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Tell HN: Recruiters are lying about remote positions

• cosmiccatnap 5y ago
  You will notice this thread is being pushed off the front page despite having an absurd amount of comments...
• z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
  So lying liars, lying? All of these corporate companies are pure grifters. If they don't allow remote, don't work there. They have no legitimate reason for office work except authoritarian control measures.
• GoodJokes 5y ago
• chociej 5y ago
  IANAL but this sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit against the recruiter?
• bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  This is just another thing in a long line of scrupulous things that recruiters do. If bad actors will edit your resume before sending it in then lying about the remote nature of a job is just another part of that. Which FAANG? Name and shame.
  • heeton 5y ago
    And, which recruiter?
  • nineplay 5y ago
    I'm still holding on to a slight hope that the recruiter will find a hiring manager willing to override the committee and all of my time and effort will not have been wasted. They said they'd keep looking but they were probably just trying to get me off the phone. I'll put it this way. One FAANG I wouldn't work at under any circumstances. One FAANG has been very clear that they want employees on site. One FAANG has a recruiting proc where you are hired once you pass the interviews, you can figure out your team later. One FAANG doesn't really fit in the FAANG acronym.
    • germinalphrase 5y ago
      Why so indirect?
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      > One FAANG I wouldn't work at under any circumstances. Uh Amazon? I hope it's Amazon, not Facebook. > One FAANG has been very clear that they want employees on site. Both Netflix and Apple. > One FAANG has a recruiting proc where you are hired once you pass the interviews, you can figure out your team later. Google? > One FAANG doesn't really fit in the FAANG acronym. Amazon? Apple? Facebook because they've changed their name to Meta?
      • seabrookmx 5y ago
        I'd guess Microsoft.
      • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        > > One FAANG has a recruiting proc where you are hired once you pass the interviews, you can figure out your team later. Google? That's definitely Facebook.
• bcj7393nsk 5y ago
  Don’t worry, remote WFH is ending. Soon, this situation will never happen.
  • geocrasher 5y ago
    Hardly. I work at a startup that doesn't even have an office. We are distributed around the world, and everyone, CEO included, is WFH. Perhaps your comment was sarcastic, but that doesn't make it any less incorrect.
    • wiredfool 5y ago
      Not a startup, but my (small) company is absolutely hiring remotely, preferring EU timezones. We have an office, but it's generally unused. We've got people in at least 4 countries now, maybe 5 by next week. They were supportive when I took a ~year~8 months with the family to drive/airbnb around europe precovid.
    • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      I have the same deal here. Pre-COVID, they had a WeWork office, but some employees were remote around the USA. Once COVID hit, they left the WeWork and became fully remote. We don't have an office, and now have people from all over the world. HR and the C-suite make a big point of advertising both internally and externally that we are a 100% remote company. They've also arranged full-company gatherings so we can meet each other and put an actual person behind the face we see in Zoom. A couple months ago, it was in Chamonix, France.
  • danesparza 5y ago
    You realize WFH was a thing before the pandemic, right?
  • com2kid 5y ago
    My company more than doubled its workforce during COVID and we don't plan on leasing any more office space. Not to mention we hired people all around the country, so most of them don't have a place to come in to.
  • 5y ago
• geocrasher 5y ago
  I once got hired for a remote position at a company in TX (I'm in WA). I was to fly into TX on Sunday to start 2 weeks of training on Monday, and on Friday evening I got an email saying "Sorry, we changed our mind about hiring remotely." That really sucked. I'm guess I am just glad they didn't do it a week into training.
• version_five 5y ago
  I'm curious, what level was the position? The process was months long and went to a hiring committee? That sounds like a what you'd have for a faculty position or something, was this a research position?
  • debatem1 5y ago
    Sounds like the standard google process to me.
  • nineplay 5y ago
    SWE. Some of the time I needed so I could answer leet questions and system design questions on the fly. A lot of time was spent scheduling, particularly around the holidays. There were some 'bonus' rounds of interviews I took because they f'd up.
    • version_five 5y ago
      Thank you. I had someone reach out to me from one of those companies recently and was considering going through the process (or trying to). I had no idea it was this long.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    nah that just sounds like google
• jdhn 5y ago
  You definitely need to name the company that did this.
  • version_five 5y ago
    Why? This isn't Twitter, piling on a company doesn't add much to the discussion, it just lets people focus their outrage better
    • 015a 5y ago
      I'm not seeing why that would be a problem.
      • hitpointdrew 5y ago
        In what context is focusing ones outrage at all useful, ever? This is just reinforcing destruction, promoting group identity, enabling a mob mentality, and sometimes promotes violence. Honest critique is one thing, mob mentality outrage is not an honest critique.
        • aaomidi 5y ago
          The company is doing what would be illegal in most places, and definitely immoral here. They deserve the outrage and the outrage is the only thing that's gonna fix this. Also to answer your question. Literally every single positive change in this country has come out of focused outrage. Civil rights movement LGBT rights Women's rights The basic amount of worker and consumer rights.
          • version_five 5y ago
            So we've escalated from "top paying tech company decided I can't work remote" to the civil rights movement... this thread is an interesting study in internet discourse
        • artificialLimbs 5y ago
• 88913527 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I'll be sure to get it in writing if I find myself in the job market.
  • nineplay 5y ago
    If I could do it again, I'd probably still go through the interviews but I'd have spent little if any time on prep. If they asked the knapsack problem and I couldn't code up a solution in 40 minutes, oh well - I tried.
    • nprateem 5y ago
      And if you could do it the time after that you'd probably make it the first thing you say when you speak to anyone from the actual company
• throw_m239339 5y ago
  Recruiters are lying about positions all the time at first place.
• behohippy 5y ago
  That's brutal. We're on the other side of it right now trying to get exec and HR to actually commit to something so we can hire remote. We had multiple good people in the pipeline who we had to pass on, because they won't actually say if they'll demand these people move to Toronto (one of the worst housing markets in the world) as soon as they sign the papers. It's like we're supposed to surprise them with that?
  • motohagiography 5y ago
    Rents and prices in Ontario are absurd and unless a company is offering remote - or is a satellite dev shop for a US company taking advantage of currency and R&D tax credits and can pay US salaries, they just aren't going to be able to be competitive for talent. If your product market is global like any product has to be right now, Toronto is more of a constraint than a strategy. I'd be skeptical of how much leverage that HR approach has for tech staff right now.
    • behohippy 5y ago
      They don't have any. We're bleeding talent and destroying our pipeline for more. We don't pay well to begin with, so asking people to relocate for a worse quality of life is just ... mind boggling.
  • chaostheory 5y ago
    That’s rough. The housing market there is like the SF Bay Area’s housing market, but with extremely abysmal pay. I’m surprised you guys didn’t go remote sooner.
• supertofu 5y ago
  Maybe we should get a list going of scummy recruiters.
  • danesparza 5y ago
    I would be on board with this. I would even pay a small fee to have access to this list.
    • irvingprime 5y ago
      It would be too huge.
  • lawwantsin17 5y ago
    It would be a whitelist more than a blacklist, frankly.
  • ravenstine 5y ago
    A whitelist (or whatever the correct term for that is now) would be more effective. Frankly, I'd say the vast majority of recruiters are bad. They are worse than a used car salesperson, and I will never deal with any of them again besides the occasional one that's actually working directly for the employer, as opposed to third-party recruiters from large recruiting firms. A few years ago, I was working on some software that would find quality job listings and auto-apply for them (in theory; I don't believe I finished the form-filling part). Part of that filtering involved removing any listings from third-party recruiting firms. Blocking on the person-level really wasn't practical. While it worked somewhat, it seems that more of these firms appear and change names every year. It would always be imperfect unless someone was constantly monitoring the countless number of recruiting firms. My best experiences were with small-time recruiters who worked for themselves. I'd much rather identify who these recruiters are and then ignore all the other ones by default.
  • m3047 5y ago
    Maybe we should gamify it. Actually I was thinking of places with the same posting for months or years. My inspiration was remembering the amusement that FuckedCompany provided... and it was surprisingly accurate.
• jrd259 5y ago
  My Amazon team (based out of Toronto) is hiring remotely. I know the hiring manager won't change their mind because I am the manager.
  • aaomidi 5y ago
    Yeah but you're also amazon
    • cheeze 5y ago
      And?
      • jhatemyjob 5y ago
        Amazon trains its employees to be back stabbers. I'm at the point where if I see a long stint Amazon on your resume, I count that as a point against you, because if we work together, you're probably gonna try to give me the runaround and/or fuck me over.
        • jrd259 5y ago
          I doubt anything I say could convince you otherwise, but I've had no experience at all in 8 years at being "stabbed" in the back. Nor have I any way to prove I am not an evil one. Amazon is large, you may be judging on a small sample size.
