Hacker News Reader

Comment by cle | Hacker News Reader

Many employees voted with their feet. From the outside it seems like Amazon has already suffered significant brain drain, they are likely trying to stop the bleeding at this point. In addition to their poor reputation as an employer, seems like they've backed themselves into a corner.

View on HN

As a former Amazonian, I'm giddy to see their chickens come home to roost.

With stack ranking, many engineers blacklisting Amazon, and the sheer size of their engineering department, they must be close to literally running out of engineers to hire in America, right? At least if they stuck to in person work and limited their hiring pool geographically.

If they can turn someone into a backend engineer in nine months they can hire forever even with a lot of turnover.

> Lambda School to Launch New Backend Engineering Program, Jointly Developed with Amazon

https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/lambda-school-launches-...

> Inspiration for the new backend program came from Amazon Technical Academy, which trains current, non-technical Amazon employees for software development engineering roles within the company. Amazon Technical Academy’s curriculum is based on the critical knowledge, skills, and attributes required to succeed as a software development engineer at Amazon, which Lambda’s program will cover in their entirety. Amazon Technical Academy is part of Amazon’s commitment to upskill 100,000 of its own employees by 2025.

They can hire new grads every year

Getting expensive to move to Seattle though

Running a giant company with nothing but new grads is really asking for every project management problem ever discovered.

Nah, all the new grads will be able to balance a red-black tree on a whiteboard in seconds, so they should be able to easily handle all other engineering tasks

Day 1. Searches, “what is all this docker and kubernetes stuff?”

Every problem is a solution in the waiting. Imagine a "every project management problem ever" as a service for enterprise customers of AWS. Every year there could be an almanac of recently discovered screwups. Amazon Studios would have a long run reality TV series.

Big co manager api from aws sounds fantastic! You send promo request, they send that less than stellar feedback from 360 review three years ago and your “consistently exceeds (needs more impact)” response.

It's one of the reasons I left. A team full of new grads with nobody to properly teach them. Poor designs are drafted and implemented leading to unmaintainable systems.

Let alone the project management problems, what about the "Worst Case" from yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28825009

> is really asking for every project management problem ever discovered

"Oh but they can just google the solution. Welcome aboard."

I know that they are hiring across the world for their Vancouver office.

I basically get weekly recruiting emails from the Vancouver office (I work in Vancouver) but I tell them that I’m not doing the online assessment. Surprisingly the recruiters always go silent shortly after. I am a mid level Senior engineer and Amazon can pound sand if they think I’m going to take their dumb online test without any commitment from them whatsoever.

Amazon fails to understand that it is currently a worker’s market in software engineering so they are the ones who have to convince engineers to work there.

The assessment is ridiculous time commitment anyway. You have to set aside a 2.5 hour block of uninterrupted time to do it, and from what I hear it's pretty brutal anyway.

I get pinged by Amazon recruiters almost every week right now, and once I discovered the assessment was 2.5 hours during my last job search, I had trouble finding the time and energy to fit it in amongst all the other job search requirements I had to do.

Ended up getting so far along the process with 6 other companies that I just didn't bother to take it. Still ended up with a job offer with a 60% bump in pay and what seems like a better environment than Amazon would have been, without any threats to force me back into the office or needing to relocate.

At least according to Levels, the Vancouver office pay sucks.

Lots of equivalent paying companies in Canada now, yet alone USA.

I’m in Vancouver and get multiple recruiters contacting from Amazon weekly it seems? I’ve engaged a couple times out of curiosity and their offers were always hilariously low.

Extra inappropriate when one considers the insanely mad cost of housing in Vancouver.

Back during the HQ2 circus, wasn’t Vancouver the city that tried to pitch themselves to Amazon that “we have talent like Seattle, but our average software engineer pay is much lower!”?

This has always been an advantage of setting up shop in Canada, though ideally this leans more on the "Canadian dollar is cheaper" aspect than the "we simply underpay everyone" aspect.

One of the highest three COL cities in North America!

Vancouver has some of the lowest (listed, admittedly) incomes in Canada too.

Yep can confirm, got multiple Amazon Vancouver specific recruiters in my inbox last month, and I'm in Ireland

I replied back to one of these and explained that due to their anti-union actions, and they way they treat employees, I would never be interested in working there, no matter the salary. I thankfully have never received any more of their spam.

To be fair, very few tech companies would hire someone who starts off by expressing their support for unionization. It's certainly a good "unsubscribe" tactic. For example, if you want to get rid of unwanted Linkedin outreach, just put into your title "Go unions!"

Being against anti-union tactics involving privacy and surveillance issues is not the same as being pro union.

Employers won't hold it against you for being against tactics that involve privacy and surveillance issues in general (eg: "I wouldn't want to work at a place that spies on every single Slack message I send to coworkers"), because they give you the benefit of doubt that from their bottom line perspective you will be a net-positive contributor. The minute you include the word U-N-I-O... (eg: I wouldn't want to work at a place that spies on unionization efforts), that benefit of doubt is lost, and now everyone is wondering why that topic is on your mind.

None of this is a reflection of the value of unions from the employees' perspective. But it's important to realize that unions are one of the instances where the employees' and employers' interests are not aligned. So, emailing a recruiter and mentioning unions has only one possible outcome - none.

God, America is weird.

Sounds like you both dodged a bullet.

I'm in the US and Amazon's Dublin office was trying to recruit me last year. I've turned down invitations to interview at Amazon about every other year throughout my career but this was the first time I'd been contacted by an overseas location. Their message even acknowledged that it would be a big move especially with the various travel restrictions in place at the time but they wanted me to interview anyway. Seems like they're running out of people everywhere and poaching each other's local labor markets.

That is really interesting, it does seem odd that they seem to be trying to hire cross continent all of a sudden

Same here, I have been contacted multiple times for Amazon Vancouver positions. I am from Slovenia and they told me they would be glad to help me out with the overseas move and sponsor the Visa..

This is where news and reality diverge

They stopped being able to hire seniors easily. So I quit, because working with 8 people 1 year out of college, and myself with 7 years exp, was awful.

In my opinion, "bar raisers" often impede the hiring of candidates who could be good senior level employees.

After doing 5 years of interviews, I think part of the issue is Amazon doesn’t really do onboarding, so everyone is scared of making an L6 offer, because the new hire is expected to perform equal to an L6 who has already been at Amazon for years, on day 1.

Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous amount of grilling over leadership principles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com