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This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're havin

This is specifically in reference to warehouse workers, not the tech side of things. Though I've heard from many recently ex-Amazon engineers that they're having real trouble recruiting engineers now too

7ewis 4y ago
From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job compared to other big tech companies.
- yojo 4y ago
  Same. I’m not on Facebook’s radar, but I get Amazon recruiter spam to my inbox every 2-3 months. This is a far higher rate than any other company.
- sefrost 4y ago
  I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time. They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the interviews puts me off from engaging.
  - jen20 4y ago
    I’m regularly asked to talk to AWS recruiters, but always decline unless they assure me up front they will never ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. They’re still not hurting enough for that common sense step to have been taken, so I will not be talking to them.
  - maherbeg 4y ago
    I recommend asking them to take you off of their recruiting lists. They'll still contact you but way less frequently.
TrianguloY 4y ago
Probably depends on region/country/situation. Applied for an engineer position in Europe a few weeks ago, got to the last round of interviews, was rejected (probably because I'm horrible trying to explain things with that STAR method, I think the rest was ok). I don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.
xedrac 4y ago
It turns out when you treat your employees as disposable resources to be exploited, instead of human beings, people don't want to work there. I have several friends that worked for Amazon as engineers and from their stories, I don't think I'll ever consider working for Amazon. They probably have some good teams in there somewhere. And let's not forget their "hire to fire" practices to meet their turnover quotas.
dktoao 4y ago
From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out. Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't know if I'd make the cut and I'm sure it'd be a SUBSTANTIAL pay increase, but I haven't followed up with any Amazon recruiters simply because of their reputation as the sort of company who's comfortable with employees having visible breakdowns.
- influx 4y ago
  I worked at Amazon 8 years and it is very manager and team dependent on what your experience is. I got to work on S3 and Alexa, and have no regrets. I learned so much, had a bunch of fun and worked with really smart people. Got paid well too. Downside, there was no free snacks. shrug
  - dktoao 4y ago
    I'm sure there are great teams to work for at Amazon. After all it is a large company with many different offices all over that does a lot of different things. However, my naïve estimation is that I am not very likely to land on one of these teams and much more likely to end up in a meat grinder. However, like I said, that is just my perception and I could be wrong. I just don't intend to find out.
    - influx 4y ago
      For sure, it's not for everyone, and I would encourage everyone at any job they interview for to also vet the people and team you are going to be working with. Ask them hard questions about performance, expectations and on call burden.
  - tylerhou 4y ago
    implying bananas aren't snacks
sidvit 4y ago
I'm a fairly inexperienced software engineer (<2 yrs experience) and I've been contacted by 3 separate Amazon recruiters on Linkedin in the past month alone if that means anything
- starky 4y ago
  I don't even do any coding and have gotten contacted by their recruiter for a SWE position in the past month. Seems like their recruiters are resorting to spray and pray when it comes to finding new hires.
  - leephillips 4y ago
    That’s nothing. I’ve never programmed a computer, just recently learned how to use an abacus, and been in a coma for three years—yet 43 Amazon recruiters email and call me seven times a day for a software senior management job.
    - notpachet 4y ago
      You may be qualified for that, actually.
    - maccolgan 4y ago
      Sounds like the competence of an average senior manager.
treeman79 4y ago
Yep. They keep messaging me. Could double my salary and not a chance I would work there. I know some recent grads that are starting there however. I miss the days when I was young totally clueless about corporate or political values and I just wanted to program stuff. Was so much easier.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  > corporate or political values If you think any company has any real values beyond "make as much money as possible" you're doing yourself a disservice. I would never work for amazon because I refuse to grind leetcode, but in an odd way they're almost the most honest about their mission being to make money.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    I’m totally happy to work for a place that wants to make as much money as possible. That is a great thing. Making as much money as possible by milking the government or using the government to regulate your competitors things is another matter Only allowing one voice in politics is super dangerous.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    A company's true loyalty is naturally to its shareholders but it's a bit of a cop out on your part to deny the fact that there are different levels of ethicality within different companies (palentir vs yacht games).
VerminOctopus1 4y ago
I can’t be the only one who had this experience. I recently had the choice between pursuing a cool startup position and an AWS position. Once I was emailed all of the AWS interview material and the 4 hour itinerary… I just had to ask myself if it was even worth putting my time into it. The total comp would probably be better than the startup position, but everything else (work life balance, risk of being fired, opportunity for growth, etc) seemed (probably) worse from what I’ve heard. Suffice to say, I dropped out of the interview process and took the cool startup job instead.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  "4 hour itinerary" is hardly excessive for a big tech role, what are you on about?
