Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

My nephew worked for Amazon in Kentucky and during a snowstorm they refused to let him stay home. He didn't feel it was safe to drive (and it wasn't). They told him he is fired. Someone even called to apologize later, but he already found work some other place.

On the "good" part of Amazon at AWS, I had a laughably terrible hiring experience (I know I've told my story multiple times, sorry). They forgot to call me back on the scheduled phone interview day, my future manager who was supposed to interview me wasn't there the day they brought me in, they forgot about me during lunch, sat in a conference room for an hour, then went wondering around, thinking, nah, this can't be happening. After that I got a little snippy with them parroting back leadership principles. And then later it took them 3 weeks to call back (but at that point I wasn't surprised).

However, I like them as a amazon.com customer. I guess to make things awesome on the outside, those on the inside have to suffer...

I want to soften this viewpoint a bit. I had similarly bungled experiences with both Facebook and Google (eventually got offers from both, accepted at Google). Missed phone calls, mistaken identity, inter-office communication problems and more.

It's not a fair reflection of the company at large; recruiting is very often a shit show for all kinds of reasons.

Ditto this experience from Shopify

It is fair however to keep in mind that employees, or potential recruits, who forget to keep meeting times or fail to show up could have a very different outcome.

I'd say as a candidate you're on the hook as well to push the process forward.

recruiting is very often a shit show for all kinds of reasons

I never before experienced the kind of rudeness and incompetence during hiring I had encountered while being interviewed in the Bay Area tech scene. Interviewers not keeping phone appointments. Interviewers blatantly not listening. Interviewers basically (incorrectly) implying that I'm lying. I will observe that the YCombinator companies fared much better than the above, however. Much, much better!

I'm on the East Coast, and I've interviewed with a fair number of East Coast and West Coast companies and the West Coast ones were by far the worst. Google and Amazon have been fair to middling, but there's been some that were probably so inept it has to fall under some kind of criminal law somewhere.

Friend of mine got interviewed by a well known company down in the Bellevue area of Washington, for a role managing storage stuff, shortly after moving to the area. They got him in 5 times over a month for interviews with various people, and eventually about 3-4 weeks after the final interview they offered him the job.

They seemed very surprised when he laughed and told them they were too late, he'd got work elsewhere, as if they somehow expected him to sit around on his arse waiting for the job.

Ebay?

I'm curious to know the company if you're willing to share because I grew up in Bellevue and worked at a software company downtown there as well.

Yeah, lots of the companies seem to operate like engineers aren't in high demand virtually everywhere and that they offer some kind of special je-ne-sais-quoi that will convince qualified people to sit around for months while they make up their mind.

I can say having been on the hiring-side of various companies for a while, most East Coast companies can go from looking at an application to hire inside a couple of weeks if they're slow, inside of a week if they're pretty well put together and can get enough people for interviews. It just simply doesn't take 5 interviews and two months to find somebody -- that's just ineptitude...and those companies' own internal metrics show all the process and hoops don't make much difference in final employee performance.

As a general rule you are better off not working at such places, because people there are generally so full of themselves.

Growth, promotions, raises and other perks will come in a trickle unless you are a member of some political cartel in the company, because every one thinks they are special.

Recruiting is worse of course, because they don't generally grant easy access to their elite club.

Out of 6 companies I talked to over the course of a couple of months, Amazon somehow managed to stand out.

It is an industry-wide cultural problem.

I think it very much is a reflection of the company, in that it shows they don't take it seriously.

I should add that I've also had fairly positive recruiting experiences at companies I ended up not liking at all. I'm saying there may be not be much correlation between the HR/talent departments and eng.

> It's not a fair reflection of the company at large; recruiting is very often a shit show for all kinds of reasons

I have personally dropped the ball on an interview once, had the wrong time written down to meet someone. Apologized profusely when i did arrive. :/

Having interviewed with Amazon, MS, Google, and Facebook I have to say MS was by far the easiest experience of the 4. Applied, a few weeks later they contacted me, 2 weeks later I did my interview, offer a day later. Facebook and google it was more like apply wait weeks for response, wait a couple weeks for phone screen, wait a week for resposne, wait a couple weeks for a second phone screen, wait a week for response, wait a few weeks for in person, wait a couple weeks for response. Amazon was similar, but at least that was over the holidays and I actually travelled for that one.

> I guess to make things awesome on the outside, those on the inside have to suffer...

Or, the two things don't necessarily have to be related.

> However, I like them as a amazon.com customer. I guess to make things awesome on the outside, those on the inside have to suffer...

I've never understood this logic. Amazon is making a ton of money (rightly so, imo), they could afford to trim down quite a bit. Why should those on the inside be forced to suffer?

I am just saying what the popular explanation for this is.

Amazon's own official explanation is probably something along the lines of "frugality" (hey isn't that a leadership principle..., see I learned something from the interview after all!)

Their profit margins are tiny. Look up earnings for recent quarters.

Their profit margins are tiny by design. They put all of their profits into technology investment, and have been doing it intentionally for a long time. See: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520801/no-stores-no-sal...

Isn't that because they tend to reinvest most of their revenue back into the company, instead of paying it out?

> However, I like them as a amazon.com customer. I guess to make things awesome on the outside, those on the inside have to suffer...

Whenever I really enjoy or am afforded a major convenience by some kind of technology these days I feel guilty about how much suffering went into my enjoyment. This ranges from video games, NLP, or being able to get food at 11:30 PM on a Sunday.

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