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Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely
- comprev 5y ago16 days per annum remote is nothing but a small token.
- QuarterReptile 5y agoAs someone with zero remote days, I strongly disagree.
- jklinger410 5y agoAs someone who works remotely, I strongly agree.
- Jochim 5y agoWhy do you disagree? I hate these kinds of half-compromises because they feel really disingenuous. The company knows a significant proportion of their engineers want to work from home permanently and rather than giving a straight yes or no they try to weasel their way out with a solution that sucks for almost everyone. People that want to WFH permanently are forced into the office, with the restrictions on commuting that entails. People that want to work in the office are frustrated that people aren't in when they want to speak to them. Hybrid solutions genuinely look like the absolute worst of both worlds from the perspective of all parties involved.
- ghaff 5y agoI don't know. It seems that somewhere between you must be butt in seat all day every day and everyone can move to a mountain town or the beach if that's what rocks their boat there probably exist reasonable flexible approaches. Some will doubtless resent that they can't depend on being able to tap an arbitrary coworker on the shoulder on a given day and others really don't want to live close enough to an office to drive in occasionally. But there seem to be intermediate approaches that make most people happier overall.
- thehappypm 5y ago16 days is kind of a lot. For me the hybrid model means I can much more easily do long weekends or weeks-in-an-interesting-place as 16 days would let me do 2 weeks and a half dozen long weekends. Compared to my old employer that's a ton.
- ashtonkem 5y ago16 days a year is 1.3 days per month; not exactly a lot. Most companies offer more than 16 days a year in vacation. Long before Covid I worked at a co-located office that allowed WFH for logistics or “heads down” days. Employees there regularly racked up 5-8 days remote a month. And it was a nice office to work from, all things considered. > Compared to my old employer that's a ton. The issue is that after the pandemic the standards have changed. Most of us have spent 1-1.5 years remote now; for those that want to work remote 16 days is now badly substandard. Personally it’s my belief that if a company is going to remain in the office and offer flexibility, the minimum seems to be 1-2x a week.
- Forge36 5y agoMore than my 2
- confidantlake 5y agoDoes everyone else get multiple recruitment emails a week from Amazon? I get more recruitment emails from them than all other companies combined. Even when I suspended my linkedin I am still getting emails.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoYup, ever since I bombed one of the take-home coding interviews they give, I've gotten more recruiters from them.
- my_usernam3 5y agoYYYESSSSS, I feel like I'm on multiple recruitment DB and they have no communication. Hell I've gotten the same EXACT email from two recruiters the same day.
- noitsnot 5y agoI applied years back and now get them once in a while when they decided to go full WFM maybe 6 months back. They make the email seem like a manager is interested in your skillset for a specific role, etc but it is clearly an automated template.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adultSwim 5y agoWhich of the big tech companies currently have strong WFH policies?
- KallDrexx 5y agoFrom the blog post > At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice. We also know that many people have found the ability to work remotely from a different location for a few weeks at a time inspiring and reenergizing. We want to support this flexibility and will continue to offer those corporate employees, who can work effectively away from the office, the option to work up to four weeks per year fully remote from any location within your country of employment.
- taurath 5y agoReally curious why only within country? Security reasons? Also why 4 weeks? Just to be available for meetings? I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment.
- jandrewrogers 5y agoTax, visa, and regulatory reasons. Other jurisdictions will impute residency for all legal purposes if you spend too much time there or work from there. They are trying to avoid myriad very messy legal edge cases.
- vineyardmike 5y ago> I find it funny that this is the American version of a nice holiday - go pay money to rent an Airbnb so you can work in a different environment. It's not. BUT its a nice way to get a change of scenery without burning holiday time.
- vineyardmike 5y agoMaybe you live in a cold climate and want to spend winter somewhere warm, but still work.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoOr support your kid in that overseas one month study program. There are a lot of interesting things you can do here with flexible working arrangements.
- tra3 5y agoI spoke to an Amazon recruiter the other day; the expectation that he shared was that everyone is still expected in the office in the new year.
- vineyardmike 5y agoThey changed the policy today. The recruiter probably didn't know.
- spike021 5y agoThis announcement was literally today, and the announcement specifically says people are probably only just learning about it today...
- sharkweek 5y agoI live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works at Amazon. The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market. It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback from employees was quite startling in how much of a problem their retention would be with such a hard rule.