  - VerminOctopus1 4y ago
    The point is that the role wasn’t tantalizing enough to justify taking off a day from my existing job and going through Amazon’s interview gauntlet. The other job I was interviewing for had a much more reasonable interview structure, no whiteboard bullshit, no live coding, no 4 hour sessions. I think it says a lot about the company and how they value prospective employees’ time.
jppope 4y ago
I feel like this post by Matthew Prince sums it up => https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1537541459137548290 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1537541459137548290
packetlost 4y ago
Considering I get an email at least once a week (sometimes more) to join them, I'm not surprised at this. Usually I go out of my way to tell them I'm not interested in working for Amazon in particular.
jerglingu 4y ago
This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.
robbyking 4y ago
I have a friend who was an engineer at Amazon, and it sounds like tech jobs at Amazon are a nightmare, too.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
Eventually their reputation will precede themselves with all job types. I think this also mimics their other business practices of short term-ish decisions for revenue instead of longer term practices to build a place where people are attracted naturally. What will happen with their tech products when they can't staff engineers, can't get ahead of the bad PR for recruiting and don't want to pay over market to attract those that will put up with their way of working? They might have some systemic outage level things happen where companies may take their business elsewhere. Or maybe not, I don't have a crystal ball. Cloud abstraction/migration technologies might be a good investment/startup.
amzn-throw 4y ago
I've been an engineer at Amazon for almost 10 years. Been promoted twice. Ask me anything. Yes, we're having a lot of trouble recruiting engineers, because of discussion threads like this where a lot of misinformation is shared about what it's like to work here. Is it tough? Yes. Is it competitive? Yes. Is there stack ranking? Yes. Is it the most fulfilling and challenging and interesting job I've had in 22 years of Software Development? (The latter half of my career has been here). Yes, yes, and yes. This is the best job I've ever had and I think it can be for a lot of others who want to have disproportionately large impact day-to-day and on-the-world.
- rashkov 4y ago
  Can you expand on this a bit? What makes the work so fulfilling? Is it just knowing the impact? The team is good? Are you learning and improving as an engineer?
  - amzn-throw 4y ago
    I'm glad you asked because it's a subtle thing, and may be related to me personally. But I would venture I'm not the only engineer like this. For me, I spent my whole career bouncing against the walls constraining of what an engineer role was supposed to be. I'd push back against requirements from Product Managers and be told I'm ruffling feathers. (Not directly, but indirectly). I'd see QA or Documentation struggling, and I'd jump in to help, and be told later that my contributions there are not appreciated. I'd see another part of the company do something wrong, bring it up, and be told there's nothing I can do. I'd have a great idea and be told "that makes sense, but we can't do it for <unsatisfying reasons>" Amazon, on the other hand, always nurtured this within me. Good ideas reign supreme. Most people I work with have very little ego - they just want to do the Right Thing for customers, and ship great solutions that solve real problems. NOTE: I'm not claiming this is universal. There are plenty of egomaniacal assholes that ruin whole teams. Those horror stories are out there too. But in my experience, working on 4 different teams, in 3 different geographies, they are by far the exception. My last 3 years in my career before Amazon, I was the tech lead for 3 different year-long projects in 2 different companies. Each we built exactly what we set out to do. Each went into production. Each was a collossal failure. Why? Customers didn't want it. We didn't solve the right problem. This has NEVER happened to me in a decade at Amazon. The "Working backwards" process is LEGIT. There are notable exceptions (Firephone!), but every single project I've personally worked on has been a monumental success. That's super important to me. I want my work to have meaning. I don't want to write code, exchange it for cash, and move on to the next thing. I want the things I build (mostly AWS services) to be useful to someone. So, this is what fulfillment means to me: * I can define my own job description via a lot of Ownership, and work on big problems within my job role (SDE), and outside of it. Despite Amazon's huge size, I never feel like a cog in a machine. I have a lot of power to fix problems I see in my team, org, and in the rest of the company. * Everything I've built I know has made an impact on people's lives (Developers, and their productivity) and that impact only grows. It feels really good knowing hundreds of thousands of developers are each a little (or a lot) more efficient and can spend more time on interesting problems rather than boring cruft, by using stuff I built. The "learning and improving" part is interesting. I would unequivocally say yes, and was a huge part of what I loved about the company a decade ago when I first joined. But that part is also as much a curse as is a blessing. Sometimes I actually wish I could just pause and keep doing what I'm doing and be GOOD at it without tackling the next tier of challenges. But it seems that as soon as I get good at anything, I find myself seeking the next level of complexity, and the company is equally happy to throw me into an even deeper part of the pool. So to some degree I always feel like I'm on the edge - always not sure if the problem I'm working on is solvable. At this point I just know that I'll get through it and figure it out in time. And if I don't, I'll learn a lot about why it doesn't work. So maybe I just take this for granted now. It doesn't spark joy day to day, unlike the other 2 bullet points.

