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I 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

• mxmel 5y ago
  After 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 ago
    Because they'd publicly sworn to SLU businesses that they were going to be dragging employees back.
• jorblumesea 5y ago
  The 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 ago
    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)
    • 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.
    • rootusrootus 5y ago
      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.
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        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.
        • rootusrootus 5y ago
          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.
          • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
            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.
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  • rzanella 5y ago
    I interviewed for Amazon Brazil once, it felt like I was being questioned by the police as if in a movie: - 4 straight hours inside a room - every hour the interviewer changed - got asked the same questions over and over again I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "- 4 straight hours inside a room - every hour the interviewer changed - got asked the same questions over and over again" It's the same in UK, at least they standardised it!
      • humanlion87 5y ago
        It's the same in North America as well. If you get scheduled during lunch time, you will get the opportunity to go outside at least :) All that is moot now because of covid.
      • spacedcowboy 5y ago
        It's the same in the US too. My last (internal transfer) job interview at Apple was 8 hours long, 8 interviews.
        • matthewfcarlson 5y ago
          I think I might have you beat with 9 hours, but that was an external interview
    • jdavis703 5y ago
      This sounds like a fairly normal interview process. How do tech interviews typically work in Brazil?
      • rzanella 5y ago
        I don't think it's a "Brazil" thing, I've been in Europe for a while now, I only mentioned where it was because maybe it's different between (Amazon) branches. The current job I'm at was like 5-6h of interviews, it was hard to pass, but it didn't feel like the interviewers were trying to play "good cop, bad cop"
  • sharkweek 5y ago
    I have shared this story on here before, but my first "real interview" out of college was at Amazon and to this day it is still one of the worst experiences of my career. The recruiter was great, super nice, got me all organized for a full-day loop. They gave me some things to prepare, so I did. Admittedly, I was under-qualified for the job as a fresh grad but was assured that'd be fine. Still, the entire team made it abundantly clear how much I was apparently wasting their time even being in the room with each of them as they took turns throughout the day talking to me. Felt so unbelievably toxic, and even though this was in the early 00s, I have never even considered working there since.
    • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      I found my Amazon interview to be surprisingly easy and friendly, except for one interviewer who gave me Alien Dictionary and got offended when I told her this was a well known leetcode problem. Oops..didn't get the job.
    • dayvid 5y ago
      Very similar experience. It was a boring and tedious interview. The behavioral part of the interview felt odd with a focus on tailoring my experiences around Amazon principles which I wasn't aware of until a few days before the interview. The employees seemed nice, though, but not really cheerful and a little standoff-ish. It honestly felt like a more traditional style of interviewing. I contrast that with another FAANG interview I had, where you had lunch on campus and they tried to leave a positive impression.
  • mrRandomGuy 5y ago
    Good, if you treat all your employees like garbage don't be surprised when not that many people with actual skill are willing to join
  • morelandjs 5y ago
    They also sort of shoot themself in the foot with their interview process. I recommended the absolute best person I know for a position he was exceedingly qualified for. Amazon would have been lucky to have him. They blitzed him with leadership questions and were “not inclined”. Incredibly dumb given their current situation. He’s not even bad on those dimensions, they just can’t get pretty off topic imo.
• cle 5y ago
  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.
  • 1270018080 5y ago
    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.
    • bluedino 5y ago
      They can hire new grads every year Getting expensive to move to Seattle though
      • whatshisface 5y ago
        Running a giant company with nothing but new grads is really asking for every project management problem ever discovered.
        • drdeadringer 5y ago
          > is really asking for every project management problem ever discovered "Oh but they can just google the solution. Welcome aboard."
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        • VRay 5y ago
          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
• bowmessage 5y ago
  Another nail in the coffin for downtown Seattle's recovery?
  • Spivak 5y ago
    It's not as doom and gloom as you might think. Without such a huge wealth gap between the people who work for the downtown industry and tertiary business you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again. People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead.
