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Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

Amazon seems to be hurting for hires. Many people I know including myself who large tech companies normally would not go near got several Amazon recruiters reaching out during our last job hunts.

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The amount of bad press AWS had racked up regarding bad WLB is not lost on anyone

I spoke with an AWS recruiter last week for an infosec role and they were surprised I was not interested. Sent them links to the nytimes and other pieces showing it’s a grind house.

The comp premium is just not there imho for the hit to quality of life (at least for the roles I’d be eligible for).

I think in my last interview I implemented my LRU cache and BFS graph code too quickly. They are desperate for a certain kind of engineer :)

I had an AWS manager reach out to me last year to discuss working some Rust related stuff (and they knew that my Rust experience was very limited even before reaching out to me). They decided after an interview or two not to go ahead with it because I wasn't willing to relocate.

Can't imagine why they might be hurting for hires...

Yeah the relocation thing was a big reason I wasn’t interested. I think some time later, I saw on HN they decided to be a little more flexible.

They did had some interesting looking roles, but the entire work culture seems iffy to me.

We're seeing that lower in the food chain. We aren't even able to find people who can write a simple single function on the fly that compiles right. This isn't leet code, or big O, or anything. Just make it function. I guess anyone who could was hired by AMZ.

Yet one common trick they pull on experienced hires is to force them into a lower "level". While low-balling is an industry-wide practice, they have clearly taken it to the next level (ahem) by abusing the equivalence relationship to the Google/Facebook ladder.

To begin with, the "Senior" level at Amazon is designated L6; while Google/Facebook designates their "Senior" level L5/E5. If you visit Levels.fyi [1] you can see this equivalence clearly laid out... except Amazon recruiters / hiring managers seem to really believe that only someone who roughly qualifies for Google L6 can qualify for Amazon L6. I find this delusional at best, because precisely as another comment here said, Amazon does NOT currently allocate enough compensation premium to justify this "high bar". Heck, from the PoV of an actually competent candidate, why would they pick Amazon over other offers, if it means they would have to take a "title hit" in return for... mediocre total comp, worse WLB, constant gaslighting, and low job security?

[1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Cruise,Facebook,Googl...

I do not understand how you can lowball or downlevel people at scale. Everyone I know interviews at multiple companies and then compares offers. Some offers are more competitive some are less - just pick the best one in term of level/comp/interest.

The only hard thing is frankly balancing salary vs interest. Do you want more money to work on increasing ad click rate by 0.1% or less money to design software for Mars mission.

Not everyone who qualifies for any given offer necessarily has a better option available to them.

> I do not understand how you can lowball or downlevel people at scale

A common tactics is to enforce YoE requirements aggressively --- basically the jokes along the lines of "10 YoE w/ k8s". These days they do it less blatantly (i.e. the specifics are not written in the JD) but the spirit remains.

> The only hard thing is frankly balancing salary vs interest

I can only say from my recent experience that this is a simplified model. Not saying this is wrong, but some circumstances call for analysis of other factors, such as those involving career path planning. Wouldn't go too deep here but the trick is a lowball'd and/or downlevel'd offer at BigTech/FAANG might actually remain desirable. This unfortunately reinforces their (predatory) behavior, but such is the force of the market after all...

Can I ask why that is? Just WLB issues? Moral concerns?

Presumably a combination of WLB and Amazon’s tendency to PIP/fire employees much more readily than other tech companies.

I’m guessing it’s mostly bad press around work environments.

I personally didn’t bother going through because A) I wasn’t prepared and B) I was locked into a new lease and after some research the relocation benefits they offered wouldn’t be worth it. I believe at the time they weren’t overly flexible on work location.

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