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I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters resp

• nathias 4y ago
  ghosting is pretty standard in my experience, 1-2 months of interviewing and testing then nothing is pretty standard in the industry
  • meibo 4y ago
    I went through four interviews with (insert popular encrypted messaging solution) a while ago and got a verbal offer, then proceeded to be ghosted entirely, no more replies, from multiple people. Still don't know what happened. How is this acceptable? So much wasted time, and not just for me. I basically interviewed the entire team I was supposed to be working with.
    • CoastalCoder 4y ago
      Why redact the company name? It would be a kindness to warn us away from them.
      • meibo 4y ago
        I still respect what they do, I don't respect their hiring practices or representatives. They are quite present on HN, for what it's worth.
        • CoastalCoder 4y ago
          Fair enough, thanks for explaining.
  • inglor 4y ago
    Here (Israel) it's illegal, you can reject a candidate for pretty much any (non discriminatory) reason but you have to tell them about it pretty promptly. It's weird there are US states where it's not a requirement.
    • somenameforme 4y ago
      One practical problem is that there are a fair amount of people who are simply unstable, and if told why they were rejected (in very neutral to positive framing) they will actively challenge it and even go pseudo-stalker mode over it. Dealing with just a handful of these guys is enough to do away with providing any sort of feedback. Like many things, a few bad apples ruin nice things for everybody.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nathias 4y ago
        ghosting in no way solves this problem, it's universally acknowledged as worse than a simple 'no'
      • llanowarelves 4y ago
        Then we have a right (and moral right) to ghost companies without any notice, too.
        • dnissley 4y ago
          Yes, in the US you do. Makes you look bad just like it makes a company that does it look bad.
    • htrp 4y ago
      Isan email that says we've moved on with another candidate sufficient or do you have to give the exact reason?
• spicyusername 4y ago
  That's terrible, but I can't say I'm surprised. Amazon has done nothing but earn a reputation for treating it's employees, potential or otherwise, atrociously.
• jdthedisciple 4y ago
  Well I hope you didn't put all your eggs in the AWS basket ...
• mrjin 4y ago
  I would say not that bad if you take it from a different angle: what if you managed to get there and then laying off started?
  • nicolas_t 4y ago
    Wouldn't that be better? They'd get a severance pay?
    • hawski 4y ago
      Most certainly not, because they would not work long enough.
      • bluGill 4y ago
        since amazon has a policy to layoff the bottom 6% every year (numbers may be off), any good manager will be constantly looking for someone to hire into the bottom 6% role so they can keep their good people. Since they are not actually looking for someone who can do a good job they don't care if they treat you well.
        • distcs 4y ago
          I keep hearing this trope but this is very naive. A manager simply cannot keep hiring into bottom 6% role. All candidates are subject to the same type of interviews. Every interviewer has to give a "hire" decision for the new candidate. Then there is a bar-raiser interview in Amazon where the interviewer belongs to an unrelated team. They need to give a "hire" decision too. Unless all of this happens, a manager cannot simply hire a new candidate. There is no way a manager can simply hire into the bottom 6% role to keep their good people.
          • beastcoast 4y ago
            I saw this happen personally. I was in the interview loop along with the hiring manager, HM was not inclined but the bar raiser and other people on the loop, myself included, were inclined but as a downlevel (L7 -> L6). Candidate is hired, I start mentoring him, he gets dev-listed (aka Focus) within two months, is pushed out by month six. I can only assume the HM had an axe to grind against this candidate, and saw a H2F opportunity.
• sneak 4y ago
  • comice 4y ago
    human beings can often find situations like job interviews stressful. OP is probably a human.
    • j33zusjuice 4y ago
      An interview with one of the largest, most important tech companies in the world. Everything about landing a job there makes you more valuable. You have the prestige of having worked at AWS, who are known for hiring only top talent. And you’ll have worked at a scale unrivaled outside of a handful of other large tech companies. I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about working at AWS, but if you can tolerate it for a while, I’m sure you’ll have gained a lot of valuable experience. The trouble, it seems, is getting out before AWS makes you completely miserable. /(Based on people I know who have worked there, and comments I’ve read around the internet. None of this is first-hand experience.)/ I am still curious about the other question, though.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        > You have the prestige of having worked at AWS > I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about working at AWS, wut?