7ewis 4y ago

From the tech side, I'd say Amazon and Facebook are by far the most frequent to reach out on LinkedIn asking if I want a job compared to other big tech companies.

yojo 4y ago
Same. I’m not on Facebook’s radar, but I get Amazon recruiter spam to my inbox every 2-3 months. This is a far higher rate than any other company.
sefrost 4y ago
I have five different recruiters from Amazon messaging me every week here in Vancouver. They acknowledge that other Amazon recruiters have been messaging me at the same time. They must have a lot of open roles here, but all of the stories of having to grind leetcode style tests for the interviews puts me off from engaging.
- jen20 4y ago
  I’m regularly asked to talk to AWS recruiters, but always decline unless they assure me up front they will never ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. They’re still not hurting enough for that common sense step to have been taken, so I will not be talking to them.
- maherbeg 4y ago
  I recommend asking them to take you off of their recruiting lists. They'll still contact you but way less frequently.

TrianguloY 4y ago

Probably depends on region/country/situation. Applied for an engineer position in Europe a few weeks ago, got to the last round of interviews, was rejected (probably because I'm horrible trying to explain things with that STAR method, I think the rest was ok). I don't think they have a lack of candidates to be honest.

xedrac 4y ago

It turns out when you treat your employees as disposable resources to be exploited, instead of human beings, people don't want to work there. I have several friends that worked for Amazon as engineers and from their stories, I don't think I'll ever consider working for Amazon. They probably have some good teams in there somewhere. And let's not forget their "hire to fire" practices to meet their turnover quotas.

dktoao 4y ago

From what I have heard, they are a terrible company to work for (even for SWE). I could be wrong but that reputation alone has made me ignore most job postings and recruiters reaching out. Even if they could offer me a 20+% pay rise.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Yeah, I don't know if I'd make the cut and I'm sure it'd be a SUBSTANTIAL pay increase, but I haven't followed up with any Amazon recruiters simply because of their reputation as the sort of company who's comfortable with employees having visible breakdowns.
influx 4y ago
I worked at Amazon 8 years and it is very manager and team dependent on what your experience is. I got to work on S3 and Alexa, and have no regrets. I learned so much, had a bunch of fun and worked with really smart people. Got paid well too. Downside, there was no free snacks. shrug
- dktoao 4y ago
  I'm sure there are great teams to work for at Amazon. After all it is a large company with many different offices all over that does a lot of different things. However, my naïve estimation is that I am not very likely to land on one of these teams and much more likely to end up in a meat grinder. However, like I said, that is just my perception and I could be wrong. I just don't intend to find out.
  - influx 4y ago
    For sure, it's not for everyone, and I would encourage everyone at any job they interview for to also vet the people and team you are going to be working with. Ask them hard questions about performance, expectations and on call burden.
- tylerhou 4y ago
  implying bananas aren't snacks

