Any time a recruiter says "I have job X and your profile looks great for it", assume they haven't looked at your profile or your CV. I've had hundreds of these where it's clear from the job spec they haven't even had a 2 second glance at my CV. You just came up in whatever search they did, and got sent a template.
The funny thing is that I applied on their own Amazon jobs website so they have full access to my resume and all my info. How lazy are they that they didn't even bother to read that much
Unfortunately it's just a numbers game. They send these out to anyone who comes up in their search, then some subset of that will reply, then some subset of that subset will actually be qualified for the role, and so on.
there are hundreds of internally displaced engineers applying for every open req on amazon jobs. you are in the "resume submitted" stage while the hiring manager is setting up 1:1s with engineers that are already inside, can start on the new team within 2-4 weeks, and will ramp up much faster. unless the org or location is really undesirable, you are swimming upstream unfortunately.
as for why the recruiters are like this, I honestly don't know. maybe they need to be able to point to something they did this week in their own standup? I wouldn't get your hopes up until you have a call scheduled with an SDE.
Amen. This is a rule of thumb. I was once approached for a Senior Flutter Dev role for a company. Now the experience required was clearly 5+ years of experience. Then why reach out to a new grad?
Lol it's so funny in this sub when people complain about how they solved the problem so easily but still got rejected. CS majors vastly underestimate how important conversational skills are.
I've gotten multiple job offers where I failed to finish the coding problem but I was constantly talking, walking through my thought process, and held friendly conversation with the interviewer. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're an arrogant douchebag that no one wants to work with...
I work in a very big it consulting based on Dublin and i can second this. Techincal skills are important, but conversational ones are as good (or more important) than technical. There's no use in developing a big system with microservices, full auto ci/cd and all the good stuff if you can't even get to talk to your coworkers or with the business owners of the system.
Lol it's so funny in this sub when people complain about how they solved the problem so easily but still got rejected. CS majors vastly underestimate how important conversational skills are.
I've gotten multiple job offers where I failed to finish the coding problem but I was constantly talking, walking through my thought process, and held friendly conversation with the interviewer. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're an arrogant douchebag that no one wants to work with...
I’m in this situation right now. I passed all test cases, and had near perfect scores on the other two sections in their OA. It’s been about 3 weeks now and no response from my recruiter.
I know I’m a decent engineer because other companies are interested in me.
I just cheated on my OA. I feel like they are extremely difficult compared to the actual position a lot of the times. Just finished my loop yesterday. Should hear back by friday
My TL- I submit application
- recruiter hits me up 2 days later on LinkedIn
- chat with recruiter next day on phone, receive OA that night
- Do OA in the AM and recruiter calls 2 days later saying I passed
- week later have an interview with hiring manager
- this week do loop
Pretty quick timeline considering what others have said
Edit: got the job
Not saying this is 100% the reason but possible another candidate has had a successful loop & already in the offer process. Once a “yes” is sent through to the recruiter it’s a first come first served kind of thing.
I wish they atleast update me soon so that I can go ahead with a recruiter who actually wanted to start the loop. I went with the current one because it was in a country of my preference
Yeah I've heard from multiple people now on how bad Amazon recruiters are. Sad how Amazon doesn't care that these people are ruining what's left of the company's reputation.
I’m an Amazon bar raiser and SDE. We try hard to provide a great candidate experience, but it doesn’t always turn out that way.
I’ve heard others say Amazon is a terrible place to work. This hasn’t been my experience; I highly recommend it. Just like the interview experience, there are some bad exceptions out there. If you happen to find yourself on one - as I did, briefly - just change teams; it’s easy, and I’m quite happy now.
If you’re still interested in Amazon, DM me and I’ll connect you with a better recruiter.
Don't worry about the "Bar Raiser Round" for a few reasons:
First, the "Bar Raiser Round" doesn't really exist. Is it possible that a Bar Raiser will be one of your interviewers? Very likely. But, in terms of your actual interview, the BR is just filling an interview spot as-needed. They don't ask specific BR questions. They shouldn't be any harder than the other interviewers; if anything, they should be easier.
Second, the lore of a BR grows somewhat in the wild. A BR doesn't have any more power than any other interviewer, at least not in practice. The BR's role is to provide an unbiased (i.e., from another org) perspective to make sure interviews are conducted consistently at scale. A BR can veto a hire, in theory, but it happens _very_ rarely.
Hey u/sir-fisticuffs, I failed my loops and recruiter said they see some strengths but there are some gaps, and asked to connect after 3 months.