          • AtlasBarfed 5y ago
            By definition, your experience is a small sample size. I won't say my sample size (about 5 people who worked there and 10 people that have interviewed) is massive either, but mine is 100% negative. Yes, all IT people, so I'm not even dealing with the poor line workers. Their turnover numbers IMO validate the negative views of Amazon. The ass-covering and lying during their downtimes over holiday also show a degrading culture. Their UIs also show a poorly managed IT staff. I can understand warts, but why not gradual improvement? The biggest sign was their awful redesign of the console, which was demonstrably worse and has not improved. "You're not supposed to use the UI in AWS" Well OK, their APIs are not well documented. When you have a command with literally 100 options, you need a LOT of examples. The documentation of their error codes is basically "stackoverflow", and change over releases with no warning. And this is for their most used services, who knows what the various other crap is like. And they only show examples of invocations, they almost never show the OUTPUT format. This is something that should be actively improved for the leading cloud provided that will probably hit 100 billion in revenue in 2022. You can't invest .0001% of your revenue to better documentation and tooling? Like that HASN'T cost you 1000x that in services and revenue already with people unable to get their prototypes off the ground or fix problems to scale more quickly? They show management, they show low worker motivation, their marketing and press is so bad that Walmart seems like a good corporate citizen in comparison. All of their policies can be glossed over with growth. Unfortunately, AWS isn't a startup company anymore, it is a utility, an important core component in the foundation of the internet. Their culture and hiring and communication show that their growth HR policies are going to backfire in the coming decades as all their systems are likely on the their third or fourth "generation" of people being responsible for it. Consider getting a software job at Amazon: likely you're getting shunted onto some "legacy" (you know, written 4 years ago, 2 employee generations ago) and are expected to know a big complicated messy codebase with no docummentation and no organizational memory, and then you get saddled with ridiculous expectations. You either get to greenfield redevelop it (if you have a nice manager) which is risky, or you are utterly fucked from an advancement perspective and you are just meat to chew.
• lbriner 5y ago
  So what you mean is, "A Recruiter lied about A position"?
  • bell-cot 5y ago
    This +10 (if I could). "Remote" from a recruiter is no different from "35% annual raises", "perfect match for your skill set", "insta-vesting stock options", or anything else a recruiter tells you.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I see a few possibilities: 1) Recruiter was misinformed and/or policies changed while you were interviewing. A lot of companies, including some of the big names, have been changing their remote policies in 2022. They're also playing off each other and the hiring market, so the situation is evolving quickly. Given what I've seen lately, it's possible that they were hiring remotely when your process started but they ended that policy before you crossed the finish line. (EDIT: Op mentioned scheduling interviews around the holidays in a different comment. With such a long interview cycle, I'd expect changing policies is the most likely explanation) 2) Recruiter was lying. I actually don't think this is likely because the recruiter would just be wasting their time. Recruiters don't actually gain anything and lose a lot of opportunity cost by running dead-end candidates through the pipeline for jobs they know won't be accepted. 3) You might have been switched to a different opening or department during the interview process. If the initial hiring manager declined you, they may have found someone else who wanted to pick up the thread. They should have notified you about the difference, of course. 4) Finally, it's possible they decided you weren't a good fit for remote work. Hybrid remote/in-office companies are becoming more picky about who they're allowing to work remote because not everybody can handle it. Usually the strongest candidates are afforded remote opportunities, but borderline maybes will be asked to be on-site at the start so they can be closely mentored.
  • irvingprime 5y ago
    Number 4 is an interesting point. Personally, as a hiring manager who works exclusively remote (though my company does have offices) if I thought someone was borderline or even under the line at handling remote work, I would not make them an offer at all. Well, I might if we were talking about an internship and there was someone on site I trusted to keep an eye on them. Otherwise, one of the most important things I look for in any direct report is the ability to do their work without the need for a lot of hand-holding. IOW, if I don't trust them to work remote, then I just don't trust them.
    • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > IOW, if I don't trust them to work remote, then I just don't trust them. It really depends. There are a lot of good people out there who don't do well with remote work. A lot. If your company is mostly remote, it makes sense to pass on people who aren't great at remote work. But if you have in-office teams where they'd be a good fit, it can still be worth bringing them in if (and only if) they're interested in an in-office position. It's really hard to tell if someone can handle remote work during an interview, though. People who have successfully worked remote and have good references are easy. People who have only worked in offices and want to go remote are much harder to evaluate in an interview context.
• twomoonsbysurf 5y ago
• KennyBlanken 5y ago
  scene, ten years ago I apply for a job at a university. Job description says a college degree is required. I state in the cover letter that I do not have a degree, but hoped my experience would make up for it. HR emails a few days later. Phone interview? I disclose NoDegree. Not a problem, she says. Phone interview with her goes fine. She passes me off to the department and a C-level dude who apparently has to sign off on all hires for this category. Phone interview with the C-level dude. I disclose NoDegree. Not a problem, he says. Email from the department business manager asking for an in-person interview. Disclose NoDegree. Not a problem, when can you come in? In-person interview with the business manager, a lab assistant, and about 6 or so faculty members. The faculty in particular love me. Disclose NoDegree to each of them. No problem, they say. Lots of experience. Two weeks later, not a peep. Email the business director. Response: "sorry, we went with a candidate with a degree." Fucking assholes wasted easily 40 hours of my life on that bullshit.
  • teakettle42 5y ago
    You likely made the degree a deciding factor by voluntarily raising it as an issue with every single person you spoke to. In the future, I would suggest not even mentioning that you don’t have a degree (unless there’s a legal/licensing requirement for one). Simply do not include an “education” section on your resume. You’re not being dishonest, and given sufficient work experience, most people won’t even notice the section’s absence. The few that do notice, won’t care.
• 1123581321 5y ago
  That’s a pain. I recently went through an active search and I have to say this was not my experience. There was one mixup about remote that we figured out in the first 15 minutes with the internal recruiter. For the rest, both the recruiter and the company explicitly assured me the positions were 100% remote and part of the interview was about each party’s experience and perspective working remotely. I had LinkedIn set to remote only, which may have helped.
• thrwyg17381 5y ago
  Since you are referring to the HC, and mention FAANG, I’ll assume this was Google. If so, it’s not that they don’t want remote hires. It’s that you didn’t qualify to work remote / without closer guidance. This is a typical way these rejections are worded. Throwaway account for obvious reasons.
• rcarmo 5y ago
  In the EU at least, you get a contract that specifically mentions place of work (and many countries have standardized remote clauses now). What you sign MUST reflect the terms you agreed to…
  • dudul 5y ago
    It's the same in the US, if only for tax reasons you need to specify in your offer letter where you'll be working from. The author's friends were a bit careless.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  When I joined my current company, I made sure to have it specified in my offer that I had the option to be fully remote in perpetuity. I know it doesn't actually make a difference — they can fire me for any reason, and I'm not going to take them to court over it — but it makes me feel like at least we have agreed on terms.
  • torton 5y ago
    And if they aren't willing to even write it into the initial offer (despite how toothless that promise is in the long term in the US legal system), you know they aren't really serious about remote.
• mabbo 5y ago
  When I went looking for a fully remote position last year, I was worried that exactly this might happen. Then I heard that Shopify had literally shut down and sold their offices. It's not actually possible for the company to go back to the office because they don't exist. So that's where I work now.
  • vasco 5y ago
    +1 On this. Find somewhere that was remote before pandemic or that shifted fully. I've worked fully remotely for the same company for almost 6 years now. Having worked in an office before, one belief I've formed over the years is that working at a place that doesn't have remote at the core and that has staff that's remote and staff that isn't, would create a two-tier system and I'd be very afraid of trying it. In fact for a lot of the company history, we've had an office in a location next to the founders, that people were not allowed to use as a work place. You could go there for a day here and there but not as a group and not as a regular activity. There weren't even spots for more than 5 or 6 people at the same time in there, so mostly used to receive mail. This sort of thing won't even be in the minds of a huge corporation that is only doing remote because the pandemic forced them to. So my advice if you want to go remote, is to find a company that was either fully remote before the pandemic, or a company that has truly embraced it and shifted completely. edit: seems like there's a bit of attention here, if you're struggling with remote or starting something and you want to exchange some war stories for fun, I'm always up to share some thoughts even though the internet is full of experts on remote nowadays. I've done it as an engineer in a company of 12, later as an engineering manager and more recently being manager of managers and we've surpassed 250 people, so I have thoughts about it from multiple angles. You can figure out how to contact me from my profile.
    • MivLives 5y ago
      The company I'm working for is struggling with this. They firmly believe in no remote. They won't entertain it for juniors, and generally to get approval you need to be pretty vital. But at the same time they've also opened up multiple offices (that are all in different geos, timezones). What the end result is that in my section of the company I'm effectively remote working from the off as my team has a remote contractor, and the other teams in my area are all dispersed between home and the new other offices. It's frustrating being told to go into work and getting no benefit from it besides a change of scenery. I'm not sure I'm cut out for full remote at least in my current housing situation/skill level. I suspect other companies are in a similar situation, and it's part of the growing pains of getting larger. But fuck is it hard to be happy with it.
