Amazon interviewed me about my Amazon fake reviews detection app
So last April-May, I built a chrome extension that detects fake reviews on Amazon. It analyzes a combination of factors about the linguistics of the review (part of speech tags, unigrams and bigrams analysis), the reviewer metadata (rank, percent helpful reviews, number of reviews...), and the overall product reviews statistics (standard deviation, percent one time reviewers... etc).
At the end the reviews quality are scored on all these factors to give the product reviews a letter grade rating where "F" means that the product is very likely to have gone through a reviews bombing campaign and an "A" grade is for a product that contains mostly reliable reviews from reliable reviewers.
On the side I've been applying to Amazon jobs, and the last one I applied I included in my resume that I made such an app. About a couple of weeks later I get an email saying I was lined up for an interview. The interview went OK, I didn't do great in it to be honest, I didn't do bad either. I got asked about the chrome extension I made to describe what it did and why I did it which I obliged in answering.
Two weeks later, I contacted them to know about the hiring process and I got a reply that I was not considered for the job and that they couldn't share the reason why.
That sucked. What stung me even further, and made me believe that the interview was only a sham reason to only know about my app, was the fact that the product that I used as an illustration on the chrome extension store got banned. Not only that, but multiple products from the same seller and other sellers in that product category engaging in review deception schemes also got banned or more in their lingo "Discontinued".
BUT the app still detects products with deceptive reviews in other categories so it wasn't a site-wide update.
This is my story. Do with it as you wish. And be careful in dealing with large corporations.
Edit: Here's the link to the chrome extension in question:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/evalute-amazon-reviews-le/cfngaogeljebhifobnjlhoakgaogmndj?hl=en
60 comments
[ 112 ms ] story [ 1329 ms ] threadThis seems like potential evidence that they became aware of your app and made some changes based on the easy to identify information, but I don't think this is evidence as to why they decided to interview you. Maybe they would have interviewed you if your resume didn't include that app on it.
I know you probably didn't mean evidence in a legal sense, but it is circumstantial evidence, and this is a reason why a competent, healthy company would not call in a developer for a fake interview with the intention of stealing his ideas. The costs of potential legal liability and reputational risks would far outweigh the small financial gain. Especially as they could just analyze the app, never contact the developer, and not leave such a big evidence trail
Maybe Amazon is not a competent, healthy company, or maybe a rogue executive inside the company independently arranged this evil scheme, but that seems so unlikely when they could just offer a few 100K, or employment, to get access to his ideas legally.
Anyway, my advice to the developer is: it's possible you were evilly taken advantage of, but it's improbable. What is probable is that if you go down this road of paranoid fear of having your ideas stolen, it's a very unhealthy path to follow, even if you are right a few times. Try to think the best of people, and usually they will return that favor.
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/old-man-at-amazon-gives-advice-...
They appear to be using stack ranking and performance improvement plans to massively churn their work force so a significant percentage of employees doing good work are disposed of by their two year anniversary just because their system is designed that way. They seem to be making their “teams" in to brutal exercises in survival of the fittest or more accurately survival of those most able to play the stack ranking game. Stacking ranking nearly destroyed Microsoft so you assume it is or will do the same to Amazon.
I feel for young programmers starting out, because the work environment seems to be bad and getting worse in a lot of places.
Your interview might have made them acutely aware that your extension exists and they may have either got a copy and looked their site's products to find issues or at least take care of the "low hanging fruit" examples you used.
So what occurred might have been as you say. And I suspect you didn't move forward on the interview process BECAUSE of your extension (i.e. they didn't want to muddy the waters in case Amazon's legal department wants to send you a C&D letter) but I don't think they needed to interview you to get intelligence on your extension (since any engineer worth their salt at Amazon could have told them the same thing, just by downloading a copy and reading).
It sucks that Amazon didn't see the value of your innovations and exploit them to make their site better. But their loss I guess...
Also, another part of your story doesn't make sense: Amazon is growing like crazy right now[1], so why wouldn't they continue with the hiring process if you passed the interview? Setting up a "sham interview" like you're suggesting implies that it's worth the company's time to talk to you for 20 minutes about your Chrome extension, but not worth the company's time to actually hire you. This might be true for a company that has a hiring freeze or is downsizing or laying people off, but not a company that's hiring tens of thousands of people every year.
[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2014/company-town-amazons-rapid-grow...
Happy to brainstorm about standalone services you could build with your abilities.
So no, it was not some sort of ploy to get info on your chrome extension. If they wanted to do that, they could have just unzipped it and read through your source code. It's trivial.
Lastly, kudos to Amazon for paying attention. Sounds like they investigated the vendors and banned them for review pumping.
But isn't that a good thing? I mean, would you really be opposed to Amazon using your exception to detect fraud?
- Fraud is something that happens a lot online, and Amazon is going to be removing stuff they think is fraud constantly.
