I graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2012 with a degree in computer science. This was after taking one year too many to finish my required courses, and without doing any internships or such. A few days after my graduation ceremony (I forget exactly when) edris tab and I were sitting at a Starbucks applying for jobs. For the record, it was his idea. One of the companies I applied for was Amazon — they called me back within a day or two, did a phone interview, then invited me to Seattle for an onsite.
I was located in Vancouver, so they booked me an Amtrak train ticket — frugality is one of Amazon’s core Leadership Principles — and I arrived at the Executive Hotel in downtown Seattle. Then came a grueling day of technical interviews. I still remember a few of the people who interviewed me and what questions they asked (hello, Micah!) and what questions I asked: did I really have to code that? Yes, I did — because that one, as I learned later, was the “bar raiser” interview, which was meant to be harder than the others. After the day was done, I treated myself to some good food at the Portage Bay Cafe, expensed, naturally. Then I headed back home.
The very next day I get a call… they were going to give me an offer. I blinked at what they were offering me — a doe-eyed new graduate like me, especially from Canada, could not fathom such amounts of money. I immediately accepted the offer, signed the contract, and waited expectantly for my start date. And that’s the end of that story… for now.
In retrospect, this was a lucky break. I didn’t do any internships (they call it co-op in Canada) while in university. I had spent about four and a half years doing coursework that should have taken four years, and an additional half a year retaking a course that I failed. My GPA was… not stellar. Then, why had Amazon been so eager to hire me? Because I had something that made me stood out from the herd: I had a personal website. And on that website I made a simple chat application. It was a silly little thing where you’d open a chat room with an ID, and then other people can join the chat room with the same ID, and they could send messages to each other. It was written in PHP and basic JavaScript. All the messages were stored in a MySQL database, in one table which wasn’t even indexed. But at least it worked, I suppose.
…actually, turns out it was because Amazon was on a hiring spree at the time.