I don’t think that’s true for our interactions with the recruiter. At least the ones I have talked to, couldn’t care less about my work. They only care about the odds of me clearing the interview. Their behavior is linearly related to that.
Rereading, I realize we're talking about slightly different things.
I'm talking about the labor market in general, and my point is that your value is not $X/year, your work's value is, and it's good for your mental health to make that distinction, whether X happens to be high or low.
You're talking about understanding the recruiter's incentives, and you're right that, like any sales people, they've focused on making the sale and getting their commission.
Depends on the recruiting team. For in-house recruiting teams they at lease have a stake in maintaining the company's image and reputation. The recruiters at my company go out of their way to emphasize that we want to give every candidate a good (or at least not-bad) experience, regardless of whether they get an offer. If an interviewer covers for someone who went out sick, or if otherwise goes beyond reasonable interviewing responsibilities the recruiting team tries to recognize it. I remember when I arranged for a candidate to meet a member of an ERG they expressed interest in, even though the candidate had unambiguously failed the interview. Someone on the recruiting team dropped off cookies at my desk the next day, it was sweet - pun somewhat intended.
I don't remember there being anywhere on the interview app for me to put in feedback. I see lunch buddy's responsibility being to make sure you're well fed and caffeinated, and ready for the afternoon interviews/excited about the team/org.
It’s really not - lunch is part of the interview. Maybe less technically oriented, but it’s still part of the interview.
[edit:
Wow, so much down votes.
I have interviewed and been interviewed at multiple big tech companies. In all cases the lunch has been part of the interview process, in most I’ve even been given an explicit “this is X, they’ll be talking about Y over lunch”, or it’s been called “lunch interview”.
If the company isn’t treating the lunch period as an interview you’re wasting your engineer’s (or whatever) time, and the candidates.
]
Literally every tech interview I’ve ever had treats lunch as part of the interview. Every candidate I’ve talked to at lunch was aware that it was part of the interview.
At Google the lunch is not scored. It's a chance for the candidate to decompress a bit (the rest of the day is back-to-back) and also to sell Google culture a bit, but it's not about getting feedback.
At my last gig at Stripe we had a candidate fail the lunch interview because he spent much of the time bad mouthing his current co-workers. Not a good look. Unless there is a red flag though, the lunch interviewer doesn't have to show up for the post-interview discussions.
Currently an Amazon employee. 40+ interviews + debriefs. Not once has "what did the lunch buddy think?" ever been uttered.
I've been a lunch buddy myself a handful of times. My goal is to have a good time, answer any questions the candidate has, and squeeze as nice of a meal (+ coffee) outta the process as I can. I've never been asked for feedback
It benefits neither the company nor the candidate to have the candidate be overly stressed out all day. Lunch also gives the candidate the chance to chat informally to a potential colleague and for that potential colleague to make a pitch for why it's cool to work at the company and live in the area. If the lunch buddy does their job well the candidate should leave excited to work for the company and in good spirits for the last half of the interview. On top of that both people get a free lunch. Definitely not a waste of time.
Agreed. About half the candidates I take out to lunch in some way ask "is working here as stressful as the rumors say?"
I think it is worth it to the company for me to spend the 5 extra minutes of my time (since I'm going to eat lunch anyway) and $25 on lunch to defuse those concerns and sell them on the team. With the phone screen, the interviews, the feedback forms and the debrief, the company is spending a ton of time on each candidate brought on site. Loosing a candidate you make an offer to is the worst waste of time.
When I was younger and dumber, I did two full day interviews at Amazon, 9am till 4-5pm. No lunch, no bathroom breaks, wall to wall interviews completely unrelated to the initial reasons for my contact. Actually rude to the recruiter after the first day, I was convinced to return for a 2nd round of interviews. I never bothered to return any contacts after that incredibly poor and redundant treatment. The exact same thing happened on the 2nd day: no lunch, no bathroom breaks, tons of waiting, and unrelated interviewers.
Another Amazon employee here. It's just lunch. We're there to give candidates a moment to relax after their morning interviews. Lunch buddies are never asked for feedback.