• gardenhedge 4y ago
  What was the salary or benefits that made you decide to endure that?
  • throw_aws_inter 4y ago
    Don't know and I am desperate enough to not care about salary at this point: I apply for jobs everywhere and the only times I have had a reply the last 6 months (except for AWS), I was offered positions with relocating to other countries.
    • gardenhedge 4y ago
      If you don't care about salary then I recommend going to some small bank or finance place.
• notadev 4y ago
  This is why my only response to Amazon recruiter emails is “No thank you”.
• JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I'm thinking the recruiters were the first to be let go.
• rr888 4y ago
  This is seemed pretty standard practice now, small companies, big companies, recruiters, FAANG. Actually Amazon for me was the best - I deliberately followed up a week later and they actively apologized and provided some feedback.
  • usrusr 4y ago
    Could it be a deliberate test for being persistent? "Candidate does not jump through hoops to follow up, if they are not sufficiently interested we aren't either" Then on the other hand, nobody ever got promoted for being nice to rejects. If their processes select for ambition (and they sure do), nothing that does not promise promotion will ever get done and that should qualify as explanation three times over.
    • rr888 4y ago
      Well they didn't change their mind. :) I think providing feedback is work which also requires coordination from more than one people, so is easy to avoid.
• IshKebab 4y ago
  From what I hear Amazon is a terrible employer even for highly skilled positions, so maybe it's for the best.
• jvermillard 4y ago
  same experience with Amazon a while ago, same with Microsoft, looks like ghosting is common
• golergka 4y ago
• speeder 4y ago
  That is just Amazon being Amazon. When they interviewed me the first time, the interviewer didn't show to work, so they asked another guy to interview me, he ended interviewing me in a language he didn't knew, to a position using another language entirely, the whole thing was a farce. Some years later Amazon recruiters contacted me, asked me to go interview in person. Then during the interview in their offices, they literally forgot me for several hours in a random room of the building, the employees left at the end of shift, and left me alone in the floor with nobody in it, and I had no idea where the exit was. I really need a job and been applying to lots of companies, but I won't apply to Amazon again.
  • throw_aws_inter 4y ago
    Oh yeah, I didn't mention everything, I had analogous experience. At the second interview video call the interviewer didn't show up, because the recruiter forgot to tell him about it. At the fifth video call with a different interviewer, he was an hour late because of the daylight savings change, again the recruiters' fault.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    this seems like a hazing ritual to make sure only those willing to be abused make it in.
    • muzani 4y ago
      From being on various recruiting positions, I believe it's usually just incompetence or laziness. Hiring tends to happen when there's not enough people. Only the people who can do the job are qualified to assess whether someone can do the job. So you have people who are already at double the workload having to take time to design and handle interviews and such. And by the time you get everyone to sign off on hiring this guy at the extravagant tech salary, economic downturn forces you to fire a bunch of people. In a recession, the least useful people are probably HR.
      • nopenopenopeno 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dxxvi 4y ago
  This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. Calling them just makes me more stressful/sad.
  • jenscow 4y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Guess how many times anyone has called a recruiter and heard "Oh yes, you got the job - I've been waiting all week for you to call me about it"?
    • Retric 4y ago
      It’s useful to call back because if you did well but they picked someone else recruiters can often send you to some other interview with a different team. This common because a team will often say we want person X, but Y is also acceptable if X declines.
  • akhmatova 4y ago
    This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. No - it just means the decision has been made, and you won't be hired. Which is different from "you failed". It could just as easily be their failure to evaluate you properly.
    • abfan1127 4y ago
      I came here to say this. You didn't fail. Its just not a good fit. maybe they are incompetent, and saving you heartache in the long run. Maybe they weren't able to extract your relevant experience. maybe you didn't share effectively. Just keep moving and good luck!
  • driverdan 4y ago
    It's also a sign of having bad culture. Companies should always contact candidates in a reasonable amount of time.
