This is pretty fail on Amazon's part. Does anybody have a contact inside Amazon that can help this guy get his job?
Having said that, I do think not getting back to him at all (even if that was with an explicit rejection) is a complete fail.
Based on anecdotal data, it seems to be increasingly common for modern companies (though I usually hear about it on companies that are much smaller than Amazon, which should have its HR shit together) to just go completely incommunicado with someone once the decision has been made to not move forward. Doing this is completely unprofessional (no matter how big or small your company is), especially in the face of explicit queries about the status from the person who was interviewed, and I applaud the guy for naming and shaming Amazon on that aspect of it.
Fix your shit, Amazon HR/hiring managers. Don't be jerks.
YMMV. But I try to remember the companies who drop you into /dev/null and avoid dealing with them again, either as applicant or with their products.
However, not replying to any email inquiries does sound terrible.
> The last interview was with the lead recruiter from Vancouver (apparently he flew from Vancouver to Seattle to interview me, a candidate that was in Vancouver and had to fly to Seattle for the interviews…).
The recruiter finds talent, schedules the interview and hassles AWS employees to interview the applicant. The applicant interviews with 6-7 people (like I did), that consists usually of your direct manager, a bar raiser (an article about this was just posted here the other day), and other peers.
Only after your interview day is over, and everyone has a chance to put your review info into MRT does everyone meet again and discuss if you are a valid candidate or not.
The recruiter has no say in this matter since they have no idea how your answer related to distributed systems lock coordination and Big O(n) notation work. It sounds like this person jumped the gun.
Amazon HR should at least get back to you with a "sorry we've decided on someone else", or "we'd love to work with you" letter either way.
As Portuguese I am more than used to this. You never ever get a reply back if you don't make it.
Companies only contact you again if you got the job.
I was astonished when I moved to Switzerland and later Germany, that companies would get back to me to say 'no' and send me back the application documents I had sent.
It's someone very high up in the Amazon food chain, responsible for failing to create a hiring process that emphasizes the need to treat candidates respectfully at all stages of the process.
And that means, for every candidate, having one person take ownership of the communication, start to finish (regardless of the outcome). You now -- "be respectful, be kind. And always, always close the loop."
It's like, really, really simple. But somehow Amazon and so many other companies seem incapable of wrapping their organizational heads around it.