That's not accurate. The lunch buddy is there to give the candidate some relaxing time off of interviewing, allow them to get a good lunch, and to ask questions "off the record" to a potential colleague. Informally it is the job of the lunch buddy to make a pitch for why the candidate should consider working for the company, and if relocation is on the table, what's neat about the area and why the candidate should consider moving.
The lunch buddy doesn't get the option to enter feedback for a candidate and often doesn't even get invited to the interview debrief. They really are there just for lunch.
I have been a lunch buddy too, sure they can told u that it was not an interview but nothing in this world is ever black and white. The person I'm having lunch is probably will be my future coworker so if this person doing something stupid or something I don't like during the lunch, there is no guarantee I will not hinted it to the hiring manager later on.
This is incorrect. At least for tech companies, when you are explicitly told that it's not an interview, you can take it at face value (but as always, exercise judgement, and don't be a dick).
Usually they will tell you whether lunch is also an interview or if it's just lunch. From my own experiences, Microsoft typically does a more touchy-feely interview (still a real interview) over lunch, but Google typically doesn't. With the tech giants, you can take this at face value.
That doesn't mean your lunch buddy will be a good conversationalist though. Mine mostly were not (including at AirBnB, but I only point that out for the irony against their stated cultural values). I would sometimes just ask for the last 20 minutes to meditate.
Also that's not an insult or a judgement. Being a good conversationalist in professional settings is hard, and interviews doubly so because interviewees are nervous for good reasons. So I don't judge engineers or even PM's by how good at bantering they are during interviews, because it's not their job to be good at it.
Depends on the company. OP is quite correct, often the lunch buddy is another interview, sometimes it's just a way to give junior employees some exposure to the process, sometimes it's it really is just lunch.
I interviewed once with a finance company that recorded the entire day, openly, including the break room. I interviewed with another company, where the ride from/and to the airport was part of the interview - I was a little suspicious at the time due to the nature of the "conversation" and had it confirmed through a contact later.
Human creativity exists on both side of the hiring table.
Need more details! Was it the cab driver, or did they send an employee to meet you at the airport?
I've heard old stories of interviews where you park the candidate somewhere, and get the janitor to come by and drop something, or ask for a hand - and they see how you respond. Was it like that?
They used a pick up from the airport service, and apparently the owner/driver was a relative of one of the senior managers. It was somewhat blatant, in the kind of questions he slipped in weren't quite in the zone for your typical taxi driver.
I've never experienced anything like the janitor stories, although I can well believe them, but I did once work for a company in LA, where I struck up some really interesting friendships with a couple of the janitors who were unemployed script writers. They had some stories to tell...
I was able to read the article before it got hugged to death by HN.
That said, like many similar interview/hiring stories shared here, it reeks of single-sidedness. Specifically, there is not enough detail regarding your interactions with the interviewers to warrant calling this a horror story. The only points of interest in this piece, in my opinion, were that the interviewers were late and there was a clear communication issue (particularly when it came to scheduling the interviews).
Other than that, all we know is that you tripped up during some of your interviews. In those situations, based on your post, it was never really your fault, which is not the best attitude to have.
Finally, them saying that your engineering skills needed more work shouldn’t be insulting. Amazon hires tons of engineers and they are generally very technically competent. However good you think you are, there are millions who are just as good, and there are thousands who are better. Amazon can only hire so many people and this was likely their way of saying they simply had more candidates with more experience.
I know it is frustrating. I can say this because I have absolutely been in your shoes. (Dream job, all the way to the last stage, then no offer.) At the end of the day, we have to acknowledge the competitiveness of our field and use that to drive us to become better.
This HN thread is a shocking reminder of how many people view corporate sadism as normal or even good. That kind of nonsense is what engineers should be shielded from, not the other way around. I prefer to keep my dignity, thanks.
I completely agree with your assessment. At least once a week I deal with people being late for meetings / interviews / whatever. Heck, sometimes it's me running late. That's just how life happens sometimes. Yes, in an interview situation, we all want to be treated well and for the interviewers to be prompt and positive. When they fall short, however, it's a far cry from a "horror story". Just my opinion.