• sdoering 5y ago
  > [...] the job opening didn't say remote, the agreement they signed didn't say remote. I don't understand. Do people sign a contract that states something differently than they were being told verbally before? Imho what isn't in writing doesn't exist. Especially when it comes to "promises" from potential employers. For example I would not trust a promised raise in 12 months when nothing was done in writing. Even with the best of employers I would not agree to anything if they didn't agree to writing it down.
  • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    That's a pretty hard standard to hold. I've never had a company promise a particular desk to me in writing, but I trust that if they show me their nice office space and verbally tell me that's where I'll be sitting they won't put me on a folding table in the broom closet.
    • pc86 5y ago
      Surely you can see the difference between things like salary, whether you're expected to commute several hours a week, etc. and whether you're sitting next to a window or not.
    • magicalhippo 5y ago
      My contract specifically states that my primary work location is the company office. If I had applied to a remote position and the contract did not specifically state it's primarily a remote location, I would demand the contract was changed to reflect this before signing.
    • teh_klev 5y ago
      I think you've crossed over into the unnecessarily absurd. When I got my offer and contract to sign which stated remote work I made damn sure it was in the contract along with compensation, holidays, sick leave etc. If any of these differed from the job advert, interview discussions etc then I'd be bouncing it back to the employer to correct. These are not "pretty hard standard[s] to hold" a potential employer to.
• throwaway019254 5y ago
  I'm sure that at least Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are hiring remote engineers. I got offers from them and I'm located in Canada. However, I'm a pretty senior engineer so it may be harder for more junior roles.
• anecd0te 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is There are three models of recruiting, first-party, retained and commission. You do not want to speak to recruiters working on commission, because they take the shotgun approach and have the least information and least incentive to tell the truth. One of my first questions to third party recruiters is "are you retained or on commission" and if the second, end the conversation.
• TrueGeek 5y ago
  This happened to me. The interview process went well but the company's closest office was 15 miles from me, which in Atlanta traffic is over an hour. I said I would need to be remote, they wanted me in the office full time. We were using an external recruiter, which I had never done before. Eventually the recruiter negotiated that I'd be onsite for the first month for onboarding and then remote after that. My first week I mentioned something to my boss about being remote after the first month and he had no idea. The recruiter had simply lied about "negotiating" so that I'd accept the offer. Luckily it all worked out. Although company policy was officially no work from home, my directly manager didn't care at all. And shortly after corona hit and they company ended up going 100% remote anyway.
  • mcv 5y ago
    > 15 miles from me, which in Atlanta traffic is over an hour. Sounds like bicycle speed.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      If I had to drive into Boston or Cambridge from 15 miles out at rush hour, it would almost certainly take me about that long.
    • TrueGeek 5y ago
      Welcome to Atlanta. There isn't an easy way to get from Gwinnett to Alpharetta. I did try it via bicycle, and it did take about the same amount of time. But the streets here are vary narrow and southern hospitality ends when you get in a car.
      • mcv 5y ago
        Sounds like a situation asking for some dedicated bike paths. Make it easy for people to bypass the heavy car traffic, maybe even introduce a shortcut from Gwinnett to Alpharetta, and reduce the pressure on the roads.
• tommiegannert 5y ago
  Spray and pray works until your reputation takes a hit. Recruiters definitely have incentive for quantity over quality and are basically the sales branch of HR. They're your friend just as much as the croupier is. Just business. Not sure what the solution for us is. Having someone promise you something that is totally disconnected from what you later receive in writing reeks of exploitation of your sunk cost. Not accepting it is the first necessary step.
• mikequinlan 5y ago
  >I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is, but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect. There is no downside to them for getting you to interview. The best case is you decide non-remote isn't a deal breaker after all and they get the commission; the worst case is you decline the job and the recruiter finds another candidate.
• jupp0r 5y ago
  Sorry for you to be in that situation. Unsolicited advice for next time: interview with several companies and get multiple offers. The additional leverage would have definitely strengthened your position in this and also would have given you more options in case things turned out equally disappointing with employer A.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    Many people are not really in the position to just go and get multiple (in this case remote) job offers.
    • jupp0r 5y ago
      How is getting one offer different from getting multiple? At least for me, prep is the main part and the interviews themselves are a smaller commitment compared to that. This is greatly helped by the pandemic causing on-site interviews mostly being replaced by online video conferencing ones.
      • ghaff 5y ago
        For most professionals, landing a decent job offer is a multi-month process.
        • jupp0r 5y ago
          Totally, but is landing two offers twice as hard as one? No way. Once you’re ready for interviewing at a top company, you are also ready to interview at 3 other ones - with marginal overhead compared to the months of prep.
• valbaca 5y ago
  You need to name and shame. "FAANG" isn't a company.
  • mcv 5y ago
    I'm this close to naming my next company FAANG.
• mfer 5y ago
  I've worked for multiple companies as a remote employee for many years. I've had this concern in the past. Now I look for others at the company who work remote while applying (this helps work as a check) and I make sure there is something in writing.
• omgmajk 5y ago
  A friend of mine went to an interview after a recruiter called him and said it was hybrid (up to one day at the office every two weeks and rest remote) but at the interview when it was done, they said that he needed to be at the office a minimum of four days a week. I feel like this is sort of common these days.
  • joezydeco 5y ago
    I've literally had recruiters email me job descriptions with "remote" in the email header and the document inside says "hybrid". None of these people actually read the crap they shovel onward.
  • jghn 5y ago
    It is, but it's worth giving companies the benefit of the doubt here. A lot of companies are actively changing their policies. At my day job we're transitioning from full remote to hybrid, and the rules on hybrid are themselves in flux. It'd be real easy for a candidate to get mixed messages if they entered the hiring funnel now. Yes, the company should be up front about the circumstances, but I could see how it would happen. And yes, other companies are just malicious.
• novocantico 5y ago
  > the agreement they signed didn't say remote Just read stuff you sign, don't sign unless you agree, and ask to modify if needed. Incredibly easy way to avoid problems like this.
  • pilgrimfff 5y ago
    How would that have helped OP - who wasted a lot of time interviewing and didn't have anything to sign?
• adeeshaek 5y ago
  I work for a startup that's full-remote (been that way since before COVID) and we are hiring. If you'd like to work in golang, come apply! who is hiring link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878768
  • kyle_u 5y ago
    Confirmed! I've been happily working at Fevo for years, more than a thousand miles from headquarters.
• KingOfCoders 5y ago
  "When they pointed out they had been hired as remotes they were met with a collective shrug" If it's not in the contract, it doesn't exist.
• qbasic_forever 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is, but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect. This is exactly how it works, recruiters don't get paid unless they get a candidate hired. Despite all the words they write and say to you, they only care about getting you and the hiring manager to say yes and _everything_ else doesn't matter or is immaterial to them. Unfortunately it's nothing new to see recruiters being less than honest. In their defense, right now is a weird time with many companies who were firmly in the remote only culture now backtracking and reopening again. It could be the case when this position opened things were much different with its requirements. But ultimately never trust a thing a recruiter says unless it is signed in writing from your hiring manager/HR of the company. Never believe anything they say about compensation, the future of the company or your position, etc. Never.
  • brazzledazzle 5y ago
    At the end of the day it's a sales position and just like any sales people they can have a flexible relationship with the truth.
    • achenatx 5y ago
      not good people who plan to develop long term relationships. A good recruiter can place the same person many times over the years. But not if they lie.
  • calvinmorrison 5y ago
    > This is exactly how it works, recruiters don't get paid unless they get a candidate hired. Not exactly. I mean yes - exactly. But they also typically have riders on the contract. Firstly, our recruiters do not get the same cut if the new hire doesn't pan out. Also recruiters I have worked with in the past tend to get a percent of the salary number. That helps as the recruiter is really trying to get you the highest number. So yes, and no.
  • hammock 5y ago
    OP experience makes me think some kind of added process like Letter of Agreement or Letter of Intent from the initial outreach that says “assuming you pass all the rounds, we will hire you to a remote position at a salary to be determined but between the range of x-y, etc.” could be helpful. It’s not a contract but a precursor and some lighter level of commitment. Common in enterprise sales scenarios but not in mid level job searches.
• jupp0r 5y ago
  I’ve heard similar things happening in my network recently. On the other hand, it seems to be much easier than earlier to get FAANG offers in the first place.
• quartesixte 5y ago
  > When they pointed out they had been hired as remotes they were met with a collective shrug - the job opening didn't say remote, the agreement they signed didn't say remote. While I wish we could live in a world where people would uphold their word, alas. If it’s not written down on paper it might as well not be real.
• diehunde 5y ago
  If you get to the point you get an offer, always make sure to get that in the contract. I was working remotely for a company that went through some re-org and ended up with a different manager who wasn't very excited about having remote team members. Unfortunately for him it was part of my contract so he couldn't force me to relocate.