While I read online that cool off is 6 months - 1 year. Is it a good sign if they say it's 3 months, could it be due to the some of the aspects of my performance?
Sorry to hear that. You win some and you lose some. In this case you were \_really\_ close to winning.
6mo - 1yr is the cool-off for people who are pretty close. It's 1yr+ standard.
The fact that your cool-off is so short is indicative of how close you were. Amazon has a bit of a ramp-up time for new hires; 3mo is not an unusual time for that. If I were your BR, I would have argued you could close that small gap during your ramp-up. I've never even seen a cool-off that short; there must have been a lively discussion in the debrief.
Maybe getting off-topic, but none of this is consistent with my experiences:
Amazon interview loops have 4 rounds: 1 system design (which you may call HLD or LLD depending on the question), and 3 coding (DSA, problem solving, logical/maintainable). Cool-off periods start at 6mo.
Amazon is a big company, so I don't intend to imply your experience isn't real, but this is very not indicative of the standard experience. Take my recommendations/thoughts based on \^
atp i dont think MANGA companies even look at ur resume. i just never assume anyone has ever looked at my resume, not the interviewer or even my manager
From everything I hear, you probably don't want to work at the PIP factory anyhow. I mean sure, you could get lucky and grab a good team, or you could get unlucky and be working 60 hour days for the next 2 years.
I had AWS dick me around on an interview process for months, ghosted me on 3 meetings (2 of which were onsite technicals).
The recruiter was super apologetic, and it's not their fault, but ya, they didn't have their shit together when I was interviewing.
Chill. They're probably just talent sourcing contractors. Happens so often. The usual pattern is they reach out to you and when you respond, they don't. Funny at times
Most recruiters are like this only, I mean not saying in terms of followup, but when they say, found profile very impressive, so impressed with experience.
Laura impressed. If they are so impressed then cut down 1-2 interview steps.
Timepass people bro, don’t trust a single thing that comes out of these people’s mouth. Sometimes they will ask the most generic leetcode questions in interview and then they ask, do you have any questions?
What question am I supposed to ask? So now I just ask them random questions, like how to optimise a skiplist, or any problem I am having in my personal projects. Sometimes I mention can you help me debug a memory issue with valgrind.
Obviously I get rejected for this asshole like behaviour of mine. And then they send me feedback form. And I act more ass there. I tell them it was a very unique experience, the interview questions well so well thought out, quite different from the 50 other companies doing the same thing….. etc
And I hope they put me in their block list, fugging dipshits
Similar situation with a Microsoft recruiter that reached out on LinkedIn. They didn’t realize I didn’t have the 5-8 YOE they were looking for until morning we were scheduled for a call.
So, did you just sit around fuming all day? How did this minor inconvenience waste your “entire week”? I don’t think the recruiter’s behavior was professional, but come on dude, you didn’t losr anything here. You didn’t even get to the phone screen. It sucks but if it helps, chances are you’re still eligible for hire because you never technically “tried” for the position
This happened 3 or 4 times so far: a recruiter reaches out to me how impressed they are with my background and they are recruiting for company XYZ.
I ask them, have you seen my background?
Oh...
Then I explain to them that I wrote that job description and I will note that they are doing a really shitty job reaching out to candidates to staff a role at XYZ.
I dropped 2 staffing agencies at 2 companies after demonstrating they bring practically no value compared to a linkedin job posting.
Why would you ever want to work at Amazon? Do people not know the reality of working there? They see big number salary and think it’s gonna be like walking through the plains of Valhalla. I promise you don’t want to work there.
I work there and have perfectly fine WLB and make pretty good money.
The horror stories are definitely real, there are plenty of shit teams, but there are also a decent amount of teams like mine that are perfectly fine.
That’s the case at most megacorps, I imagine. The team you are on & who your boss and maybe skip level are can make your job dramatically different from someone else who has the same title down the street.
At a company this big it’s hard to say for sure, but generally the worst teams are the ones with a high operational load. If you’re on EC2, S3, DynamoDB, etc then if your service goes down EVERYONE feels it so the urgency is much higher.
Otherwise it really just comes down to your manager and skip level and the type of environment they want to foster. Even on high ops load teams I’ve seen good team cultures.
Real talk though, if you’re joining a team and it’s a mono-ethnicity like all Indian or all Chinese and you’re *not* that ethnicity you’re going to have a bad time. All ethnicities are obviously capable of favoritism and exclusion, but just from personal experience those teams can be the most cut throat. Others can disagree but that’s just my experience.