- Looking through the source of a chrome extension is pretty trivial. An engineer can find the info without asking you, and an hr person has no use for that info.
- Tons of people don't get hired. Many companies don't give reasons for not hiring for legal reasons.
Looks like in this case the interviewer pulled the cord and the seller/category was reviewed and several were banned.
This would most likely have been completely independent of the interview reject.
We just hired an engineer away from Amazon. Smart guy, he'll do well. Amazon's loss. What are they thinking?
Anyway, this HN set-up has more rules than you can shake a stick at. You're better off elsewhere.
"Community" my ass
History is full of examples of people who see the world differently only to be ridiculed (or worst) and later proven to be correct. From Copernicus to Columbus, the Personal Computer and FedEx. Ideas that were ridiculed and rejected by "smart folks" only to alter society in a major way once proven to be correct.
This, I feel, is what isn't captured by these silly voting systems. The HN version of fora would have burned Copernicus at the stake for daring to suggest that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Similarly, here, today, the voting system does not capture innovative thinking but rather cargo cult. Yes, it generally helps bubble good/correct posts to the surface but it also serves to squash down anything that does not align with majority rule. Which means that the audience is subjected to a positive feedback loop fed by cargo cult mentality rather than allowing the injection of a variety of viewpoints for intelligent independent evaluation.
Again, ignore the voting system. Don't let it get to you. It isn't designed to promote alternative thinking at all, that much is evident.
Also, offend an Apple, Amazon, Google or M$ fanboy at your peril.
And, on a personal note: Got a downvote from the sheeple. Just proves the point. Whoo hoo!
This is not easy. These kinds of problems go back to the old USENET days. Of course, there was no click voting system. What would happen is that you'd get piled-on by folks who felt entitled to police specific lists. Horrible nasty flame wars would emerge with people being brutally assaulted online in every way imaginable.
Today things are different, the up/down vote is there. And every site I can think of has mob rule problems. From StackOverflow to HN and everything in between.
Again, not an easy problem to address.
Some sites, after you get more than 30 billion upvotes (or some suitably hyperbolic number), you become a meta-poster with various super-powers and the ability to sling your weight around and punish the noobs. The all time favourite "closed for being primarily opinion-based" is wielded with totalitarian contempt and authority. Absurd really because EVERYTHING is opinion based; sometimes those opinions are backed up by empirical evidence sometimes they're backed up by having 30 billion upvotes.
The whole system stinks and, before a super-user blacks me for "Irrelevant or tangential content", the reason I address this is because the original poster who was screwed by Amazon is just another example of too much power being wielded to suppress dissent.
Further, before I'm accused of a diatribe about a problem without offering a solution, I have a number of proposals none of which will ever be implemented because the all-powerful and mighty may lose their pre-eminent positions as a result.
Status-quo rules KO
As an example, there is no reason for Apple to tolerate racist remarks in their user fora. That sort of things has nothing to do with their company and the image they wish to portray. The right thing to do is to remove such posts and ban the users who post them right away.
How about a political discussion forum? Should they allow racist discussions? That's a stretch. Don't know. The stuff is nasty. However, one could argue it is better in the open than behind closed doors because it could serve to inform, educate and perhaps convince a few people to change their ideology for the better.
This is an extreme example, of course, yet this sort of thing is exactly why I said moderation systems are difficult to implement. I don't know of anyone who's done it "right" (in quotes because we don't really know what that means). There are mod systems that work reasonably well but not all the time. In HN's case some subjects bring out cargo-cult down-voting and alternative opinions are simply squashed down. That's just the way it is.
Keep in mind that these fora don't have to be about freedom of speech. They are private sites with their own ecosystems and rules. I you don't like it you can leave.
My approach on a site like HN is to envision mass down-voters as post-adolescent emotional cargo-cult voters who have been indoctrinated or peer-pressured into thinking in a certain way. They have little life experience as the basis of their opinions and seem to refuse to get past the indoctrination or cargo-cult mentality to actually analyze issues before forming an opinion. In other words, their opinions are given to them, they are not the result of life experience and analysis.
For example, there are plenty of people on HN who will post about business without ever having started or operated one. You can see them a mile away because of how ridiculous their comments are in the context of someone who has launched and operated one or more real businesses. These people will down-vote opinions of someone with experience because they probably sound harsh or foreign to them.
They, for example, don't understand the interaction between taxation and business decisions or government and business growth. And yet you can't fault them because they simply don't have the life experience. These are things that are nearly impossible to teach. You can read about it all you want in a book. Your brain does not "click" into reality mode until, for example, a government official shows up at your business asking you to pay the county a "privilege" tax on your desk, printer, computer, chairs, refrigerator and machinery (this is a real thing, BTW).
Once you transition into considering the source of down-votes none of it bothers you. Just state your position and ignore the down-votes. Life is good.
I honestly don't know how they retain good engineers.
But you may have caught a lucky break in not being hired (see comments on work culture).