A student uses AI to beat Amazon’s brutal technical interview. He received an offer and someone has exposed himself to his university
A student at the University of Colombia is facing a disciplinary hearing at college after using an AI program to help him get on land on Amazon, Meta and Tiktok. Roy Lee, the student facing Colombia, told me that he would not be on the campus when the hearing happened, that he plans to leave the university and that the program he built on Dupe Big Tech is proof that the jobs they offer are outdated.
Landing for a large technology company is a nightmare. Conversationly known as Faang (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), companies put potential software engineers through an interview battery. The most hated part of the process is the technical interview. During a technical interview, developers solve esoteric encoding problems. Often they have to do it live on a camera while an employee from the company is watching.
Lee is a sophomore in Colombia, he would end in 2026 if he struck around. He plans to get a degree from college and use it to get a job at Big Tech. Training for the technical interview killed his passion for work. “It was one of the most unhappy experiences I have ever had during the programming,” he told me. “I had the feeling that I had to do it. This is something I had to do for a lot of technological work and there was so much to learn, so much to remember and so many accidental problems I could expect to throw me. “
Lee said he was a “little perfectionist” and that this led to the fact that he spent 600 hours of training in technical interviews. His Leetcode profileA website that allows programmers to train for esoteric interviews is a testament to his devotion. “It made me hate programming,” he said. “It is absurd that this is the way in which technical interviews are done and conducted and that this is the way they have been conducted in the last two decades.”
According to Lee, these interviews often cover topics that no one will ever see in work. Instead, this is a performance for the leaders. “This is whether you have seen the problem before, remember the solution and you can act so that you see the problem for the first time,” he said. “The answer to many of these problems is so algorithmic. They are also simply not representative of what you do as a programmer. “
So Lee wrote a program called Coder’s interview To help him and others surround the process. Lee’s program makes the hard work of a technical interview for you, and he claims to be completely invisible to programs that major technology companies use to monitor the computer’s computer.
“In fact, the product is really simple,” he said. “Take a picture and then ask Chatgpt, ‘Hey, can you solve the problem in this photo? “This is literally the whole product. Someone could probably build a working prototype version of what works in less than 1000 lines of code. “Don’t take his word for it. It’s on Github hereS
According to Lee, he used his program to submit technical interviews to companies such as Tiktok, Meta and Amazon. He said everyone gives him offers. “I recorded the full cycle with Amazon as the best demonstration of the product to show that it works; The dialing process has already been broken. “
Meta and Tiktok did not return Gizmodo’s request for comment. Amazon declined to comment on Lee more special, but said the recruitment process was developing to meet the demands of the moment.
Margaret Kalahan, a spokesman for Amazon, told me that Amazon welcomed candidates to share their experience in working with generative AI tools, but said these candidates should promise not to use unauthorized tools during the interview process.
Lee recorded his entire technical interview with Amazon and posted the whole thing, Uncut, on YouTubeS Then they made him an offer. He rejected it. For Lee, the question was proving that the interview coder was working without handing over a technical interview and going to a position.
Two days after Lee posted his technical interview with Amazon on YouTube, someone sent a note to Colombia and accused Lee of cheating during the interview. Lee found out about the complaint when Colombia forwarded an edited version of it and scheduled a disciplinary hearing for March 11.
In the complaint, Colombia sent Lee said that Amazon would cancel her proposal and that he was upset that a university student had “cheated” a technical interview. “Amazon has a long tradition of working with Columbia Engineering … And this is a deep effect on seeing situations like this. We believe in Colombia to take the right action with regard to this student and we hope to continue this long -standing partnership. “
Identifying information on the complaint is edited, so it is impossible to know where it came from. “Colombia declined to comment on the issue, citing federal privacy rules that did not prevent it from weighing.” Amazon would not comment directly on this. Lee shared various Colombia materials with Gizmodo, who have checked the disciplinary hearing, are real.
Lee told me he would not attend the hearing. He said LLM did a job at Big Tech -NCLESS. “Maybe it’s stupid to say that,” he said. “Most human intelligence work will grow old in two years. So I have two years to do something. Which means I have to swing as big as possible and I don’t have time to work for two years in a great technological work, nor do I want more … By the end of my completion, these LLMs will become enough advanced by the time there is no significant intellectual work to create value for society. “
He said he has booked a one -way ticket outside the city and will not even be on the campus when Colombia wants to talk to him. His story became viral in circles programming after posting his video on YouTube and appeared even more after posting for disciplinary actions from Colombia on xS
The attention was good for him. He sells subscriptions to interview Coder for $ 60 a month. Lee acknowledged that major interviews with technology companies and the technical part of publishing online is a marketing scheme. “I actually didn’t have the balls to do something like that until recently,” he said.
But he was adamant that the technical interview process was the drain of developers and the world. “Big technology companies have no incentive to change,” he said. “Leetcode is a sloping system that works for them, but it is a giant net negative from the ecosystem for development worldwide.”
“This is an attempt at a standardized test that measures problem solving, but in today’s world it is just outdated.”