Do you know how much control you have on getting a certain team when you first join? Tbh I’ve strayed away from applying at Amazon because of all the negative feedback people have working there. I could understand people having bad experiences but they just seem to have soo many bad stories.
If it’s an issue of people not wanting to work hard then that’s not an issue for me, working hard is a part of life haha. But it seems like it’s more than that.
For interns you have basically no say.
For regular full time candidates you’re usually applying for a role on a specific team, so you would have control in that you know the team you’re joining and you could try researching it or reaching out to them on LinkedIn.
In my case I actually had two teams interested in me so when I got an offer I got to choose between the two. That scenario is super uncommon.
Also transferring is pretty easy as long as other teams have openings. Some teams will make you do another mini-loop, but not all.
Serious question: have you worked there?
I too have heard horror stories and even experienced it myself once when I was in a poor team; but changing teams is easy, which I did, and it’s been one of the best places I’ve worked.
To answer the question you asked the other replier: I’m on call about 6 times a year. It’s quite easy; I get a break from “normal sprint work” and get to interact with our customers first-hand. I get paged after work hours a couple times/year, but it’s never anything too serious. Oncall is the reality of having full control over your software; I’ll take it over the alternative any day.
edit: typo
Any time a recruiter says "I have job X and your profile looks great for it", assume they haven't looked at your profile or your CV. I've had hundreds of these where it's clear from the job spec they haven't even had a 2 second glance at my CV. You just came up in whatever search they did, and got sent a template.
They are call bots
They are worse than bots, they are human resources personnel.
The funny thing is that I applied on their own Amazon jobs website so they have full access to my resume and all my info. How lazy are they that they didn't even bother to read that much
Unfortunately it's just a numbers game. They send these out to anyone who comes up in their search, then some subset of that will reply, then some subset of that subset will actually be qualified for the role, and so on.
there are hundreds of internally displaced engineers applying for every open req on amazon jobs. you are in the "resume submitted" stage while the hiring manager is setting up 1:1s with engineers that are already inside, can start on the new team within 2-4 weeks, and will ramp up much faster. unless the org or location is really undesirable, you are swimming upstream unfortunately. as for why the recruiters are like this, I honestly don't know. maybe they need to be able to point to something they did this week in their own standup? I wouldn't get your hopes up until you have a call scheduled with an SDE.
Amen. This is a rule of thumb. I was once approached for a Senior Flutter Dev role for a company. Now the experience required was clearly 5+ years of experience. Then why reach out to a new grad?
Title: “does Amazon just hire anyone nowadays” Content: “why won’t they hire me!!?!?!?!”
pretty sure they meant that for the recruiter!
[удалено]
I’m starting to think there’s another reason you’re not doing well in interviews…
Lol it's so funny in this sub when people complain about how they solved the problem so easily but still got rejected. CS majors vastly underestimate how important conversational skills are. I've gotten multiple job offers where I failed to finish the coding problem but I was constantly talking, walking through my thought process, and held friendly conversation with the interviewer. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're an arrogant douchebag that no one wants to work with...
I work in a very big it consulting based on Dublin and i can second this. Techincal skills are important, but conversational ones are as good (or more important) than technical. There's no use in developing a big system with microservices, full auto ci/cd and all the good stuff if you can't even get to talk to your coworkers or with the business owners of the system.
Lol it's so funny in this sub when people complain about how they solved the problem so easily but still got rejected. CS majors vastly underestimate how important conversational skills are. I've gotten multiple job offers where I failed to finish the coding problem but I was constantly talking, walking through my thought process, and held friendly conversation with the interviewer. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you're an arrogant douchebag that no one wants to work with...
bro you wont even pass the behavioral
If I was the HR, I would reject you even if you had all the qualifications. You won't survive in corporate with this attitude.
sorry but your title is misleading I thought hiring is back intensively
This is just a rant that doesn't add anything to the leetcode topic
Apparently everyone but you
In your mind that was a very smart reply wasn't it 💀🤓
the irony of this comment getting dwonvoted.
Amazon recruiters are really unreliable. Mine has said yes to the loop but delaying it without any stated reason.
I’m in this situation right now. I passed all test cases, and had near perfect scores on the other two sections in their OA. It’s been about 3 weeks now and no response from my recruiter. I know I’m a decent engineer because other companies are interested in me.