  • riotnrrd 5y ago
    Very few workers in the U.S. have actual employment contracts. If you work in the tech sector in the U.S. you almost certainly don't. Instead, your employment is "at-will"; i.e. terminable by either party, with or without cause or notice (unless you live and work in Montana). You may have received a written offer of employment when you were hired (outlining your title, salary, hiring bonuses, etc.), but that is not an employment contract. The important distinction for the OP is that a written offer of employment is not legally binding. They can lie or change their minds.
    • diehunde 5y ago
      You're right. But at least you would have enough proof to seriously damage their reputation in case they change the terms in the letter. I'd like to believe they would care about that, especially in tech where everybody is struggling to hire good employees.
    • JohnFen 5y ago
      > If you work in the tech sector in the U.S. you almost certainly don't. I've been working in the tech sector in the US for a long time, and have had an employment contract at literally every company. I'm genuinely surprised to hear that people are working without one. That seems unwise.
      • bialpio 5y ago
        Same - I've always had contract (but the sample size is quite small). The problem is that even if you have "full remote" in your contract, you also probably have "at will" in the same contract, which IMO means they can still play the game of "come in person or you're fired".
• underhill 5y ago
  Same thing happened with me @ Apple last year. Went through 4 or so interviews with the expectation that it was a remote role. Then the day before the big remote "onsite" I was told they actually wanted someone in-person. So I removed myself from the process. I'll chalk it up to 2021 being a confusing time for everyone - but I felt pretty burned by it.
  • cvhashim 5y ago
    It was well known across the industry Apple required most people back in the offices.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  Short of a contractual guarantee, you should always approach a new job with this expectation. They may say remote now. But almost all of us are subject to 'at will' employment laws and the company could absolutely change its mind later. I've only been looking at remote jobs that also happen to have big offices or headquarters in places I'd be okay moving to, because I might use it as a plausible path to move there. My ties to the area I live in are about to end, and I'm feeling the itch to shake things up.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    This. I am currently going through talking with HR ( mostly because management did not want to 'create a precedent'; clearly they got orders from higher ups ) hoping to get full time remote, while, at the same time, interviewing for other positions ( which will worst case serve as a leverage - worst case, I will just go to a different office making more money ). It sucks, but yeah. Unless this is in writing somewhere, it can change at any moment. If I wasn't so scared of being my own boss ( it is genuinely hard to keep track of everything ), I would consider trying consulting.
• benreesman 5y ago
  If you made it through the FAANG dynamic-programming circus then plenty of people on here would love to engage you at some level, including me.
• FpUser 5y ago
  While I feel for the people being fooled by recruiters I can not comprehend how come they did not make sure in their first interview that they're indeed hired for remote and it will be stated in their contract. I would never trust recruiter as they're responsible for nothing.
  • irvingprime 5y ago
    Not everyone is as expert at job hunting as you are.
    • encryptluks2 5y ago
      True, but these aren't entry level jobs either.
    • FpUser 5y ago
      One does not have to be the expert to realize simplest things. I came to Canada from USSR some 30 years ago. Even then fresh from detached scientist I've had enough sanity to dismiss the words of a middle man. Also for the reference I am a vendor for the last 20 years and have never used a middle man to find contracts or a job before that.
• aynyc 5y ago
  I feel for the OP. I have a more general question. Let's say your contract states that you are remote. What if the company changes their mind say 12 months down the road, are there any recourse? As far as I know, there isn't much you can do about it other than perhaps a X-month severance package or go back to the office.
  • pram 5y ago
    I’m fairly sure there is no recourse since this has happened previously at places like Yahoo? They told everyone to be on site, even remote employees who had been that way for years. In fact it appeared to be used like a stealth layoff, so they were banking on people disagreeing.
  • NineStarPoint 5y ago
    Having it written into the contract would probably make it easier to collect unemployment if you quit before they fired you for non-compliance? I think a major change like that is already a fairly easy case of constructive dismissal though. Otherwise yeah, there's not going to be much recourse unless specific penalties were also written into the contract.
• uuyi 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is, but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect. From experience dealing with recruiters for the last 25 years they universally lie to both sides to pocket the commission at all costs. I drove 400 miles once to do an interview for a solution architect position. Got there and the company were recruiting an Oracle DBA. The recruiter had plain up lied because I had some Oracle experience on my CV. They assured me they would ream the recruiter and bought me lunch and gave me an Amazon voucher to cover the fuel and time though which was nice.
  • md_ 5y ago
    This is probably more true for headhunters than for in-house recruiters. FAANG mostly (completely?) use in-house.
    • balaji1 5y ago
      with the the roles of recruiters being so metrics driven, most recruiters seem to be optimizing for funnel metrics. FAANG or not. But especially at FAANG where the number of recruiters and candidate pool is large that they prefer metrics.
    • sgerenser 5y ago
      I’ve had third party recruiters contact me for Amazon roles, although I believe it was mainly sourcing and they passed you off to an internal recruiter if you got past the very basic sourcing screen. Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft were all internal-only in my experience.
  • no-s 5y ago
    I drove to LA once to do an interview the next day after confirming with the in-house recruiter. When I got there they told me they didn’t think I was actually coming because they had already hired someone. Also they didn’t want to pay expenses despite offering to do so in their letter to me. So I called up a consultant firm I knew in LA and sez, “hey I’m in town interviewing at X for Y, but I don’t like them and I wonder if you got any Y jobs" and they got me a (consultant) job as the technical lead for the job the X company had placed the other DBA at. Later I had my attorney send a letter with my documentation to X company and settled up for time, expenses, and atty fees.
• sydbarrett74 5y ago
  FAANG recruiters will lie with a straight face. Not surprised at all by this.
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    You can remove FAANG from that statement without reducing its correctness. The recruiting business is like the used car business -- there are good recruiters out there, but the odds aren't fantastic that the one you're talking to is in that group. When you find a recruiter that is honest and genuinely wants what's in the best interest of all concerned, hang onto them. Keep in touch with them. When you're thinking about changing things up, make them your first call. They are gold. Treat all others with great care and suspicion.
• readonthegoapp 5y ago
  • kmonsen 5y ago
    The NATO stuff is really silly. It is not like NATO is in any way pressuring countries to join. There are countries desperate to join that NATO choose not to accept. People and countries should be free to choose their own destiny, not based on some history or sphere of influence. Russia/Warsaw pact was different, they had to station troops in the countries to keep them in the "alliance". Any NATO country is free to leave at any time.
• derelicto 5y ago
  This is very anecdotal, but I have a friend that interviewed at Google for a Remote SWE position - everything indicated that it was remote: the posting, the recruiter and the hiring manager. Now they announced RTO, his manager said: "We're excited to have you at the office" - he was really confused about this messaging, so they forced him to apply to work remotely (even if he had been hired as such) denied his application on the grounds that this SWE role that requires a lot of cross regional interaction and virtual meetings - requires "intense collaboration that you can only get in an office". Total BS. Needless to say he's leaving. This is such a travesty, total misdirection.
  • sjg007 5y ago
    Your friend probably has a claim against the company for breach of contract. When people leave a job to join a new one and incur expenses and then the new company lays them off or fires them for no fault then the judges usually side with the employee.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Indeed, and then he finds that not only is there breach of contract but that the company is also quite vindictive and will use any kind of claim as a reason to not even consider hiring you in the future, assuming that it stays within the one company and doesn't get passed around between recruiters.
      • iooi 5y ago
        Every background check that companies put you through include any history of litigation against employers, no need for recruiters to talk to each other.
        • mschuster91 5y ago
          I can understand at least the reasoning behind checking criminal history of potential hirings (even though as an European, I disagree with the concept on a fundamental level and it's illegal in Germany to demand a criminal record check outside of very specific industries). But how on earth do civil lawsuit records in the US end up anywhere where the background-checking industry can get their grubby paws on them?!
• Grustaf 5y ago
  I'm often contacted by recruiters that have no formal connection with the company that is hiring. They simply find wanted ads, go look for people that sort of match the requirements. When they find some, they'll take them to the company. There are firms that only do this kind of pirate recruiting, and they even do it for roles where the company explicitly says "no recruiters".
• mattzito 5y ago
  It's hard to know what happened here without knowing the company and the internals - I know for Google, for the hiring committees I'm aware of (I'm a PM hiring committee member), we cant' even easily see where the candidate is based vs. where the role is based, and it's not something we take into account. We don't care, we just want to say whether the candidate passed the bar to work at Google, and from there it's between them and whatever team they're joining. Now, there are other places where problems can arise. For example most (all?) hires go to a VP-level review, which is mostly a rubber stamp for more junior levels, but I have seen a few cases where a VP steps in with concerns about a candidate, and potentially that's what happened here - the hiring manager didn't have buy-in up the chain for the role location, and it got flagged at some point. I'll also throw out there that maybe the recruiter was not wholly truthful, from the perspective that perhaps there was some other problem, either concerns around passing the hiring committee or negative internal references, and the recruiter told you that the remote was the issue instead. I haven't seen a recruiter be directly untruthful, but I have seen situations where the recruiter represented things slightly differently in order to try to keep the candidate's morale up. As an example, I once got asked to do an interview redo for a candidate - this happens from time to time, either because an interview had to get cut short, or the candidate did really poorly and they want to give them another chance, or the interviewer left the company, but they don't tell you the situation when they ask you to re-interview so as not to bias you. When I spoke to the candidate, they said they'd been told something about the interviewer leaving bad notes and transferring orgs, so they had to redo it - I redid the interview, filed my feedback, and later found out that actually the candidate had bombed the previous interview, so much so that the hiring committee felt like it was an outlier and requested a re-interview. Again, this is just from my narrow window on one company, but I wanted to share some of the dynamics at at least one company in the FAANG space.