sidvit 4y ago

I'm a fairly inexperienced software engineer (<2 yrs experience) and I've been contacted by 3 separate Amazon recruiters on Linkedin in the past month alone if that means anything

starky 4y ago
I don't even do any coding and have gotten contacted by their recruiter for a SWE position in the past month. Seems like their recruiters are resorting to spray and pray when it comes to finding new hires.
- leephillips 4y ago
  That’s nothing. I’ve never programmed a computer, just recently learned how to use an abacus, and been in a coma for three years—yet 43 Amazon recruiters email and call me seven times a day for a software senior management job.
  - notpachet 4y ago
    You may be qualified for that, actually.
  - maccolgan 4y ago
    Sounds like the competence of an average senior manager.

treeman79 4y ago

Yep. They keep messaging me. Could double my salary and not a chance I would work there. I know some recent grads that are starting there however. I miss the days when I was young totally clueless about corporate or political values and I just wanted to program stuff. Was so much easier.

dgfitz 4y ago
> corporate or political values If you think any company has any real values beyond "make as much money as possible" you're doing yourself a disservice. I would never work for amazon because I refuse to grind leetcode, but in an odd way they're almost the most honest about their mission being to make money.
- treeman79 4y ago
  I’m totally happy to work for a place that wants to make as much money as possible. That is a great thing. Making as much money as possible by milking the government or using the government to regulate your competitors things is another matter Only allowing one voice in politics is super dangerous.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  A company's true loyalty is naturally to its shareholders but it's a bit of a cop out on your part to deny the fact that there are different levels of ethicality within different companies (palentir vs yacht games).

VerminOctopus1 4y ago

I can’t be the only one who had this experience. I recently had the choice between pursuing a cool startup position and an AWS position. Once I was emailed all of the AWS interview material and the 4 hour itinerary… I just had to ask myself if it was even worth putting my time into it. The total comp would probably be better than the startup position, but everything else (work life balance, risk of being fired, opportunity for growth, etc) seemed (probably) worse from what I’ve heard. Suffice to say, I dropped out of the interview process and took the cool startup job instead.

deanCommie 4y ago
"4 hour itinerary" is hardly excessive for a big tech role, what are you on about?
- VerminOctopus1 4y ago
  The point is that the role wasn’t tantalizing enough to justify taking off a day from my existing job and going through Amazon’s interview gauntlet. The other job I was interviewing for had a much more reasonable interview structure, no whiteboard bullshit, no live coding, no 4 hour sessions. I think it says a lot about the company and how they value prospective employees’ time.

jppope 4y ago

I feel like this post by Matthew Prince sums it up => https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1537541459137548290 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1537541459137548290

packetlost 4y ago

Considering I get an email at least once a week (sometimes more) to join them, I'm not surprised at this. Usually I go out of my way to tell them I'm not interested in working for Amazon in particular.

jerglingu 4y ago

This is true. Job postings linger for close to a year before they can be filled, and in some cases positions will receive literally less than 10 applications over a week. It's even harder for more esoteric positions like data engineer.

robbyking 4y ago

I have a friend who was an engineer at Amazon, and it sounds like tech jobs at Amazon are a nightmare, too.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

