A Student Used AI to Beat Amazon’s Brutal Technical Interview. He Got an Offer and Someone Tattled to His University

A Columbia University student is facing a disciplinary hearing at the college after he used an AI program to help him land internships at Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. Roy Lee, the student facing down Columbia, told me he won’t be on campus when the hearing happens, that he plans to leave the University, and that the program he built to dupe Big Tech is proof that the jobs they’re offering are obsolete.

Landing a job for a Big Tech company is a nightmare. Colloquially known as FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google), the companies put potential software engineers through a battery of interviews. The most hated part of the process is the technical interview. During a technical interview, programmers solve esoteric coding problems. Often, they have to do it live on camera while an employee from the company watches.

Lee is a sophomore at Columbia, he’d graduate in 2026 if he stuck around. He planned to get a degree from the college and use it to get a job in Big Tech. Training for the technical interview killed his passion for the job. “It was one of the most miserable experiences I’ve ever had while programming,” he told me. “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 said he’s a “bit of a perfectionist,” and that it led to him spending 600 hours on training for technical interviews. His LeetCode profile, a website that allows programmers to train for the esoteric interviews, is a testament to his devotion. “It made me hate programming,” he said. “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 no one will ever see on the job. Instead, it’s a performance for executives. “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 said. “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.”

So Lee wrote a program called Interview Coder to help him and others bypass the process. Lee’s program does the hard work of the technical interview for you and he claims it’s completely invisible to programs that the Big Tech companies use to monitor a prospective employee’s computer.

“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.” Don’t take his word for it. It’s on Github here.

According to Lee, he used his program to pass technical interviews at companies like TikTok, Meta, and Amazon. He said they all gave him offers. “I recorded the full cycle with Amazon as the ultimate product demo to show that this works; the recruiting process is now broken.”

Meta and TikTok did not return Gizmodo’s request for comment. Amazon declined to comment on Lee, specifically, but said its recruiting process is evolving to meet the demands of the moment.

Margaret Callahan, a spokesperson at Amazon, told me that Amazon welcomed candidates to share their experiences working with generative AI tools but said that those candidates needed to 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 YouTube. Then they made him an offer. He rejected it. For Lee, the point was proving that Interview Coder worked, not passing a technical interview and landing a position.

Two days after Lee posted his technical interview with Amazon on YouTube, someone sent a note to Columbia and accused Lee of cheating during the interview. Lee became aware of the complaint when Columbia forwarded a redacted version of it to him and scheduled a disciplinary hearing for March 11.

The complaint Columbia sent Lee said that Amazon would be rescinding its offer and that it was upset that a student of the University had “cheated” on a technical interview. “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.”

The identifying information on the complaint is redacted, so it’s impossible to know where it actually came from. Columbia did not return Gizmodo’s request for comment. Amazon would not comment directly on the matter. Lee shared various materials from Columbia with Gizmodo that verified the disciplinary hearings are real.

Lee told me he won’t be attending the hearing. He said that LLMs have made getting a job at big tech pointless. “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 said he’s booked a one-way ticket out of the city and won’t even be on campus when Columbia wants to talk to him. His story went viral in programming circles after he posted his video on YouTube and got even further reach after he posted about the disciplinary actions from Columbia on X.

The attention has been good for him. He’s selling subscriptions to Interview Coder for $60 a month. Lee admitted that going out for big interviews with tech companies and the technical portion to post online was a marketing scheme. “I didn’t really have the balls to do something like this until quite recently,” he said.

But he was adamant that the technical interview process was a drain on programmers and the world. “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.”

“It’s an attempt at a standardized test that measures problem solving, but in today’s world that’s just obsolete.”