  • eitally 5y ago
    Also at Google, and my impression is that during the role posting exercise when the hiring manager is first talking with their recruiter, the recruiter asks which locations are acceptable, and "remote" is an option. Often the hiring manager will say, essentially, "I don't care" because they don't want to artificially restrict their candidate pipeline due to location preference. Then, once finalist candidates are in/through interviews, the rubber hits the road and the hiring manager realizes they probably actually do have location preference, and pulls the rug out from beneath the candidate(s). What seems like a small detail on the Google side is likely not appreciated for its enormity on the candidate's side, imho. As a hiring manager and frequent interviewer for other teams, this is my somewhat informed opinion of at least one likely root cause.
• trollied 5y ago
  The recruitment industry needs to be massively disrupted to stop this bullshit, but unfortunately there's too much money involved so it's unlikely to happen. Stack Overflow had a good effort, but have recently bowed out.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  Yes, this happened to me with my last position. Overall, they weren't one of the worst third party recruiters I've dealt with (though I shouldn't have dealt with them at all), but they told me in the first few calls that the position was "fully remote". This was only half-true. It turned out that the employer wanted me to come in 1 to 2 times a week. That was during late-pandemic, so who knows whether that would have been changed to not being remote. Maybe it was miscommunication, but there's no way I can know that. An honest or competent recruiter would have sorted out those facts. IMO, do whatever you can to bypass recruiters. Networking, doing presentations, and even just finding the emails of those who are really in charge of hiring, have a much greater payoff with modest effort than dealing with recruiters, particularly of the third-party kind. I believe this is particularly true for junior developers. If you are junior developers, expect most recruiters who reach out to you to be scum of the earth who will drop you like a hot potato if a single employer doesn't end up hiring you. They will tell you that you have "all the skills" and are "perfect" for a position and then they'll ghost you just as fast. Don't take it personally. Those people suck.
  • pc86 5y ago
    I'm not sure how selling something "fully remote" when you're expected to be in-office 40% of the time is only half-true. That's a complete fabrication. I would even have a hard time considering something fully remote if it required annual meetings or something, unless they were optional and remote-friendly.
• sydbarrett74 5y ago
  Prediction: offices are going to become a status symbol for an enterprise to prove it's substantial enough to afford one. It will be mostly style, negligible substance. Perhaps a receptionist/office manager, a couple of private offices in the back for those who desire them, and a conference room. That's all that'll be needed.
• cyberlurker 5y ago
  I make my employers put it in the contract before I sign. But I’m not unsympathetic to people being abused by big companies and recruiters. This is some bullshit.
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    This. It's something that applies to the general case, not just employment, and not just with big companies: if it's not in the contract, it doesn't exist. Any condition that's important to you MUST be in the contract.
• ShakataGaNai 5y ago
  Ask the people you're talking to where the teammates are, the expectations of return to office. Ask them in the very first call. Either they'll be offended because they probably have nefarious plans (dodged a huge time waste), or they'll happily explain how their team is spread across 4 timezones and could never return to the office since there isn't one. Sadly "remote" is just a buzzword to a lot of people. But on the flip side a lot of companies are truly serious about it.
  • calvinmorrison 5y ago
    At my last role, I got all the way to the "signing your hiring paperwork" to find out that vaccines were mandatory for all new hires. Seeing as that's 30% of the workforce or so who isn't, and this being a senior level position, and a year more after they were first available (meaning, anyone who wanted to get a vaccine - probably would have already)... you'd think they'd bring that up day one. I about flipped shit on the recruiter.
    • breakfastduck 5y ago
      People just assume anyone with a reasonable amount of common sense would be fine with it I imagine.
      • calvinmorrison 5y ago
        It seems bizarre to me you wouldn't put requirements up front, which seems to be what this thread is complaining about. Thank you for implying I am a moron
        • noasaservice 5y ago
          Well, you are a moron for refusing a free vaccine that significantly reduces chance of getting covid, AND lessens severity of ailments if you do get it. I'd say it was a bullet dodged by the company.
          • 5y ago
• fooblat 5y ago
  I don't know how many times I have to repeat this advice: if it isn't in writing in your contract then it doesn't count. It doesn't matter what a recruiter or hiring manager promises. Get it in writing. Always and forever!
• shmde 5y ago
  Hmm looks like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch
• ushakov 5y ago
  send this FAANG company an invoice for the time you spent interviewing
• thenerdhead 5y ago
  Recruiters and hiring teams are hardly ever on the same page. Always get your information straight from the company, not a third party that is enticed to land interviews for higher chance of converting to landing a candidate. I do think the bait and switch of offering employees who entered the workforce full time employment and then asking them to come into the office two years later is disgusting. There's something bigger going on with how fast this has been swept under the rug. If you're reading this and want to be fully remote, don't settle for anything less. People have been doing remote work for decades at this point and contributing more than most people do in an office. If you prefer to work at an office then do whatever suits you.
  • AyyWS 5y ago
    "Always get your information straight from the company" I remember the hiring manager walking me out of a prospective employer's high security area after a really successful interview, and I asked him in the hallway about the full employee conversion process. He said the entire team is interviewing to keep their current jobs and they'd be shutting down their office to consolidate on the east coast. No way I'd accept after that. I still wonder if he was lying to me since I've talked to their kubernetes people at DevOps Days, so I know they have a team here still.
    • thenerdhead 5y ago
      Those people are rare breeds to tell you the truth. I've had similar in my career and also do the same for those who are entering a minefield.
• dspillett 5y ago
  > the agreement they signed didn't say remote While the recruiter lying is the cause of the problem, there are several points during the process when they could have confirmed the relevant job details. Just before signing the agreement is the last such opportunity. > but that's not the company's problem If it causes enough problems, such as people not signing when offered because they have read the agreement or people leaving without notice during probationary periods (in most legal jurisdictions these periods work both ways) because of the divide in expectations, it will become the company's problem, and they'll stop using those recruiters. Unfortunately some are desperate enough for work that they'll just go with it until finding something else, so there may not be enough signal to insight change that way. Especially given that there are apparently very few recruiters who don't act in similar ways. > but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect That is exactly how it works. If it is any consolation they often lie to the employers too, though that isn't quite as easy to get away with due to the differing power dynamic.
• angarg12 5y ago
  My advice for those people is: don't go to the office. Simply work remotely as it was agreed and let the managers make a move. Considering how insanely difficult it is to hire right now, I predict most of times they will do nothing. However this might sour your relationship with your manager so you might want to consider looking internally for someone who supports remote work, or look for another company that's more honest and transparent.
  • dudul 5y ago
    I would also recommend starting interviewing after the first request to get back into the office.
• 999900000999 5y ago
  I'm thinking hybrid work is the best older companies can do. The only way to know you'll never need to come into an office is to work somewhere without an office. If they company isn't fully remote they'll eventually want you to come in. I'd love something like working a straight week per quarter in the office. Then if you decide to have a San Francisco office, I can endure The tenderloin for a single week every 3 months
• jedberg 5y ago
  Protip from an old guy: Always get everything in writing. No verbal promises. Make sure everything you discussed is written in the offer. If you discussed 100% remote, make sure the offer says 100% remote. If it doesn't, ask them to add it before you sign. And then if they go back on it, keep working there, look for a new job, don't go to the office even if they tell you that you have to, and bring up that you have it in writing that it's 100% remote. And if they fire you anyway, you've got a good basis for a wrongful termination suit, while hopefully working at a new job and/or collecting unemployment.
  • pc86 5y ago
    This works if they try to get you to come in right away, but things change and the company is allowed to change a remote position to an in-office position. It can even happen soon after hiring (but is obviously much more suspect). The company changing its mind !== wrongful termination.
    • damethos 5y ago
      That's not how contracts work. It does not matter if the company changes its mind. If it's in writing then it has to be honored or else contracts would be pointless if anyone can just change its mind without consequences.
      • pc86 5y ago
        There are no employment contracts in the US. Or rather, they are so incredibly rare (mostly executives, and even rare among them) it's not worth discussing in the context of employment.
    • jedberg 5y ago
      > The company changing its mind !== wrongful termination. It's true, it doesn't always mean that. But as with anything legal, it might mean that, it's mostly how well you can convince a judge!