    • jdavis703 5y ago
      What is stopping local restaurants and retailers from serving downtown workers? Back when I worked in a CBD, I almost always ate lunch at local/regional businesses.
      • vineyardmike 5y ago
        > What is stopping local restaurants and retailers from serving downtown workers The lack of downtown workers going into offices. Effectively there is no one working near those restaurants.
    • kodah 5y ago
      > People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead. Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. The downtowns were always packed, and usually the artists were local, but as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is good schools, affordable home prices, stable jobs, and a decent economy.
      • munificent 5y ago
        I think you're oversimplified and over-regimenting. Cities are like organisms. A healthy city needs a large number of different kinds of organs and systems all working in concert. Some may not be entirely essential—you can live without an appendix and give up a kidney—but almost all of them need to be in place to have something someone would call a thriving city.
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this... Jeff Bezos recently stepped down as CEO. Google tells me that happened July 5th of this year, a few months ago. He founded the company. It's essentially under new management for the first time ever. I don't think you can infer much from this incident. There are too many unusual factors at play and we don't have an established track record for what the "new normal" (post Bezos) will be for Amazon.
  • picardo 5y ago
    Jeff was still with the company when the last version of the policy was announced, i.e. "3 days from office, 2 days from home." It was probably the head of HR who came up with it. Jeff accepted it like, "Oh well." You could tell he couldn't care less. But Andy Jassy looked ashen. I think his becoming CEO was the reason Amazon changed course. If Jeff had stayed, he would have let HR decide the policy for the entire company, and it would have been disastrous for AWS.
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• mathverse 5y ago
  It is amazing that some americans can be so picky to give up their many hundred thousand/per year jobs because they dont want to go to the office. I am just envious at how developed your tech scene is.
  • munificent 5y ago
    The flip side is that many feel an intense pressure to do whatever it takes to get the most lucrative job they can find because the US has much less of a social safety net than many European countries.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      Once you get beyond a certain threshold that's not really true. Or it's a story they tell themselves because they care more about money than other considerations.
      • oblio 5y ago
        Have you ever had a 1 month long holiday? Not sabbatical, just regular PTO.
        • ghaff 5y ago
          Yes, multiple times--most recently a few years ago was close to that just pre-pandemic. Another probably 4x in the 3 week to 4 week range in previous job. Pretty standard tech industry jobs. More recently have had many other multi-week holidays that were a combination of tech events and pure PTO. I realize a fair number of people can't do that or, commonly in my experience, feel that they can't do that but it's not actually impossible if that's what you prioritize.
  • dudul 5y ago
    Nothing to do with being picky. It's just about people having different priorities.
  • andreilys 5y ago
• soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  I interviewed w/ Amazon - they contacted me during the pandemic and I though what the hey, ignore the worst reviews of any company on glassdoor, let's see what they're all about. The interview was, and I hate to use this word, followed a template clearly put together by an MBA who went into middle management without any work experience, The two people to whom I talked showed the enthusiasm of a dead wet beaver while asking the questions. This was for a storage position that I've been doing for 20+ years at some of the biggest accounts all over the planet. During the 2 hours, I got asked two very basic questions. Then a bunch of weird generic scenarios - what have you done that fits this scenario and how did you handle it. About half way through the second interview I decided there's not enough money in the world, and decided to have fun with it. I tells ya what - I made up some of the most ridiculous obviously fake <and then vanilla ice walked into the meeting> stories ever. They sent me a rejection letter, just to ask me to interview for a similar position two months later. I asked their recruiter to read their employee reviews and only contact me again if they offer 7 figures. Been a year now - nothing. Maybe they got the hint.
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  • belval 5y ago
    For what it's worth, the Amazon interview experience is modelled that way for fairness. We are pretty much told that we can't deviate too much from the script because by doing so we might advantage a candidate over another. There are exception with more senior employees that tend to disregard that advice but overall it's pretty well followed. Sorry about your bad experience though.
    • tdeck 5y ago
      One option might be to add this explanation to the script so the candidate understands why the process seems so alienating.