- mxmel 5y agoAfter reading the article it’s not clear why this is a change to such a publicly stated policy. The only thing that has changed is that the directors have discretion to choose how many days in the office will be required for teams. The headline is extremely misleading.
- kixiQu 5y agoBecause they'd publicly sworn to SLU businesses that they were going to be dragging employees back.
- jorblumesea 5y agoThe 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.
- teh_infallible 5y agoA 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)
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago> (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.
- docflabby 5y agoOne of the things that's been missed is that remote working has been a big part of counteracting the massive inflation that's been caused by covid. Making people go into the office is a effectively a pay cut with all the price increases. Start forcing people in and salary expectations will rise accordingly.. .
- 01100011 5y agoSomewhat related: I wonder how many companies are seeing profit increase because of reduced costs associated with on-site workers? I wonder if the increase in costs as folks return to the office is being factored in their stock prices?
- cle 5y agoConversely in Amazon's case, they finished building multiple huge buildings in downtown Seattle right before COVID-19, which have been mostly empty since March 2020.
- kimbernator 5y agoAs much as it may frustrate them not to use the buildings, it is still strictly costing them less given the lower maintenance and utility costs.
- superflit2 5y agoThey can rent it free to BLM and other social causes? It is better than giving money to "something" they would be providing real stuff and places.
- jdavis703 5y agoThose maintenance and utility costs are then passed on to the employee and reduce the take home pay, which is frustrating to workers. There’s also more uncompensated time spent on duties a janitor, office manager or IT person would perform, like unloading the dishwasher, preparing coffee or being on the phone with an ISP during an internet outage.
- roland35 5y agoI am noticing a lot of the big tech companies are becoming more flexible about remote work, but they are still far away from a true remote friendly option for me at least. It seems the expectation is that they want people to be available to come to the office on demand every once in a while, so you need to be living within at least a 1-2 hour drive from the office. While that is certainly an improvement, it isn't true remote. If there are any big tech companies who only expect travel to the office a few times a year I would love to hear about them!
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoA colleague told me that NTT, with a staff of 320,000, is now 100% permanently remote.
- kimbernator 5y agoAs someone working for a company I like while living in a place that I'd rather not, there's no more annoying thing for me to dwell on than the fact that the only thing standing between me and moving is the fact that my employer expects me to be in the office 2 days/month.
- jedberg 5y ago2 days a month seems like it could be handled pretty well with an airplane? Like even if the commute were six hours and you had to stay in a hotel, that doesn't seem awful twice a month if the other 28 days you get to live somewhere that makes you happy.
- tdeck 5y agoDropbox has gone "remote first" and sold off some of their offices, so I assume that means you don't need to live near one. Perhaps folks who work there can correct me.
- thehappypm 5y ago1-2 hours away from a major city is actually kind of a sweet spot, IMO. Big cities have things like major hospitals and major employers, they have airports, they have baseball stadiums. They've also got social networks -- it's much easier to make friends in a place with 100,000 people your age than 50. Now, escaping to the undeveloped areas is cheap, and many of them have access to things like beautiful mountains or beaches that are either far away from or too crowded near big cities. However, rural areas generally have poor infrastructure that big cities have, and often have extremely bad schools. Being 1-2 hours away from a big city? That's kind of a sweet spot. You're still close enough to the city for culture and hospitals and the airport. But you're on a big plot of land, and since you're still in a metro, you've probably got reasonably good infrastructure and schools. The whole "move to the mountains" thing that so many people talk about assumes you don't care about good schools, airports, hospitals, etc.
- cletus 5y agoDoes Amazon still insist on that draconian vesting schedule? They always had 5/15/40/40% for years 1/2/3/4. I ask because I’m curious how far employee pressure goes as that’s so much worse than other FAANG companies.
- hbosch 5y agoIn my experience, they offset the first 2 years of vesting with cash. So all 4 of my first years were equivalent with RSUs/Cash with the first 2 years cash heavy, and the final 2 years RSU only.
- ashtonkem 5y agoThere must be a bonus that's not properly represented on levels.fyi, because Amazon's cash compensation is pretty poor compared even to some non-FAANG companies.
- nkingsy 5y agoOff-topic, but is levels.fyi... on the level? I ask because I'm hearing about all sorts of 350k-500k offers for senior engineers, but they're not showing up there. My current salary seems right about "in band" on there, but people in my network who I talk to seem to think I'm way underpaid.