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
• y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
  Amazon is doing this. I went through the process and the recruiter tried to manipulate me into "assigning a local office" otherwise it has to go through "an approval process". I told him put it through the approval then or I walk. He also tried car-salesman tactics of trying to get me to accept a lower total comp package. I stood firmly at the top of my range and after days of trying to convince me otherwise, they finally caved. They're also holding back-to-the-office meetings where they want local individuals to come in a few times a week and remote individuals to come in on a somewhat regular frequency (e.g. once a month). I told them to shove it, I'm not coming in, ever. I don't need their money that badly. I'd rather slash my salary in half and work somewhere that's not trying to screw me over at every turn. I think after 3-6 months I'm quitting anyway. EDIT: I should mention I just started at the company and it's already pissing me off. Thankfully my old cushy job will take me back any time.
  • picardo 5y ago
    Being assigned an office doesn't mean that it's not remote. It entirely depends on the team. I worked for a team that wanted me in office for three days a week last year. My current team is entirely remote, but I'm still assigned to an office that I can go to anytime I want, which is totally optional.
    • AlotOfReading 5y ago
      On the other hand, I had exactly this sort of issue with Amazon subsidiary Zoox a couple months ago. We had verbally agreed on terms that would have me doing primarily remote work. When they finally sent me terms, they specified full time in-office and changed a few other things like salary. The excuse was that some higher-up wouldn't approve remote right now, but they were trying to convince them.
    • y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
      No, but here's the catch that I learned about: if you're assigned to an office, they can make you go into that office at the same frequency as in-office workers. You'd basically have nothing in writing that states you're a remote employee (I specifically asked the recruiter about this, and he confirmed). Otherwise why would being fully remote need "special approval"? That doesn't make any sense.
• kulikalov 5y ago
  > the job opening didn't say remote, the agreement they signed didn't say remote The bright side is that's one of the least harmful ways to learn the lesson: read contracts thoroughly before signing them. Anyways, sorry for your experience. As an alternative to what others suggest, consider career as independent contractor :) Been here around 8 years and never dealt with recruiters so far.
• wldcordeiro 5y ago
  I've seen this around, Meta/FB for example currently are hiring people anywhere and letting them work remotely because of current circumstances but you have to declare that you're open to relocation and pick a "home office" regardless of your preference for remote work.
  • kmonsen 5y ago
    I'm remote for Meta/FB I can say that remote means remote. There is no pressure to come to the office, and they are OK with people relocating away from the office. The comp gets adjusted based on zip code or something like that. You are probably coming out ahead anyway, from what I have seen the adjustments are smaller than the cost of living and tax comparisons. I do live in the area and meet up with coworkers from time to time because I enjoy that, but there is really zero pressure to do so. The home office thing is because when I get devices they send them to the closest office first, then they will get delivery to my home. Never heard anyone having an issue because they are too far from an office. I do have coworkers that live far from offices.
    • sweettea 5y ago
      I want to reiterate this: I live literally three hours from any Meta office, I have never heard anyone encourage me to go to an office, and my team even has no three people in the same state. There's certainly the freedom to live near and go to the office if you need that work-life separation, but it's a freedom. And I really admire our senior leadership working to spend more time geographically distributed and remote themselves, to show their commitment to make Facebook treat geographically diverse, remote employees with equality.
• jrootabega 5y ago
  Recruiting is like fishing. They're not lies, they're lures. I doubt that will ever change. The lesson is don't be a fish. Hell, I had a recruiter steal contacts from the company we were both working for, and try to recruit me when she had left for another company.
  • damethos 5y ago
    Well, in my book, if someone promises X and does Y and pretend that X was never mentioned, then it's a lie, not a lure. Besides, isn't "lure" a "lie" that we are trying to cover as a "lure" in order to feel better with ourselves?
    • jrootabega 5y ago
      I was trying to paint the picture that recruiters are held to the same moral standards towards their candidates that fishermen are to fish. No one criticizes fishermen for using lures that look good but are not food.
• dboreham 5y ago
  You can truncate and generalize this to : "Recruiters are lying".
• exfascist 5y ago
  > When they pointed out they had been hired as remotes they were met with a collective shrug That sounds like an exceptionally stupid thing for the employers to do in the current market.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  Did this never come up in ANY of the interviews? I just went through hours and hours of interviews and I talked about this with the interviewers all the time because it impacts team cohesion, collaboration, company culture so obviously a lot of questions were targeted towards remote work. At least the hiring manager would have been able to clarify any wrong assumptions, no?
• laurent123456 5y ago
  That's probably something that should be discussed with the employer early - just bring it up casually on the first meeting with them, and then you're sure. And of course, how many days a week you should be in office, and how many days remote should be in the contract too. Usually I would also ask what are the working hours and add this to the contract, because the clearer everybody's expectations are, the better it will be for you and the company.
• kkfx 5y ago
  Verba volant, scripta manent. If someone promise something that's need to be black on white, if not you can't count that as true nor false, it might or might not be true...
• davidw 5y ago
  I think smaller/mid sized companies have fully embraced remote in many cases. The people I talk to appear pretty serious about it and have highly distributed teams that just aren't all going to go back to an office.
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  Yeah at this point I either would look for on-site positions or for companies that logistically cannot call people into the office, heh. My company, for example, literally has no real estate. There is no office to even go into.
• hasmatteam 5y ago
  Google recruiters have been doing this sort of thing for years. Most google SWE roles advertised in San Francisco didn't exist there, they just advertised to dupe you into taking the bus to Mountain View. I was told that if my interview was successful I'd need to work in Mountain View for a while, then apply to work in SF. I asked a friend who works there, he said that requested to move to SF as soon as he was done with his first few month. He's a there 3 years, fairly senior and with three kids, commuting from the east bay (he loved covid), but he's still on the "waiting list".
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I don't understand the point of this actually, if supposedly the hiring process is so expensive and error prone and takes so long to get the right person, why would you go through all that with someone who says they will only work remote and then when it is time for work to start say - gotcha!
• IdEntities 5y ago
  I went through a long remote job search in mid-2019. What I experienced was that even when companies said they were open to remote, my status as a remote hire was almost always a decisive factor in them hiring some other candidate over me. I need to remain remote for family reasons so it's a bit disappointing to hear that the recruitment and interview problems for remote candidates may not have improved that much from COVID.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ostenning 5y ago
  Just in the past few days I got contacted by a British recruiter offering a job via LinkedIn which had a particularly generous package and conditions for the German market, so I jumped on the phone and had a chat with him about it. It was all good until the second phone call to clarify that the pay was 30K less than what was originally advertised and there were no stock option benefits. I found it pretty deceiving, the old cloak and dagger sales technique.
• berdon 5y ago
  This sounds situational. I know someone personally that just landed a remote L5 position at Google. I have spoken with dev managers at Facebook who are hiring remote positions. I have spoken with dev managers at Amazon who are hiring remote positions. My guess is that was the least offensive way the recruiter could come up with to tell you you didn't pass the "bar". And the hiring committee is, afaik, another "bar".
  • cosmiccatnap 5y ago
    This is very much, not, situational. Going through the process now and has happened every time but 2 of the 10 or so I'm looking at.
    • berdon 5y ago
      That is definitionally situational: In my anecdotal situations things happened differently than in your anecdotal situations.
  • dreen 5y ago
    The non-offensive way would be not to lie.
• kurthr 5y ago
  You could have stopped with "Recruiters are lying"... however if the hiring manager said it was for a remote position that is still a verbal contract with a Deep Pockets entity. You're still not hired (and it's At Will), but if they require to show up on-site after hiring without telling you they could open themselves up to legal liability. If you (or your friends) are "quitting" anyway, it may be worth letting HR know the liability position they are putting the company in. Especially, if multiple people all file against the same company with the same complaint, they become more likely to settle out of court (for PR reasons) than fight. Unlikely that you'll keep the jobs, though.
• giantg2 5y ago
  "Recruiters are lying about remote positions" They lie about a lot more than that.
• BLO716 5y ago
  This is exactly the experience you get with a military recruiter, but on some other deep level of cohesion and intimidation. It's like the used car dealer of legend that your dad (or mom, to be fair) told you about and never to trust them much like the class of mechanics that were (and some if not most?) dishonest about what you were being sold as a service or job detail. I remember going through the Air Force wanted para-rescue CC (specifically the path to get there, not the direct application into) and man was a sold a bill of goods. Grades amazing, physically (at that time not an software developer [slowly slouching fat sloth profile in 2022]) fit, and ready for a career in the service. The promises that dude that recruited me were legendary. My pops was a military and the whole family basically, and even he was amazed at what I was offered. He eventually said to go to college and if you wanted it go to OCS school. Point being, this is not new in times of great demand on talent - in my case, it was retention of and callbacks that active duty members trying to retire were experiencing during the first decade of our involvement in the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. Its insane, how some talent is scouted in this way. But .. if its on paper, through the process its grounds for legal action. Will it ever happen? depends, but most likely not. Just walk into the interviews with open eyes and be authentic, and most importantly honest on some level about this in specific going forward. I'd say use it for all relationships you want professionally, because well - "it's just business" in the end.