My understanding is that a lot of this abrasiveness on interview day (third interview for me as well) is mainly about judging response and culture fit. I found out a lot more a few months after my own similar experience with Amazon. I think MS's lot drops are far more egregious though.
The keys are not to let it phase you, stay positive and ask clarifying questions to give clear answers. It's often far more about personality than you may think.
LOL, I'm not saying I agree with the practice. That said, many of the most impressive programmers I've met were less than typical in terms of personality. Being able to work with all types, including when a person is having a bad or rough day is important. There are times when you've been working 16-18 hour days for a few days and can get cranky.
I've worked with all types of personalities. The only ones that ever really bugged me were the excessively arrogant. Some types just grate on you. It's how you deal with and interact that is important. Can you get along with people that are different? Different backgrounds, personalities, cold, super-warm, etc. The culture fit is incredibly important for good or bad. One person can make a team very toxic very quickly.
If that is regular, yeah. I took it as that happens for a few days in a row irregularly. If once or twice a year, one finds oneself (and, presumably their team) in an unusual crunch or fighting fires for a couple of days, that does not strike me as unreasonable.
> Being able to work with all types, including when a person is having a bad or rough day is important.
Inability to work with all types here is primary displayed by the "less than typical" personalities through. Not by someone who decides that he does not want to answer insults with "please may I have another one, sir". I understand importance of not being overly sensitive, but so should be valued ability to control yourself and not be abrasive in the first place.
Otherwise being asshole becomes competitive advantage in that company.
I don't mean to say that less then pleasant people should not be in team, but that criticising them and refusing to accept that behavior should be standard and accepted responses by other people. Including leaving the room or directly defending themselves.
> There are times when you've been working 16-18 hour days for a few days and can get cranky.
That is planning and organizational failure. Also self-awarness failure. No one is effective at 18 hours a day and demanding that collegues tiptoe around you or and spend effort on your crankiness instead of work is a.) unfair b.) ineffective.
If others can't tell you about you mistakes or question you or just have to deal with abrasiveness because you are cranky after sleep deprivation, then it is your fault and you are slowing others down.
Interviews are mostly (~80%) about evaluating the candidate for fit. They almost always have a time limit. The interviewers job is sometimes made harder by a candidate who answers a question different from the one asked, or who rambles unnecessarily, or who continues talking after the interviewer is satisfied with the answer to a particular question.
In these situations, the interviewer needs to quickly cut off the candidate and move to a different line of enquiry in order to collect enough useful signal during the allotted time.
This can come across as abrasive to some people, particularly if it happens multiple times during a single interview. And the impression can be compounded if they feel the interviewer cut them off as they were saying something which would have increased their odds of success.
"Interviews are mostly (~80%) about evaluating the candidate for fit."
Interviews in our industry are the chaotic mutant hybrid of "Guess what I'm thinking!" and fraternal hazing rituals.
I've been interviewed a few times by self-declared bar raisers. Not impressed.
One raiser dismissed outright all my work on grammars, saying the tool (ANTLR) did all the work. Awkward pause. Has he never written a parser? Is he making a joke? Oh. He's serious. Unfortunately, I eventually sarcastically replied "Ya, and the compiler writes all my code for me."
I'm not a CS researcher. Our pithy jobs are client/server CRUD apps with some glue. Cut a string from here, paste it over there. Do some validation. Make sure the concurrency scales.
Not rocket science. Stop treating me like an initiate. I've been doing this longer than most.
I don't know if you are referring to Amazon bar raisers but most of them are Dev Managers who don't write code on day-to-day basis. And this is a common problem where they don't understand the technical depth of the problem a candidate has worked but still have most weightage in debrief even on technical strengths.
It is a tern for wheter they like or dislike you personally, but I certainely wouldn't call it discrimination. Plus, it's critically important that employees enjoy working together.
The term “culture fit” sounds very vague, but at many companies there are clearly defined criteria, you just don’t know them.