    • iamwpj 4y ago
• bluedino 4y ago
  Very similar experience. Checking on my application using the link they provide would still show "under consideration", but I knew after 2-3 weeks I wasn't going to get a call back. Someone finally got back to me after I emailed/called a few people I had dealt with along the way and they confirmed it.
• trentnix 4y ago
  Sounds familiar! Not to mention the interview itself being a never ending stream of “tell me about a time when…” Eventually you’ll get a “No” along with a message that, per policy, they don’t provide feedback. And then you’ll get several emails insisting you send your feedback, because they really want to “improve the process”. *facepalm* Unfortunately, despite assurances to the contrary, I was generally unimpressed with the quality of the people doing the interviewing. One of them was in his kitchen, while family members moved about behind him. Another didn’t share video, because reasons, making every silence while they made their notes that much more awkward. And another would spend 2+ minutes typing in silence until finally asking the next question, ruining any opportunity for flow or conversation. Judging by Amazon’s recent growth (prior to the recent layoffs), I’m not sure anyone has had time for any engineering. They’ve all been stuck doing interview “loops”.
  • kurtreed 4y ago
    In one Amazon interview the guy asked a coding challenge that he had apparently come up with himself. I realized later it was NP-complete.
    • dmurray 4y ago
      Is that a bad thing? A lot of real world problems don't have simple computational complexity. I'd learn more about someone from how they considered heuristic tradeoffs and assumptions that could produce a "good enough" solution to a tough problem than seeing if they could reproduce Dijkstra's algorithm from memory.
      • kurtreed 4y ago
        It wasn't framed as "find an approximate/heuristic solution".
        • dllthomas 4y ago
          You can offer. Nothing about it being NP should prevent your implementing an exact solution, though. It'll be slow as balls on (at least) some inputs, and you should surface that, but maybe they only need something that works for N<5 or something. That's different than it being undecidable, in which case you have to insist on providing something other than an exact algorithm that handles every input.
• tootie 4y ago
  I sat through Amazon's process twice. Both times was 9 total hours of interviewing. Both times ghosted at the end.
• godtoldmetodoit 4y ago
  I will never again interview for Amazon unless I am about to be evicted and they are the only one left in town. Interviewed for a senior dev role, went through all the rounds, took days off of work to be available, and after the final round they just ghosted me. I had to follow up to find out they had chosen someone else. The amount of time I put into those interviews was absurd, reading up on all their principles, coming up with stories from my career where I met their principles etc. To then get ghosted at the end was a real slap in the face.
  • Eumenes 4y ago
    I think I'd rather dig holes over working for Amazon - I've never heard anything positive out of that place.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      It seems to be a mixed bag. Don't know folks there who are developers specifically but I know people who say they really like it (admittedly fairly senior) and I know people who couldn't wait to get out after a rather short period.
      • 4m1rk 4y ago
        Wow lot of complains here. I've had a good experience interviewing with Amazon few months ago. Recuiter was supper supportive and following up constantly. The interview rounds were also relatively nice. The only thing was to prep for all those behavioral questions. Been working there for a few weeks and so far better than what I expected.
• par 4y ago
  Exact same thing happened to me with Amazon. Spent a considerable amount of time interviewing with them for a manager position, then they simply ghosted with zero recruiter response for weeks on end. Finally they told me they ended up closing the position.
• fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  You are mad they didnt just hand you a job that pays 450k a year?
• y-c-o-m-b 4y ago
  I tried to refer a friend to AWS and this happened to them as well. Twice. Here's the thing though: you know all those horror stories you've heard about big tech companies and how they operate? Most of them are true, so if you actually care about the field then AWS is not the place for you. Especially if you're senior. Junior devs: you'll want to start here to build your rep and get a taste for awful at least. EDIT: I should add that the ghosting of my friend was confirmed to be due to lay-off of the recruiters, so that's most likely the reason for the majority of the ghosting complaints here.
• timmit 4y ago
  I was planning for applying for AWS as well, but since their lay off, I didn't Thanks for sharing.