• donretag 5y ago
  Judging by the recruiting emails I receive, FAANG companies are definitely not interested in remote employees. I get 2-3 emails a week from Amazon, and they always list an office, but hint at remote possibilities. I suspect it is Amazon that is doing the bait-n-switch. I am having somewhat of an opposite problem. I actually want a hybrid position, but LinkedIn, which is sadly the best place to do an active job search, will advertise a position as local, but it is actually remote. Roles will appear when filtering on-site, but the job description will definitely specify remote. The companies are not even local. LinkedIn will add these positions in local searches.
• spike021 5y ago
  Was it Amazon? When I interviewed just before COVID, I was fed hook, line, and sinker that the position was for a headcount in San Francisco on a new team. Recruiter "confirmed" multiple times for me that it was an SFO location team/org. Then I was invited to do the on-site interview in Seattle (later found out typically they only fly you there if the role is in Seattle). So I flew there, did the on-site, etc. I receive news I passed the bar raiser or whatever, will be getting an offer. But wait, it's Seattle only with no plans to open headcount in SF. Had to spend a few months being traded between different org's recruiters to find a new open role in the SFBA.
• junon 5y ago
  I've heard of this happening quite a bit, oftentimes after a lengthy interview process had already begun.
• sebastianvoelkl 5y ago
  To everyone who is reading this, I'm hiring at On Deck (beondeck.com) We are are a 100% Remote company and will stay remote forever. Contact me if you'd like to join: sebastian.volkl@beondeck.com
  • germinalphrase 5y ago
    What roles are you hiring for?
    • sebastianvoelkl 5y ago
      https://beondeck.com/careers https://beondeck.com/careers incl. senior engineering roles
• jppope 5y ago
  Just going to help everyone out here that got a RTO notice: https://remoteok.com/ https://remoteok.com/
• shados 5y ago
  They're not lying, there are just significant internal miscommunications. A lot of the big companies right now have a lot of internal disagreements on the policies that pop up at various stage of the process.
  • cosmiccatnap 5y ago
    I find it interesting how people define a lie. It's the responsibilities of these people to be on the same page and so if they are not lying they are rife with poor internal practices which gives me about the same impression of them as if they had been lying.
• nicoburns 5y ago
  As a rule, recruiters lie about everything (there are good ones, but they seem to be the exception). Why not apply to jobs directly rather than going through recruiters?
• onebot 5y ago
  I have founded 5x companies now. My last two have been remote only. I don't think I will ever go back unless I made physical hardware again--even then I might question it. I have moved my family from California to Berlin. It is great we can travel Europe and I can work from anywhere. The tooling is great these days. Dealing with several timezones has its own issues but we aim to do quick daily standup over discord (yes no more terrible threaded messages in Slack). We use Deel to handle payroll around the globe. We try and get a face-to-face meetup once/year. Everyone seems very happy. Now the only hard part is finding Rust engineers ;)
  • slyzmud 5y ago
    Friendly tip: if timezones are an issue, try hiring in south America. We have the advantage of sharing 4 working hours with Europe and California. Also with similar salaries you will get more qualified candidates. You might be surprised with the amount of rust engineers you will find.
• makecheck 5y ago
  I’m sure there are talented recruiters but generally I’m lucky if they connect any dots properly. Things like: “I see you have years of experience on X, here’s an opening in Y”, or “I found your resume <that clearly states objectives, including where I would work>, here’s a job in $faraway_city!”. In other words, they barely seem to read resumes or anything else so if they totally screw up key details of the position, that is probably par for the course. (Insert rant about losing StackOverflow Developer Stories, which actually allowed explicit tagging of things like preferred tech which made matching really easy.)
  • tbabb 5y ago
    Recruiters use automated tools to scrape LinkedIn profiles and send what amounts to customized spam.
  • joshstrange 5y ago
    > I’m sure there are talented recruiters but generally I’m lucky if they connect any dots properly. I'd love to meet one. Every recruiter I've worked with had trouble walking and chewing gum. It's infuriating that they aren't better at their jobs given how much they can make by placing even 1 developer.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  Many companies are struggling with is issue. I wouldn't be surprised if the policy evolved from when the recruiter got the assignment. Disruptive change is hard. In the business units that I manage, some units thrived under COVID and get better working remote. Others collapsed and remain barely functional. It requires alot capital and ROI to justify dealing with it. It's one of the infuriating aspects for working for giant companies.
• dhd415 5y ago
  I recently had a slew of interviews at FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies (and accepted a great offer at one of them) that were 100% remote. It's good to name and shame the ones that are lying or otherwise underhanded about it, but I've never seen so many good-paying, 100% remote roles available. Do get it in writing and it never hurts to focus on companies with a track record of doing remote well rather than just doing it under pandemic duress.
• caffeine 5y ago
  Anyone have experience being remote cofounders in the very beginning of a startup? In my case it’s someone I know well but we would be located in different cities. Would love to talk to anyone who has experience with this.
• syngrog66 5y ago
  I've learned to look for any ambiguous "weasel words" which nullify anything else they're attached to me: how much does this job pay? them: well they hired a guy a few months ago at $X for a similar role or them: we strive to pay market! me: which for your company and this role now is... ? me: can it be worked remotely 100%? them: yes probably, though I think they'd like you to come into office as much as possible me: brain melts
• carom 5y ago
  Apple did this. Initial recruiter said remote. Thankfully before interviews the hiring manager said not remote, I had done a challenge already though. Facebook did this. Recruiter said remote. Changed their mind that the rotational position would need to be in person. I'm very up front about being remote. I live in LA. A lot of companies don't have offices here. I have a nice life, property. I'm not a 24 year old who will upend their life for a job anymore. I like working from home. I like hanging out with my dog. I've lived in both Seattle and SF. I loathe SF and find Seattle incredibly depressing. I guess I've made it if I can say no to such opportunities.
• swerner 5y ago
  I’ve had a similar FAANG experience. They approached me, I made “no relocation” a non-negotiable condition from the start. We started talking, I did the marathon interview until late in the night (CET vs PT), put my formal application in their system, and after two months they said they were ready to make me an offer. On the same day, it turned out that they had not even bothered to look up the pay range for my country. Instead, I was asked for the fifth time if I were willing to move to California.
• awb 5y ago
  Long-time remote-only recruiter here (and previous developer & startup CEO). In the worst case, they're lying. In the best case, there's a communication breakdown. Some possible communication breakdowns: 1) Identifying decision makers - It sometimes takes a while to find all the decision makers in an organization for an open position. It isn't always just the hiring manager and as a recruiter I'm not always told up front. Sometimes it might be embarrassing for the hiring manager, or maybe they don't even know. Sometimes the decision maker hands off a hiring assignment, but then sees its not what they want and takes back control. Unfortunately, that can sometimes mean a couple candidates getting deep into the hiring pipeline before it's clear. And then once you find the decision maker, that's when requirements can change where "remote ok" becomes "remote not ok". 2) Hiring ahead of the curve - Some clients will start a hiring process in anticipation of a new project coming through and then have to shut it down when it doesn't pan out. So it's possible a new remote team might be designed around a specific project and then the project gets modified or shut down and the remote team is no longer needed, but some candidates are funneled into other open positions that have different requirements. 3) Changing strategy - Some clients, especially startups, pivot in reaction to client or team feedback pretty quickly. If a job gets posted and candidates start moving through the pipeline, but the team keeps rejecting them, then the job req might change based on that feedback, but candidates already partially through the pipeline might feel like it's a bait and switch. I'm sure there are more possible explanations, but those are a few I've experienced myself even though I'd consider myself a very ethical recruiter. > I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is I charge 0 up front, 10% of the base salary on the start date and another 10% of the base salary on the 6mo anniversary if they're still employed. Every recruiter is different though. Many charge an upfront fee or minimal hourly/weekly rate in addition to a % of the salary (or total comp). > it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect. Those recruiters don't last very long. And it's a sign that they don't know what they're doing. At that point they're glorified paper pushers, shuttling resumes from one place to another. If I don't have someone specific in mind for a role, then I typically review up to 150-300 resumes for a given position and reach out to 50-100 for pre-screening questions. Of those, only about 25-50 might respond. Of those, I might interview 10-20. Of those, I typically recommend the top 2-4 candidates to my client. I don't wait to pick the top 2-4, I just know from running my own company and engineering teams who I would hire and who I wouldn't and recommend candidates as soon as they successfully cross all of my screening steps. The problem is if you flood a company with candidates, it takes them too long to schedule all those interviews and make a decision. By sending only 2-4, I can get them all through 2-3 rounds of company interviews in 1-2 weeks, and then the company can make a quick decision.
• dxxvi 5y ago
  If you think that they're dishonest with you, then ... play that dishonest game with them: you can tell them that you accept that onsite job and will be in the office at that time on that day. On the day that you're supposed to be in the office, you tell them that their office is too far and you cannot go there. They'll let you go and will also have to spend all the time and effort to find another person for your position. After a few times like that, they'll realize that it's better to be frank at the beginning.