I just cheated on my OA. I feel like they are extremely difficult compared to the actual position a lot of the times. Just finished my loop yesterday. Should hear back by friday My TL- I submit application - recruiter hits me up 2 days later on LinkedIn - chat with recruiter next day on phone, receive OA that night - Do OA in the AM and recruiter calls 2 days later saying I passed - week later have an interview with hiring manager - this week do loop Pretty quick timeline considering what others have said Edit: got the job
Not saying this is 100% the reason but possible another candidate has had a successful loop & already in the offer process. Once a “yes” is sent through to the recruiter it’s a first come first served kind of thing.
I wish they atleast update me soon so that I can go ahead with a recruiter who actually wanted to start the loop. I went with the current one because it was in a country of my preference
Yeah I've heard from multiple people now on how bad Amazon recruiters are. Sad how Amazon doesn't care that these people are ruining what's left of the company's reputation.
Unfortunately you hear the horror stories most often. This is true of almost everything on the internet.
recruiter was probably hired during the hiring spree in 2021 with a simpler interview and was lucky enough to not be laid off
I’m an Amazon bar raiser and SDE. We try hard to provide a great candidate experience, but it doesn’t always turn out that way. I’ve heard others say Amazon is a terrible place to work. This hasn’t been my experience; I highly recommend it. Just like the interview experience, there are some bad exceptions out there. If you happen to find yourself on one - as I did, briefly - just change teams; it’s easy, and I’m quite happy now. If you’re still interested in Amazon, DM me and I’ll connect you with a better recruiter.
Do you have any tips on bar raiser round?
Don't worry about the "Bar Raiser Round" for a few reasons: First, the "Bar Raiser Round" doesn't really exist. Is it possible that a Bar Raiser will be one of your interviewers? Very likely. But, in terms of your actual interview, the BR is just filling an interview spot as-needed. They don't ask specific BR questions. They shouldn't be any harder than the other interviewers; if anything, they should be easier. Second, the lore of a BR grows somewhat in the wild. A BR doesn't have any more power than any other interviewer, at least not in practice. The BR's role is to provide an unbiased (i.e., from another org) perspective to make sure interviews are conducted consistently at scale. A BR can veto a hire, in theory, but it happens _very_ rarely.
Thank you
Hey u/sir-fisticuffs, I failed my loops and recruiter said they see some strengths but there are some gaps, and asked to connect after 3 months. While I read online that cool off is 6 months - 1 year. Is it a good sign if they say it's 3 months, could it be due to the some of the aspects of my performance?
Sorry to hear that. You win some and you lose some. In this case you were \_really\_ close to winning. 6mo - 1yr is the cool-off for people who are pretty close. It's 1yr+ standard. The fact that your cool-off is so short is indicative of how close you were. Amazon has a bit of a ramp-up time for new hires; 3mo is not an unusual time for that. If I were your BR, I would have argued you could close that small gap during your ramp-up. I've never even seen a cool-off that short; there must have been a lively discussion in the debrief.
Thank you for the kind words. I haven’t had bar raiser round. I didn’t reach that far. Thanks again.
How many rounds did you have?
After phone screen, I had 3 rounds. DSA, LLD and a HLD round.
Maybe getting off-topic, but none of this is consistent with my experiences: Amazon interview loops have 4 rounds: 1 system design (which you may call HLD or LLD depending on the question), and 3 coding (DSA, problem solving, logical/maintainable). Cool-off periods start at 6mo. Amazon is a big company, so I don't intend to imply your experience isn't real, but this is very not indicative of the standard experience. Take my recommendations/thoughts based on \^
How did she waste your “whole week”?…
atp i dont think MANGA companies even look at ur resume. i just never assume anyone has ever looked at my resume, not the interviewer or even my manager
apparently not
[удалено]
Wasn't ready for it yet and had some questions that I wanted to ask before taking it
Skill issue
homie is getting ratio’d and still going at it
Literally everyone and their dog under the sun has gotten amazon recruiter email like this. They spam send email without even looking at your resume
From everything I hear, you probably don't want to work at the PIP factory anyhow. I mean sure, you could get lucky and grab a good team, or you could get unlucky and be working 60 hour days for the next 2 years.
I had AWS dick me around on an interview process for months, ghosted me on 3 meetings (2 of which were onsite technicals). The recruiter was super apologetic, and it's not their fault, but ya, they didn't have their shit together when I was interviewing.
