I never had any desire to use G+. No one I knew was on it, so it certainly wasn't a FB competitor, and they then tried to FORCE me on it for some google services, which is guaranteed to just piss me off about it. Nothing there I can't get better elsewhere, as far as I know, and I never cared enough to find out.

"And to be honest, I would be too humiliated"

Oh, cry me a river. I put myself through school on retail. I am a programmer. If I lost this job, I'd be back to retail in a heartbeat while I worked to find a new IT job. I have a very hard time having sympathy for someone who goes on and on about how bad he has it while he's not willing to work a job that is "beneath" him. What classes are you taking? What are you doing to get more relevant? Github is free. Resources are free. Many classes are free. Get your StackOverflow on. Shit, I get offers from there frequently and all I have done is answer some questions.

Your kids are hungry because you're too good to get a job at a freaking grocery store??

Well, as a liberal, educated white chick who lives in an urban area, if I said someone was more into Duck Dynasty than SNL, it would absolutely be an insult. It would imply they are hick rednecks, and in a bad way.

If you can't be bothered to design for mobile web, I probably won't be bothered to download your app. I guess I'm not alone in that.

I used Okta for a few days. Not a fan, especially after I had to reset my password on one of the sites I had in it, and there was no nice way to just set the new password in it. I'll take a normal password manager with browser plugins for as long as I'm stuck using passwords.

Eh, FB becomes less relevant to me the more it shows me ads and sponsored content and crap, instead of the content from my friends and family that I actually signed up for the service to see in the first place. Eating up my mobile data with video and ads just makes me not bother to visit the site as much.

Thanks for posting that. I didn't read the article, because as soon as I clicked through, I got a notification about notifications and a banner ad. Closed the tab.

"it effectively has weeded out some people who clearly would not be able to function in their daily job"

Did it, or did it weed out people who got so nervous at being asked to perform for an audience on demand that they froze up? I have social anxiety, and while I've been super lucky to get jobs through referrals of other colleagues (who introduced me ahead of time to folks I would be interviewing with), if I had to do this in front of a bunch of strangers judging me, I'd probably appear to be very bad at my job. How I act normally with people whom I know is very different than how I act around people whom I feel are just there to judge me and decide how worthy I am.

You raise a valid concern I don't have a good answer for you.

I've interviewed people with some pretty severe anxiety who have passed it and some who accepted offers. But that is not to say there wasn't someone weeded out that shouldn't have been.

Although for the people who failed the coding part of it I'd say they definitely behaved more overly confident than anxious.

Edit: with that said I have some experience successfully teaching programming to people with disabilities (in a university setting) which probably makes me a fair amount more qualified than many other higher managers. But again, there are no guarantees.

I too find that when programming in front of people my ability to think logically about the problem is hampered by the other half of my brain trying to analyze the interviewers reactions. I am not able to fully focus on the problem because my mind is constantly distracted.

Growing up I played sports all my life and never had a problem in front of crowds. I suspect this is mainly thanks to the cerebellum acting as a co-processor to the pre-frontal cortex of sorts. In an interview however, there is simply way to much ancillary analysis going on to fully focus on the task at hand.

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.

None of the people he mentions are from Amazon, I don't think.

Erm, as a queer woman, I have never seen that term used that way. In my experience, it's always used to target millenials, who actually expect the world to be more fair and less idiotic, and are going to be amazingly disappointed that life sucks a lot more than they thought once they graduate.