- loeg 5y ago350-500k annual comp levels exist (that’s E5-E6 at Facebook, for example). There are a lot of E5s, but fewer E6s. Your friends might also be including the full four-year grant in a single number, which creates a sort of nonsense figure? Another thing that increases comp is if the stock rises a lot after grant — but that would not show up in offers. Levels.fyi is as legit as any other source, as far as I know.
- spacedcowboy 5y agoI'm an ICT5 at Apple, pushing for ICT6 (but it won't be next year, ICT6 is more about who you know than what you know), and just had my perf review. This year I got total comp (salary, bonus, RSUs) of just over 520k, which is consistent with last year and the year before.
- thereare5lights 5y ago> “We’re intentionally not prescribing how many days or which days — this is for Directors to determine with their senior leaders and teams.” This reminds me of what George said to Jerry in The Deal on Seinfeld: > Jerry: Spending the night. Optional. > George: No, you see? You got greedy. Making the policy discretionary will ultimately make it like an "unlimited vacation" policy where it actually doesn't happen but the company gets to say that it's their policy.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoI don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee. You have to consider there is a million employees and it most likely depends on department, location, job. I personally know a couple handful Amazon employees who are all most happy and treated well. Some of them have previously been at google and they say Amazon is the better employer period. In some jurisdictions they pay clear above industry standard. All companies have good and bad aspects, some feel better in a startup , some feel better in a corporate giant.
- wil421 5y agoGoogle doesn’t have a massive distribution network. If you take out the distribution and warehouse has jobs there are still many complaints like the hire to fire headcount. Not to mention one must ask themselves do they want to work for a company that doesn’t give lower employees bathroom breaks or fires people based on AI feedback? How long until they use AI feedback to fire SWEs?
- Someone1234 5y ago> I don't know why people say Amazon has a bad reputation as an employee. Note this isn't actually a question. You then go on to preemptively defend Amazon's reputation with: - "depends on department, location, job." - "I know a couple of employees who are happy." - They pay really well. - "All companies have good and bad aspects" What I find striking about this defense is that it is so generic, it could apply to any and every company (aside from maybe pay). You obviously have no interest in learning why Amazon's reputation is negative, and frankly are trying to shut down discussion of it.
- zeko1195 5y agoYeah, I have the same experience. I work on a major aws team and we have a lot of focus on work life balance. Oncall sucks for sure but otherwise it's fine. My girlfriend at Google has a much worse work life balance. It depends on what team you're on.
- morelandjs 5y agoAnecdotal sure, but I joined earlier this year and am absolutely loving it so far. Fantastic pay, great manager, interesting impactful work, and more than enough flexibility on the personal side. I specifically chose a team based on my perception of the manager, and that decision has paid off so far. Amazon is a huge company and experiences can vary dramatically. Imagine if 20 public state schools, 50,000 students each, formed a mega university and someone started describing it in terms of a singular culture. Ridiculous right? I fully expect my experience is different than others and I don’t expect it to generalize to Amazon as a whole. It’s nice to hear first hand accounts from former employees (positive and negative), but I could do without the people parroting what they read online.
- jedberg 5y ago> as long as they are able to commute to the office when necessary This is they key right here. Basically you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle or Palo Alto, or even less depending on your patience. Still better than five days a week in the office though!
- aantix 5y agoCould the commute be via a plane?
- WalterBright 5y ago> you still have to live within a few hours drive of Seattle That encompasses the entire state of Washington, and includes a good chunk of Oregon. Not a burden. P.S. Friends of mine have lived in Seattle and commuted to eastern Washington some decades ago. It's entirely workable.
- asdff 5y agoI'd be looking hard at housing along regional rail lines. If the commute is going to be an hour or more, I'd much rather do that occasional trek in a commuter train with wifi and my laptop than in a car when I'm still half asleep in the morning. Eventually with cal HSR you will have the choice of living like a 23 year old in a tiny bay area apartment or living like an emperor in fresno or bakersfield for as much money.
- jackson1442 5y agoOr Austin, Denver, DC, etc. There are a lot of Amazon offices and from what I’ve heard this has always been expected of their fully-remote employees.
- jgalt212 5y agoThe labor market is super tight, so whatever labor wants, labor gets. I suspect this will turn on a dime, when the labor market softens. The cynic in me thinks big tech wants to promote WFH forever, as they have benefited stupendously from the war-time economy and they are in no rush back to normalcy.
- aantix 5y agoIs $600K TC possible as a remote SDE III or Principal SDE?
