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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

The other thing to add on is that Amazon is having a hard time recruiting, at least anecdotally from friends who work there. Between their reputation as a company and hot job market, filling some senior level eng roles has become near impossible.

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I have shared this story on here before, but my first "real interview" out of college was at Amazon and to this day it is still one of the worst experiences of my career.

The recruiter was great, super nice, got me all organized for a full-day loop. They gave me some things to prepare, so I did. Admittedly, I was under-qualified for the job as a fresh grad but was assured that'd be fine.

Still, the entire team made it abundantly clear how much I was apparently wasting their time even being in the room with each of them as they took turns throughout the day talking to me.

Felt so unbelievably toxic, and even though this was in the early 00s, I have never even considered working there since.

Very similar experience. It was a boring and tedious interview. The behavioral part of the interview felt odd with a focus on tailoring my experiences around Amazon principles which I wasn't aware of until a few days before the interview. The employees seemed nice, though, but not really cheerful and a little standoff-ish. It honestly felt like a more traditional style of interviewing.

I contrast that with another FAANG interview I had, where you had lunch on campus and they tried to leave a positive impression.

I found my Amazon interview to be surprisingly easy and friendly, except for one interviewer who gave me Alien Dictionary and got offended when I told her this was a well known leetcode problem. Oops..didn't get the job.

I interviewed for Amazon Brazil once, it felt like I was being questioned by the police as if in a movie:

- 4 straight hours inside a room

- every hour the interviewer changed

- got asked the same questions over and over again

I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.

Apart from getting asked the same questions, the other parts are quite common in the industry. I mean, some places might move you around a bit between rooms, but literally every job interview I've had over the last 25 years has been essentially 4-6 hours of tag team wrestling with coding/systems/personality questions.

Indeed, but when these hours are unpleasant they are an eternity, which probably tarnishes your memory of it.

They're always unpleasant! :-P

"- 4 straight hours inside a room

- every hour the interviewer changed

- got asked the same questions over and over again"

It's the same in UK, at least they standardised it!

It's the same in North America as well. If you get scheduled during lunch time, you will get the opportunity to go outside at least :)

All that is moot now because of covid.

It's the same in the US too. My last (internal transfer) job interview at Apple was 8 hours long, 8 interviews.

I think I might have you beat with 9 hours, but that was an external interview

This sounds like a fairly normal interview process. How do tech interviews typically work in Brazil?

I don't think it's a "Brazil" thing, I've been in Europe for a while now, I only mentioned where it was because maybe it's different between (Amazon) branches.

The current job I'm at was like 5-6h of interviews, it was hard to pass, but it didn't feel like the interviewers were trying to play "good cop, bad cop"

They also sort of shoot themself in the foot with their interview process. I recommended the absolute best person I know for a position he was exceedingly qualified for. Amazon would have been lucky to have him.

They blitzed him with leadership questions and were “not inclined”. Incredibly dumb given their current situation. He’s not even bad on those dimensions, they just can’t get pretty off topic imo.

A recruiter contacted me one for a position at Amazon, and I straight up said I will never work there because of the way they treat their employees. (Probably burned a bridge with that recruiter, but oh well)

It's not possible to burn a bridge with a recruiter, these are 'salespeople' who get many no's per day and have pressure to perform.

A recruiter call doesn't mean a company has interest in a candidate. It just means the Amazon job description and your resume both included the word JAVA.

I probably burned a bridge with Activision-Blizzard a few years ago. They contacted me about a potential job, and I said "When I was earning my degree, I dreamed of working for Blizzard. But then earlier this year, you announced record profits, and then only a couple days later announced the lay-off of over 800 workers. No thank you."

And considering their current controversies, my opinion on working for them has not changed.

If they ever contacted me again, I'd probably just laugh.

You sure showed that HR drone.

But...you're aware that record profits aren't a blank check to employ whoever you want in whatever positions they want, right?

Of course. But to make a layoff announcement right after a record profits announcement is pretty poor taste.

Clearly they could afford to keep the people that were working while said profits were extracted

Both Facebook and Amazon have contacted me recently, and in both cases it was a senior manager doing the recruiting. Maybe just a new strategy in general, or perhaps it's because both companies struggle with reputation.

I know a local Amazon director and he was spending a lot of time with recruiting, he had to hire a very large amount of people and that was his top measure for that year. Even paying above the market, with their reputation and the competition on the market it was difficult to meet the target.

If they were contacting you with a specific interesting position, that would be something. If they were contacting you with a generic position they just needed to fill...that sounds like a lot of cringe.

I have only actually talked with the guy from Facebook. All he did was talk about how great his teams are, how super intelligent his engineers are, etc. While he politely listened to what I had to say, he was definitely on a mission to market his little slice of Instagram and get me interested in running the Facebook interview gauntlet.

He even suggested that it would be totally okay if I was one of those people that wanted to study for a month or two before interviewing. Study?! For a job interview?

It was a weird experience. I normally shun recruiters, but I was just curious enough to hear what this guy had to say. His LinkedIn profile didn't indicate any past involvement with recruiting, so I wanted to know why a senior manager would spend time recruiting random people -- he must spend every waking hour on these calls.

Studying a month for a job interview...well, if you need a job and have the time, it can definitely work out well in the end. The leetcode problems are kind of fun to work on once you get into them, but they are definitely of limited use.

My Facebook interview was weird also, but the people were super nice and the coding problems were fairly easy. I failed on distributed systems architecture, oddly enough, as it was an area I had no experience in for a senior hire (but I got an offer from Google the same day I was rejected from Facebook, so I didn't have much time to be sad about it).

But managers recruiting random people, just seems weird to me. If they wanted me for my specific skill set, that would be great! But if they were just looking for general hires, they must have lost a bet or something.

Don't worry, they don't last that long.

Both and I someone else I’ve spoken to have been reached out to by Amazon recruiters for different, both technical roles.

Neither of us get any attention from “good” companies whatsoever, but we both at least got a handful of messages from Amazon recruiters. They seem desperate. I didn’t bother pursuing as a little research showed they wouldn’t offer enough for me to relocate anyway. I’m not a fan of the FAANG hiring/placement and would probably not engage Amazon on that unless they could offer me a particularly enticing role, at least not now. Am I missing out on money? yeah probably.

The most interesting thing though, was how robotic the recruiter felt. The messages I got felt more like some mass automated messages than someone reaching out to speak to me about open roles.

> (Probably burned a bridge with that recruiter, but oh well)

They seem to have a lot of recruiters and I'm surprised if this even got you off their "contact every month" list.

Good, if you treat all your employees like garbage don't be surprised when not that many people with actual skill are willing to join

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