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Comment by abhinavsharma | Hacker News Reader

As strange a move as this may seem outside of India, the culture’s huge focus on competitive exams means this is:

1. A very cheap way for them to build trust with a whole generation at a time.

2. A good way to leverage their brand and distribution to provide an accurate measure that a lot of these students need in order to improve.

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1a - build trust specifically with IIT aspirants who, even if they don't get into IIT, will hold amazon in high regard and consider amazon for employment down the line.

3. get data / insight / early access to top level test takers and build a recruiting funnel before these students start college.

Yeah, I think data is the goldmine. If you know what questions to ask to quickly estimate someones ability to be successful in school/workplace you can just do shotgun approach hiring. As one of the largest software companies in the world that is a savvy move, although for some reason I can't quite figure out it does feel somewhat sleazy.

When I worked for Sybase there was following brain drain pipeline from India office:

* Hire a bunch of people.

* Move brightest and hardest working to U.S. on H1B.

* Use that PR to hire a bunch more people in India.

So essentially... Cheap workers?

No. More consumers who will choose amazon over competing e-commerce marketplaces.

You realize most FAANG jobs in India are low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with right ?

so you're assuming that nothing will change in the next 5-10 years?

No they are not. The average job profile might be a bit lower but FAANG has plenty of high paying job opportunities in India.

They are?

I haven't worked for FAANG but I've certainly seen a lot of India tech jobs hired by American companies that I wouldn't consider "low-level ones the Americans couldn't be bothered with".

Can't speak for other FAANGs but this is definitely not true of Amazon India. They have teams working on everything from Alexa to new AWS services, and of course retail as well. Not to mention Amazon India itself which is pretty unique and innovative in its own ways. Amazon also pays a lot compared to most other tech employers in India - a lot less than Amazon US of course, but it's still not just "cheap labour".

True! But more like finding a new efficient frontier for talent. https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/operations-logist...

Developing and nurturing human capital doesn't necessarily depress the value of labor...it could also create more demand for such labor (by expanding the economy), evening things out.

I hope that, in addition to, improving their recruiting funnel and brand value; this effort serves to improve diversity in tech. We have talked about tech companies throwing their hands in the air to encourage college admissions rate from under-represented classes. Hopefully, this move to go down the funnel leads to that improvement!

I am now surprised one of the tech giants hasn’t tried this with SAT prep.

Human capital. Many SAT schools often have 1x1 training but with JEE India, all you need is right course content and prep materials and often students pickup from it. Often in India, JEE is one of the most respected entry path and students who take it are extremely motivated to the likes of silio ing their life for nothing but exam prep, for years.

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