- ozzythecat 5y agoAs Principal, yes. As an SDE 3? Maybe at the 99.999999 percentile if you got super lucky with stock vests given recent stock appreciation. But otherwise, no. That’s not SDE 3 comp.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- atlgator 5y agoAre they still forcing recruits to travel to Seattle for a loop interview or have they gone virtual? I interviewed a few years ago and the cross-country travel was tiresome. Also, my room at the Inn at the WAC smelled like mold. Not an experience I care to repeat.
- wizwit999 5y agoBeen fully virtual since covid.
- kodah 5y agoMy company said they'd let people work remotely, but based on my observations from friends on other teams and my own, this is more of a last resort. If you're going to quit and are not a lead engineer, then they'll offer you remote. If they can't fill a position in a timely manner, then they'll start looking remote. My takeaway is that maybe the C-Suite has been convinced, but now you need to convince line-managers and the like.
- dudul 5y agoIt reminds me of the "will consider remote for strong candidates" that you can see on job postings. There aren't many bigger red flags for me for how the company treats remote employees.
- BSOhealth 5y agoI’m on the opposite side of many folks responding. After spending the quarantine at home through the pandemic, I’m now looking at HCOL cities which headquarter big tech or startups (SF, NYC, Seattle, Austin). I’d love to spend time in a posh office again, meeting new people, getting drinks after work. Now, I have everything I need in one room: computer, weights, instruments, art supplies, dog, etc. TBH, I’m crossing my fingers employers will prioritize folks willing to work in the office to compensate for my lack of pedigree in other hiring/HR attention areas.
- AdrianB1 5y agoI think it depends on 2 important factors: age and the team. At early age you like to go out for drinks, later you may want to go home and rest or read or take a bicycle ride or spend time with the family. Also it depends a lot on the team you are in: I worked with teams where we spent a lot of time together outside business hours and I was in teams where I avoided even seeing most people, by no means spending any time together.
- rubyist5eva 5y agoAll that stuff sounds great until you have kids, then you want to find ways to be home as much as possible. At least, that was my experience. I was lucky - I bought a house in the suburbs of my hometown and moved back. Told my company I was moving out of Toronto during the second lockdown last year, they didn't even question it. Now my biggest distraction is my 2yo running in because he doesn't understand that dad works, yet. Sometimes he might be having a tantrum in the kitchen/living room and it makes it a bit difficult to concentrate...nowhere near as bad as the constant barrage of irrelevant noise from an open office. I will never commute again.
- dbish 5y agoCities are nice even with WFH to me. I don't care that much about the office, though it is easier to form bonds in person imho. I do care about having an active social life which is part of why I live in a city, and I'm very glad people are going out again generally and things are open with events happening (Seattle is where I'm at).
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- zz865 5y agoIs Amazon really such a bad employer? I've just started process with them now. I dont want to work for Facebook, there is no local Netflix and I'm probably not good enough for Google - Amazon is the only FANG company I'm realistically going to get.
- jkingsbery 5y agoI am currently a software engineer at Amazon. I obviously can't speak to other people's experiences at Amazon. And having never worked at any other big tech company, I'm not in a place to compare to them. But my own experiences at Amazon have been pretty good. I've been quite happy with my compensation and work life balance, which all have improved since my previous roles mostly at start-ups. There have been some stressful crunch times (Q4 tends to be stressful, between Thanksgiving-Christmas peak on the Retail side and Re:invent on the AWS side), but not more stressful from other big milestones at previous companies. I have been lucky, in that I had worked with my first team's director at a previous company and so I knew he was a good boss, and I had known the manager for my second team prior to joining. It's important as part of the interview process (at Amazon, or anywhere else) to treat the interview as a two-way process, as you're vetting the company, the team, and your boss as much as they're vetting you, and if you don't get all your questions answered as part of the interview (interviewers are supposed to save time for you to ask questions!), feel free to relay them to your recruiter.
- ferdowsi 5y agoMaybe you should back up and ask why you are limiting your search to those four/five companies?
