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Comment by teh_infallible | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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

You sure showed that HR drone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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