• coldtea 5y ago
  >When they pointed out they had been hired as remotes they were met with a collective shrug - the job opening didn't say remote, the agreement they signed didn't say remote. The recruiter was wrong but that's not the company's problem. One thing they can do is stay enough so that the company has spent funds training them, while they're not productive yet, and then quit.
• DeadMouseFive 5y ago
• encryptluks2 5y ago
  Several months going through an interview is too much. No company is worth that much time unless you have an attorney drawing up contracts along the way, so that is the first red flag. Now, the hiring manager convinced you to spend evenings/weekends prepping for coding and design interviews. This sounds training, and by law they may have been required to pay for that. In the future, you shouldn't spend more than an hour or two prepping for an interview unless they offer to pay. If you don't have the skills needed, then I'd recommend just telling them that. Companies that try to get you do make a big initial unpaid investment in time will also be the kind that will expect you to work a ton of overtime unpaid. In regards to the remote work, get it in writing upfront. Recruiters are dirty, so maybe this is a valuable lesson to understand that from now on.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tonymet 5y ago
  If it's something important, and it's not in writing – it's best to assume that it won't happen. Recruiters will tell you anything to close the deal: fake valuations & equity info, incorrect work responsibilities, made up descriptions of work culture. Recruiters are a sales position. They are selling you the company. Their job is to close you. And there is little if any recourse to them lying unless it's documented and protected by employment law.
• wiseguy317 5y ago
  Most of FAANG has been pretty open about they want people back in the office, at least part of the time. A lot of companies are talking about hybrid models, so that is probably where we will end up. We will get there a lot faster if the economy tanks and the power shifts away from the employee. Hope I am wrong, I love WFH.
• dvtrn 5y ago
  Adding my own anecdote about this: Despite the job ad, recruiter and hiring manager all confirming "yes we are a remote first company", Hybrid-RTO was announced recently with a mandatory minimum of one day in the office for those who live in HQ city. And while on the one hand I appreciate the Hybridization of "if you want to work primarily from the office, fine, if you want to work primarily from home, fine", it also doesn't feel like a true choice of home or office considering my manager has nagged me each Friday since this was announced because "someone said you only went to the office once this week?" Which I guess means someone in leadership has someone else silently taking attendance and reporting back to managers who shows up and who doesn't? Within my department and even my functional team of six, I'm the only one who actually lives in the HQ city-which means I'm beholden to the RTO. Which means even when it's time to have face-to-face, talkie-talkies with people on my team or in my department, even if I'm in the office: none of them are. Is it worth leaving over? Probably not. I've been very firm on my boundaries and disconnecting from work, and so far the company hasn't tried stepping over them. Frankly, I'd probably be in the office a lot more if we didn't subscribe to that stupid-damn open office workspace layout, and the internet weren't so dodgy..
• kapildev 5y ago
  One question related to remote position: how much less should I expect compated to in-person one?
• prima-facie 5y ago
  > When they pointed out they had been hired as remotes they were met with a collective shrug - the job opening didn't say remote, the agreement they signed didn't say remote. The recruiter was wrong but that's not the company's problem. That's why during the interview process you need to repeat it multiple times to all parties involved - to make sure they are all on board. After the interview/when accepting the offer you need to get it in writing as an appendix to the contract or any other form that's legally acceptable.
• MY_recruiter 5y ago
  I am so sorry you had been treated like this! It make sense to specifically ask about the remote policy when you are meeting with the hiring team - if you are working with outside recruiters (who got paid a fee for each placement, as oppose to inside recruiters, who are salaried) they may not know the current policy or the plan for the future. In all fairness, at least SOME of the FAANG companies were pretty transparent about their plans for 'return to office'. For people interested in being fully remote, check out the company I work for - LeanTaaS. We had adopted "flexibility first" model in late 2021: https://leantaas.com/blog/the-future-of-work-at-leantaas-is-flexibility-first-what-that-means-and-why-it-matters/ https://leantaas.com/blog/the-future-of-work-at-leantaas-is-...
• royaltjames 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is, but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect. Recruiter here. You nailed it! Recruiters are influencers: nothing more, nothing less. I'm writing a video essay to help me grieve the human-centric inane events you are describing that I lived daily for years. Compensation model differs but if people are interested I can let you know. Sometimes it’s the recruiter that originates the lie, sometimes it’s the company/process that dictates the lie. Regardless, your interview process is a datapoint that I have collected to influence hiring managers to allow more remote roles if they really liked you. Sometimes that data has been used to boot other agencies from working for them so I can have more control and make myself and my team look better. Who tf knows really? There is but only asymmetric information in this deal. It's disingenuous from the start sometimes. I've hired loads of devs that weren't looking for a job (passive candidates) even pre 2020. A lot of those wanted remote or even partial WFH and I still got them to commute from West Seattle to Redmond. Sometimes it works out where the recruiter can establish rapport with a candidate enough to coax them into a hybrid situation (i've done it dozens of times) for $5-15k more a year (puke emojis). For me, that eventually turns into self loathing, disdain. How do you make it to hiring committee, when you wanted remote as that was established from the start (on your side)? The recruiter (mistake by moving too fast, lies, who tf knows why) may or may not have known you wanted remote and at the worst expected you to be a fence sitter and pushed you through as 'it all comes out in the wash' (on their side). Maybe they take candidates through the process to stack rank them and see who they can make exceptions for and yeet the rest. Who knows: everyone is different as much as the company they are interviewing for. Like, I have read the posts about tech hiring being broken, and let me tell you what. It's more than just a mental athletic gauntlet of tree traversal and finding big O. Together - candidates and recruiters alike - we are helplessly nibbling at yet just a mouthful of the present soul crushing sausage-like shitberg.
• stevespang 5y ago
• emerged 5y ago
  The mainstreaming of remote work is going to ruin all the fun for people like me who have been doing it for decades. Should’ve seen this coming. My reaction is going to be to start my own company I guess.
• joshstrange 5y ago
  I have yet to work with an external recruiter (not an in-house one) that wasn't horrible at their job. I'm aware of how much a recruiter can make when placing someone and it's surprising to me that the world of recruiters doesn't look more like real estate (where repeat business is their bread and butter). I wish I had friends/coworkers who could recommend a competent recruiter but I've only ever heard horror stories from them as well. All recruiters I've worked with have the following failings: 1. Zero, and I mean zero, knowledge of anything technical and/or related to tech. They will fumble/mixup frameworks and languages constantly. I'm not asking for deep knowledge but it's not hard to learn about the big frameworks (just the names and generally what they do "frontend framework", "backend framework", "ORM") and google is free. 2. Terrible communication. They will ghost you or miss scheduled calls and then come up with sob stories of why they couldn't even send a text/email letting you know they wouldn't be able to make the meeting 3. Liars. They will lie about any and everything to try to place you. Have a tiny blurb about a lang/framework on your resume? They will mis-represent you as an expert and/or they will lie to you about what a company is looking for. 4. This is a part-time gig at best for them. Before I learned all recruiters were terrible I tried contacting a recruiter I had talked to in the past when I was looking for a new job, of course they weren't doing recruiting anymore. There must be massive turnover in this industry. 5. Lazy. 2 jobs ago I literally handed the recruiter the company I wanted to work for on a silver platter. I was young and native and thought I needed to go through a recruiter even though I knew the company was hiring. They failed at the simple task of handing the company my resume. I ended up contacting the company directly and was hired within a week. I never heard from that recruiter again, they didn't even follow up. I know that real estate has high turnover as well but there /are/ good agents out there. Do good recruiters even exist (not talking in-house)? Every time I switch jobs I consider quitting tech and just becoming a tech recruiter because they are all so terrible and I know I could do better.
• bob55 5y ago
• sgsvnk 5y ago
  It is also partly your friend's mistake. These things should be in writing for many reasons - - the recruiter could just possibly lie that she never mentioned remote work - the recruiter could have left the company and could possibly never answer your messages - the doc would stand as a point of argument with the company without involving another person into the discussion
• ProdigalFilio 5y ago
  Read the contracts and emails carefully. Written word is Gold.
• careersaas 5y ago
  This is something that we are trying to solve at Careersaas. We take "remote ratings" from those who have applied for roles at companies, but also we algorithmically measure the ratio of remote positions, text indicating a remote role within a job post, and then add a score. Here's Gartner, for example: https://app.careersaas.com/portal/companyprofile/662a55634c11a6916367706de56da84da751cdd4/Gartner https://app.careersaas.com/portal/companyprofile/662a55634c1...
• sdfgdfghj 5y ago
  Name the company, please.
• ruh-roh 5y ago
  In a weird way - this kind of thing has pushed me towards companies that aren't anywhere near my current location, even/especially international. It makes the conversation super clear, recruiters & hiring managers can't dance around it. International brings in the prospects of visas and such. I am in the Midwest and just joined a company headquartered in SV in a remote role. If they had tried to pull some remote bait-and-switch I would have just chuckled and asked for first class tickets in/out one day a week, or asked for the moon in relocation fees.
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