- mabbo 5y agoI quit Amazon 3 weeks ago after nearly a decade. Work from home was one of the biggest reasons. In my view, the personality traits that are conducive to promotion up the Amazon leadership ladder are strongly aligned with loving work-from-office. Most people L10 and higher not only don't understand the desire for permanent work from home, I think maybe they cannot understand it. It's just too foreign to many of them. The first announcement was "We can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either". Senior engineers started quitting. Then it was "Okay, okay, you can work from home 2-3 days per week, but only with your L10's approval". The exodus continued. Now it's "Fine, you can work from home with your L8's approval, but you better be ready to show up on 24 hour notice if we say so!". The biggest benefit of work from home is not needing to commute, and lower cost of living by leaving the HCOL cities. They don't get it. Other companies do. And anyone who has spent 5 or more years working for Amazon is well-trained enough to get a better paying job with a company that understands the cultural shift that just happened to the developer world. Edit: I know not all developers are anti-office. But for those of us who are, working for people who don't understand us, who make policies based on what works best for them, is a problem.
- anonporridge 5y agoIt's the circle of life. Success leads to ossification, which creates opportunity for new life to exploit untapped potential.
- esond 5y agoI was just last week in an interview for a role at Amazon and was told that -- while they would entertain a permanent remote arrangement for the right candidate -- it was the interviewer's honest opinion that being fully remote would hurt my chances to advance in the organization. I figured, well, at least he was honest with me.
- smashem 5y agoFunny, I left Amazon two weeks ago because WFH burned me out. I'm currently taking a sabbatical. * Zoom fatigue is real. * I find it much harder to collaborate with peers. * I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my name on it. It's a very isolated feeling. * I find it even more Groundhog Day. To wake up from bed, walk a few steps to my desk, and start plugging away. Yeah, commuting can suck, but at least there's more stimulation and "life" to it. * Deadlines, at least from my perspective, got even more ridiculous since WFH started.
- georgeburdell 5y agoSince they're having problems with retention, I wonder if they'll also get rid of that 6 month rejection cooldown? I had an Amazon recruiter cold e-mail me 2 months ago and me, being off the market for 8 years, had no idea software engineering interviewing was its own skillset, and subsequently bombed the online assessment. 2 months later, I've "grinded Leetcode" and passed a few phone interviews, but I'd be interested in circling back to Amazon. I will probably find another job before that 6 month cooldown is up, so as it is, Amazon basically is missing out on someone who is otherwise qualified just because they reached out to me first.
- Chamix 5y agoIt's a very little known fact that Amazon recently lowered the internal cooldown to 3 months.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoI'd recommend scanning all the "leaks" publicized about 4 months ago from internal Amazon HR policies. They're real, and why I was like eff this, and quit. It is plausible they're very varied across divisions and teams.
- 8note 5y agoAll I saw was "return to office is going to be pushed out by another 4 months, every 4 months for the foreseeable future"
- Izikiel43 5y agoYou could try again, worst case scenario you get a no, which is more or less your status now.
- ashtonkem 5y agoHonestly, given how bad Amazon’s reputation is I’d recommend just searching elsewhere. They were bleeding personnel before RTO became an issue.
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- NotAnOtter 5y agoAs someone on the inside: the title is mostly BS. They are pushing the decision from the L10+ level to the L7/L8 level. But we all know behind the scenes, L7/L8 will be pushed to behave a certain way. If it was truly their choice, those with a strict policy would bleed engineers to the directors with more lax policies, Amazon would not accidentally create a free market within their own company. This is a deflection of blame, and nothing else.
- sfotm 5y agoAs someone also on the inside: a generous take might be that this could allow them to accommodate more people. If you hate commuting into the office and your current team is going to make you do so, you can transfer teams if there's not a hidden directive to just say no across the board. If you dislike working from home, as I do, and your current team isn't going to encourage attendance 3+ days a week, you again have the chance to transfer. Amazon keeps employees this way, and employees get their ideal balance. It seems better than the top-down one-size-fits-all approach if there aren't hidden instructions being passed down management chains. There's not as large a problem of a "preferred class" of workers if your director and everyone below them is on the same WFH/in-office balance.
- strgcmc 5y agoI'm surprised you would say this, because creating internal "free markets" to encourage competition across teams is not an uncommon pattern within Amazon. I could name numerous examples of multiple teams competing either implicitly or explicitly with each other, seeing who's designs or systems would win, seeing which teams would be more successful at attracting talent. I do agree about this being mostly a punting of the responsibility for deciding from L10 to L8. But I think competition is not a bug, it's a feature.