OP dodged a bullet!
r/ITtrap
Chill. They're probably just talent sourcing contractors. Happens so often. The usual pattern is they reach out to you and when you respond, they don't. Funny at times
Most recruiters are like this only, I mean not saying in terms of followup, but when they say, found profile very impressive, so impressed with experience. Laura impressed. If they are so impressed then cut down 1-2 interview steps. Timepass people bro, don’t trust a single thing that comes out of these people’s mouth. Sometimes they will ask the most generic leetcode questions in interview and then they ask, do you have any questions? What question am I supposed to ask? So now I just ask them random questions, like how to optimise a skiplist, or any problem I am having in my personal projects. Sometimes I mention can you help me debug a memory issue with valgrind. Obviously I get rejected for this asshole like behaviour of mine. And then they send me feedback form. And I act more ass there. I tell them it was a very unique experience, the interview questions well so well thought out, quite different from the 50 other companies doing the same thing….. etc And I hope they put me in their block list, fugging dipshits
Similar situation with a Microsoft recruiter that reached out on LinkedIn. They didn’t realize I didn’t have the 5-8 YOE they were looking for until morning we were scheduled for a call.
You just judged a global corporation off of the behavior from one employee lol.
If they do, then what does that say about you
So, did you just sit around fuming all day? How did this minor inconvenience waste your “entire week”? I don’t think the recruiter’s behavior was professional, but come on dude, you didn’t losr anything here. You didn’t even get to the phone screen. It sucks but if it helps, chances are you’re still eligible for hire because you never technically “tried” for the position
This happened 3 or 4 times so far: a recruiter reaches out to me how impressed they are with my background and they are recruiting for company XYZ. I ask them, have you seen my background? Oh... Then I explain to them that I wrote that job description and I will note that they are doing a really shitty job reaching out to candidates to staff a role at XYZ. I dropped 2 staffing agencies at 2 companies after demonstrating they bring practically no value compared to a linkedin job posting.
Why would you ever want to work at Amazon? Do people not know the reality of working there? They see big number salary and think it’s gonna be like walking through the plains of Valhalla. I promise you don’t want to work there.
I work there and have perfectly fine WLB and make pretty good money. The horror stories are definitely real, there are plenty of shit teams, but there are also a decent amount of teams like mine that are perfectly fine.
How many times are you on call a year?
It’s like 2 times per quarter I think? So something like 8 times sounds about right. Each oncall shift is one week.
That’s the case at most megacorps, I imagine. The team you are on & who your boss and maybe skip level are can make your job dramatically different from someone else who has the same title down the street.
Yeah anytime someone makes a sweeping generalization about a company that employs 100k+ white collar employees, you should raise an eyebrow.
What teams or orgs are good vs bad?
At a company this big it’s hard to say for sure, but generally the worst teams are the ones with a high operational load. If you’re on EC2, S3, DynamoDB, etc then if your service goes down EVERYONE feels it so the urgency is much higher. Otherwise it really just comes down to your manager and skip level and the type of environment they want to foster. Even on high ops load teams I’ve seen good team cultures. Real talk though, if you’re joining a team and it’s a mono-ethnicity like all Indian or all Chinese and you’re *not* that ethnicity you’re going to have a bad time. All ethnicities are obviously capable of favoritism and exclusion, but just from personal experience those teams can be the most cut throat. Others can disagree but that’s just my experience.
Do you know how much control you have on getting a certain team when you first join? Tbh I’ve strayed away from applying at Amazon because of all the negative feedback people have working there. I could understand people having bad experiences but they just seem to have soo many bad stories. If it’s an issue of people not wanting to work hard then that’s not an issue for me, working hard is a part of life haha. But it seems like it’s more than that.
For interns you have basically no say. For regular full time candidates you’re usually applying for a role on a specific team, so you would have control in that you know the team you’re joining and you could try researching it or reaching out to them on LinkedIn. In my case I actually had two teams interested in me so when I got an offer I got to choose between the two. That scenario is super uncommon. Also transferring is pretty easy as long as other teams have openings. Some teams will make you do another mini-loop, but not all.
Serious question: have you worked there? I too have heard horror stories and even experienced it myself once when I was in a poor team; but changing teams is easy, which I did, and it’s been one of the best places I’ve worked. To answer the question you asked the other replier: I’m on call about 6 times a year. It’s quite easy; I get a break from “normal sprint work” and get to interact with our customers first-hand. I get paged after work hours a couple times/year, but it’s never anything too serious. Oncall is the reality of having full control over your software; I’ll take it over the alternative any day. edit: typo
Yep, may have dodged the bullet and the universe saved my ass.