Eventually their reputation will precede themselves with all job types. I think this also mimics their other business practices of short term-ish decisions for revenue instead of longer term practices to build a place where people are attracted naturally. What will happen with their tech products when they can't staff engineers, can't get ahead of the bad PR for recruiting and don't want to pay over market to attract those that will put up with their way of working? They might have some systemic outage level things happen where companies may take their business elsewhere. Or maybe not, I don't have a crystal ball. Cloud abstraction/migration technologies might be a good investment/startup.

amzn-throw 4y ago

I've been an engineer at Amazon for almost 10 years. Been promoted twice. Ask me anything. Yes, we're having a lot of trouble recruiting engineers, because of discussion threads like this where a lot of misinformation is shared about what it's like to work here. Is it tough? Yes. Is it competitive? Yes. Is there stack ranking? Yes. Is it the most fulfilling and challenging and interesting job I've had in 22 years of Software Development? (The latter half of my career has been here). Yes, yes, and yes. This is the best job I've ever had and I think it can be for a lot of others who want to have disproportionately large impact day-to-day and on-the-world.

rashkov 4y ago
Can you expand on this a bit? What makes the work so fulfilling? Is it just knowing the impact? The team is good? Are you learning and improving as an engineer?
- amzn-throw 4y ago
  I'm glad you asked because it's a subtle thing, and may be related to me personally. But I would venture I'm not the only engineer like this. For me, I spent my whole career bouncing against the walls constraining of what an engineer role was supposed to be. I'd push back against requirements from Product Managers and be told I'm ruffling feathers. (Not directly, but indirectly). I'd see QA or Documentation struggling, and I'd jump in to help, and be told later that my contributions there are not appreciated. I'd see another part of the company do something wrong, bring it up, and be told there's nothing I can do. I'd have a great idea and be told "that makes sense, but we can't do it for <unsatisfying reasons>" Amazon, on the other hand, always nurtured this within me. Good ideas reign supreme. Most people I work with have very little ego - they just want to do the Right Thing for customers, and ship great solutions that solve real problems. NOTE: I'm not claiming this is universal. There are plenty of egomaniacal assholes that ruin whole teams. Those horror stories are out there too. But in my experience, working on 4 different teams, in 3 different geographies, they are by far the exception. My last 3 years in my career before Amazon, I was the tech lead for 3 different year-long projects in 2 different companies. Each we built exactly what we set out to do. Each went into production. Each was a collossal failure. Why? Customers didn't want it. We didn't solve the right problem. This has NEVER happened to me in a decade at Amazon. The "Working backwards" process is LEGIT. There are notable exceptions (Firephone!), but every single project I've personally worked on has been a monumental success. That's super important to me. I want my work to have meaning. I don't want to write code, exchange it for cash, and move on to the next thing. I want the things I build (mostly AWS services) to be useful to someone. So, this is what fulfillment means to me: * I can define my own job description via a lot of Ownership, and work on big problems within my job role (SDE), and outside of it. Despite Amazon's huge size, I never feel like a cog in a machine. I have a lot of power to fix problems I see in my team, org, and in the rest of the company. * Everything I've built I know has made an impact on people's lives (Developers, and their productivity) and that impact only grows. It feels really good knowing hundreds of thousands of developers are each a little (or a lot) more efficient and can spend more time on interesting problems rather than boring cruft, by using stuff I built. The "learning and improving" part is interesting. I would unequivocally say yes, and was a huge part of what I loved about the company a decade ago when I first joined. But that part is also as much a curse as is a blessing. Sometimes I actually wish I could just pause and keep doing what I'm doing and be GOOD at it without tackling the next tier of challenges. But it seems that as soon as I get good at anything, I find myself seeking the next level of complexity, and the company is equally happy to throw me into an even deeper part of the pool. So to some degree I always feel like I'm on the edge - always not sure if the problem I'm working on is solvable. At this point I just know that I'll get through it and figure it out in time. And if I don't, I'll learn a lot about why it doesn't work. So maybe I just take this for granted now. It doesn't spark joy day to day, unlike the other 2 bullet points.