- 8note 5y agoIdk if im just at a good org, but I expect my whole management chain doesn't care, and will let my team decide what works well for us. Also, amazon definitely makes free markets within the company. When I accepted the offer, multiple teams pitched on which team to join. Plus, OPs is different by team, as are opportunities to work on promotion worthy stuff (well, at least once you get to sde3) Standard disclaimer: opinions are my own
- subsubzero 5y agoOne of the changes from the covid-19 pandemic and pandemic's since history began is social changes that happen once the pandemic recedes. The fact that a job that can be done almost anywhere(within a certain timezone at the least) and is forced to be done at one of the most expensive real estate markets in the World(sfbay area, Seattle, NYC as well) always seemed crazy to me, and alot of others are starting to see it as well. I expect google, apple and even the biggest stalwarts of working from the office to finally relent and allow work from home permanently. They can't put that genie back into the bottle even if they tried. Companies in tech want to be serious about climate change, then don't force your workers to commute hours to your office, its bad for the environment, bad for the workers mental and physical health, and horrible for the areas these companies cluster in by driving real estate prices to the moon and contributing greatly to homelessness and over-congestion.
- kcplate 5y agoPersonally I find it pretty damed shameful to see the tone deafness as I read comments from a bunch of self-important Amazon developers complaining about quitting due to a possible RTO when Amazon’s delivery drivers feel the need to have to piss in bottles to meet their work obligations. Talk about same planet different worlds, sheesh.
- f8o 5y agoIn São Paulo big names became remote friendly, smaller ones followed and, given the high demand for IT workers, non remote software engineering jobs became a joke. Note: Crowded and not a commute friendly city for most people.
- newsorpigal 5y agoAmazon employee here: this title is very generous. In fact this could easily go the other way because they removed the 2-day-at-home guarantee. Now it's up to your L8. He can force his entire org back to the office if he wants to. If we're told to go back, then I'm looking for an internal transfer to an org with a more reasonable director or even a new job. WFH has been a huge boon to my quality of life.
- throwawayam 5y agoI interviewed at amazon,India last year for their Arora DB team. It was one of the worst experience I ever had interviewing at any company. I was asked to come to their office on a week-end, the HR calls me a day before to remind me that I have to be there at sharp 8:30 AM. I was living bit far from their office, but I made sure that I was there at their office well ahead of time. Turns out there are 50 odd candidates waiting there. They had never informed me that it was a mass interview. They then asked us to assemble in a room and told that interviews will start soon. Turns out the people who were supposed to interview us were flown down from their HQ and they were running late. So, to our frustration, they arrived 4 hours later. They provided us some average lunch and interviews started in the afternoon. The initial interviewers were fine, but in the later rounds(in late evening) I felt that the interviewers did not seem interested. In the last interview, the interviewer( I guess he was one of the directors), was not even making eye contact. He asked me a data structure question and asked me solve it on the white board, but then he got busy with his laptop. My solution was not very efficient one, but there was no hint or discussion on how to make it better and he then suddenly started talking about how great Amazon is as a place to work for! After few days, they arranged for next set of interviews and the HR mailed me bunch links I had to study. Then I got a call from one their senior managers to inform me that there will be lot of leadership principles questions and they are very serious on them and I have prepare for them thoroughly! They took another month to complete like next 5 rounds and at the end the HR calls me and say that I had to take one interview again as one of the the directors had lost the feed back on me!. I said no, then he comes back and says that they have found the feedback. They took another few days and sent me a rejection letter. I wasn’t expecting an offer from them as I did sort of average in the interview, but the whole experience made me think how unprofessional they were!.
- Fargren 5y ago> He asked me a data structure question and asked me solve it on the white board, but then he got busy with his laptop. It's bad that he didn't tell you this, but it's expected of an amazon interviewer to write a more or less accurate transcript of the interview. Almost certainly what the interviewer was doing on his laptop was writing down your work.
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- pachico 5y agoI live in Barcelona, where public transportation is quite good and it doesn't take me more than 20 minute to get to the office. Still, I prefer to work remotely. Commuting in certain places makes working remotely a necessity but this is not the only reason for not having to go to the office. There is a lot of friction about this, mostly I suspect is because higher management became such before working remotely was an option.
- nivenkos 5y agoWhen I worked at Amazon we were already working remotely... almost everyone in that org in fact, including management.
- jatins 5y agoI feel low trust environments like Amazon would actually make working from home a misery. While I was there (more than half a decade back), my manager had a week where they were working remotely. And the first thing they'd do every morning in that week was call everyone on the team _individually_ to get updates. Not a team standup, but individual calls. And they were honestly "a good manager" by Amazon standards. There was also very little writing culture back then which is very important to have thoughtful conversations in remote setting.