Roy Lee, a Columbia University sophomore, is currently facing a disciplinary hearing after using an AI program to secure internships at Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. Lee shared that he has no plans to attend the hearing and will be leaving the university. He claims that the program, which he developed, is a testament to the obsolescence of the hiring practices at major technology companies.
Landing a job at a well-known tech company, often referred to as FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google), involves a grueling interview process. A particularly difficult aspect of this process is the technical interview, during which prospective software engineers must solve complex coding problems, often live and on camera.
For Lee, training for these technical interviews proved to be a draining experience that diminished his passion for programming. “It was one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had while programming,” he stated. “I felt like I had to do it. It’s something I needed to do for a big tech job, and there was just so much to learn, so much to memorize, and so many random problems I could expect to have been thrown at me.”
Lee, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, dedicated approximately 600 hours to preparing for these interviews and is active on LeetCode, a website that helps programmers train for the types of coding problems encountered in tech interviews. “It made me hate programming,” he confessed. “It’s absurd that that’s the way technical interviews are done and conducted and that that’s the way they’ve been conducted for the past two decades.”
According to Lee, these interviews often cover topics that are unrelated to the day-to-day responsibilities of programmers. Instead, he believes they are a performance for executives based on memorization. “It’s whether you’ve seen the problem before, memorized the solution, and can act like this is your first time seeing the problem,” he explained. “The answer to a lot of these problems is so algorithmic. They’re also just not representative at all of what you do as a programmer on the job.”
In response, Lee created a program called Interview Coder to help himself and others bypass what he saw an antiquated hiring process. The program reportedly automates the technical interview process and, Lee claims, goes undetected by the software used by large tech companies to monitor candidates’ computers. “In reality, the product is really simple,” he said. “You take a picture, and then you ask ChatGPT, ‘Hey can you solve the problem in this picture?’ Literally, that’s the entire product. Someone could probably build a working prototype version of this that works in less than 1,000 lines of code.” The code itself is available for review on Github.
Lee has stated that he used his program to pass technical interviews at TikTok, Meta, and Amazon, and received offers from all three companies. “I recorded the full cycle with Amazon as the ultimate product demo to show that this works; the recruiting process is now broken,” he stated. While Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment, an Amazon spokesperson, Margaret Callahan, confirmed that Amazon welcomes candidates to share their experiences using AI tools, however candidates are expected not to use unauthorized tools during the interviews.
Lee recorded his entire technical interview with Amazon and posted the unedited video on YouTube before rejecting the offer. He claims his intention was to demonstrate the efficacy of his Interview Coder program, not to secure a job offer. Following his YouTube post, an anonymous complaint was sent to Columbia alleging that Lee had cheated during his interview. The university forwarded a redacted version of the complaint to Lee and scheduled a disciplinary hearing for March 11.
The complaint stated that Amazon would be rescinding its offer and expressed concerns about a student “cheating” during the interview. The Amazon complaint read: “Amazon has a long tradition of working with Columbia Engineering…and it deeply concerns us to see situations like this occur. We trust Columbia to take proper action with regards to this student, and we hope to continue this long-standing partnership.” Lee has verified the disciplinary hearing is indeed happening.
Lee believes that the emergence of large language models has diminished the value of a big tech job. “Maybe it’s stupid of me to say this,” he said. “Most human intelligence work is going to be obsolete in two years. So I have two years to make something happen. Meaning I need to swing as big as possible and I don’t have the time to work two years in a big tech job, nor do I want to anymore…by the time I graduate, these LLMs are going to get advanced enough to the point where there is no significant intellectual work that I could produce value for society.” He has also scheduled a one-way trip out of the city.
Following the publication of his YouTube video and subsequent posts on X, Lee’s story went viral within the programming community. He is now selling subscriptions to Interview Coder for $60 per month. According to Lee, making the tech interview and disciplinary action public was a deliberate marketing strategy. “I didn’t really have the balls to do something like this until quite recently,” he admitted, however, he is insistent the technical interview process is a harmful drain on programmers. “Big tech companies don’t have an incentive to change,” he said. “LeetCode is a slop system that works for them, but it’s a gigantic net negative on the development ecosystem around the world.”
