Everyone I've ever heard talk about working at Amazon has complained about it, one wonders if their reputation as an awful place to work has something to do with why hiring is hard
First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
A boot camp engineer absolutely can be as productive as any other L4 hire, Indian or not Indian. I think the L4 Indian hires in particular come better prepped for the leet style coding interviews. But in terms of quickly ramping up and becoming productive engineers, there’s absolutely nothing unique about a hire from India in many, if not majority of cases.
There are other stronger incentives for indexing on non resident hires. I could pay you market rate at $200K/year + equity that vests over four years. Or, I can bring a person from India and pay them $140K a year, reduced equity grant, and for the most part, I know that person isn’t going to quit. Especially with certain cultures that are more risk averse, they’re going to think twice, even if another employer is willing to offer sponsorship.
> First of all, I think it’s disingenuous to compare a boot camp hire with any L5 engineer, regardless of what country they’re from. A boot camp hire should be compared to a new hire/L4. Doing an L5 comparison is moving the goal post, which I assume wasn’t intended on your part.
Lets look at this from the perspective of the Director/VP, you're looking at filling headcount in your org, 25 seats. Its May, and you're behind the targets that were given to you in January. You have easy to source from talent pools (intermediate level or fresh masters degree graduate L5 H1Bs from India) and bootcamp graduates (3 months of coding experience). Your budget can pay up to 200k/person, which is much higher than the going rate for either of these profiles, so comp isn't a problem. Your boss (VP/SVP) is largely evaluating you on your ability to staff your org and complete projects. Do you fill these 25 seats using L5 Indian immigrants, or fresh bootcamp grads?
But if you’re asking me what I would do - I’d probably look for anyone who is a competent hire, without favoring H1Bs, and try to evaluate them a bit more than a leetcode style interview.
As I was saying, Amazon has entire organizations that are H1Bs. These are stable businesses that I don’t believe are really growth focused in 2022z
If we want to focus on costs, I think there are better options to deprecate and sunset entire services. There’s also significant opportunity at Amazon to trim the fat. Not necessarily firing people but moving off places that aren’t as valuable and moving them onto initiatives with a meaningful ROI.
Is it the slack? Or is it the fact that US-based companies have much more to offer this pool than they can offer the comparable group in the US. In particular, much higher pay than locally available and the prestige of working for a US firm.
It's great for ICs but terrible for leaders, particularly of small/starting startups .
I don't see why the same wouldn't be true of the labor market.
Hire them for a few weeks, and fire if necessary. It doesn't take more than a few days to weed out the fakers, and identify the diamond.
I say local because it's cruel to hire a guy from across the country just to be let go.
We all know most degrees, and designations are dubious at best.
Why not try out a bunch of local Americans whom live near the worksite, and keep the best person? (I guess some companies do that with interns, but what I'm proposing is a bit different. The prospective hires will be tested throughly at what they claim they know.
It seems like most younger job applicants would jump at the chance to work for a good company?
I'm not saying don't test them throughly before a temporary hire. Make the test difficult. Testing doesn't cost much with Zoom, and this welcoming technology.
In every job I had the best employee was mainly self-taught, and didn't have a great resume.
It seemed like they worked harder because they didn't have all the spinish behind their name, especially in this relatively new industry.
You really only want to hire people who will make it to Sr (L5) in a few years. That is the level where they are fully self sufficient and don't need constant support from someone more Sr.
The perception (that I share) is that most (not all!) boot camp grads that interview as well as new CS grads still have less long term potential to make it to L5. They have done great learning basic programming on their own. Few will go much past that (compared to CS grads).
While many companies, formally or otherwise, have some sort of probationary period, the general understanding is--unless you've really misrepresented your skills and the company probably screwed up the hiring process--you're not going to be let go after a few weeks. (Absent major organizational/financial changes.)
Even for a local job, I would be very unlikely to quit an existing job--or even put interviewing on hold--to take a job with an explicit trial period.
(Now, sure, if I had just graduated from a boot camp or other degree program and didn't have immediate alternatives, maybe.)