon's. If I remember correctly, it says not to talk about any workings of Amazon internals that you might learn during the interview, and not to talk about specifics of the questions. Things like the standard interview schedule, the focus on the Amazon leadership principles, etc are pretty well-known already, and I don't think talking about them will reveal anything that hasn't been revealed to the public.
I thought the same before reading the post, but I must admit that the author of the post is very careful not to reveal any concrete details, so this may be more like subtle trolling of people who check enforcement of interview NDAs.
I interviewed at about a dozen companies two years ago and published every single question. NDAs don't cover interview questions. I asked the employers. Still got offered and nobody sued.