For example, a company may practice test driven development (TDD), and may evaluate for a candidates ability and desire to use TDD as part of their engineering culture fit. TDD is not necessarily better than alternatives, and a candidate may not necessarily be better because they can do it. It might mean passing on better candidates who don’t prefer TDD.
Culture fit can cover many different aspects, and most are not about being past a “good enough” bar, but rather valuing the same things as the company. To “fail” a culture fit interview is arguably a good thing as otherwise the candidate may have found working at the company unfulfilling, uninteresting or difficult.
My favorite cultural fit failure was trying to opt out of the weekly mandatory surfing lessons, barely got my wet suit off before I was called to a Friday morning meeting with the founders and told to grab my stuff and leave quietly.
I think that's a particularly bad example, and I'm sorry you had such a bad experience of startups.
If you had been asked a bunch of questions in your interview that boiled down to "do you like surfing", then you may have "failed" that interview, but that would have been good for you and the company as you ultimately did not have the culture fit they were looking for.
Obviously desire and ability to surf does not correlate with software engineering ability (I assume that's what you applied for?) but things like communication, learning practices, candour, empathy, etc, can correlate highly.
It was worse than that, I relocated to another country for the job and they had just helped me setup a four month apartment contract.
I was informed that they liked to go surfing together during the interviews. It just turned out that bobbing around in freezing water with surfboards shooting at me from every angle just wasn't my thing at all.
Of course that's not the real why, my team lead was an arrogant and ignorant asshole who liked to throw developers under the bus to cover his own ass. Which doesn't work that well on people with a tiny bit of experience and integrity.
But cultural fit, like codes of conduct is a fine tool when you want to get rid of someone.
The company should be training employees to use their process, not expecting to hire people who already prefer their process. TDD is not some magical thing that requires years of study and practice and apprenticeship to do correctly. It's an approach, you apply it, it might be a little weird for a few weeks if you're not used to it, and then it's fine. What next, will they reject people for preferring trunk-based development over git-flow?
TDD is really one of those things you either like or don't. I for one hate working that way and would be happy to know about it as early as possible. No amount of training will change that.
Some engineers are happy to use the process that works in the company, if that means going with TDD then they do that, but they have no strong feelings either way. That could be a good culture fit!
Some engineers have strong feelings and would prefer not to work in some ways. There are ways to do great engineering without TDD, they may be great engineers, but for a company that practices TDD they may be a poor fit.
To take it to a bit more of an extreme: I like code review. I believe it's a good thing. I want to have my code reviewed and to learn from that, and I want to be able to review my colleagues' code and know that they will take the feedback seriously. I would not work somewhere that did not do code review as I believe it correlates with good engineering practices. In this way, I would be a poor culture fit at somewhere that did not do code review, as I would be pushing to have code reviewed, or wanting to.
Yes. How else but to discriminate would you discern to hire one employee over another?
Assuming they have roughly equivalent experience and backgrounds. It comes down to how well you might get along working with someone. Every office has a culture, and working where you and the company are a bad fit sucks a lot. It usually means sticking it out for a few months just to see if it settles down, or that things get better. Then starting the whole interview process all over again. I'd much rather self-eliminate or be eliminated quickly. Hell it's often after several interviews that you just get a bad feeling, or are dropped from the other side.
It's ALL descrimination. That doesn't mean they are descriminating by a protected class (gender, sexuality, race, etc). If everyone in the office went out for drinks every night at the end of the day, working into the evening, I wouldn't be comfortable with that. Once in a while, sure. It really depends on specifics, that doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
The internal recruiter usually knows very little about the actual role and exists only to sell you to other teams. They are usually contractors, and could not care less about how candidates actually do as they themselves have no job incentives that align properly. They'll line you up with positions that make no sense, they'll ignore any advice or opinions you might have, and are not technically skilled at all. If the interview goes south at any point, the candidate is to blame for not hitting the bar. Your happiness is not a factor, they have literally hundreds of resumes with your same skill set.
I once had a recruiter try to line me up with a javascript position when I had java experience, not understanding the difference.
You have to really police their behavior and almost babysit them, otherwise you get situations like this.
I don't work at Amazon, however my experience has been similar working at a large F10.
Our internal 'recruitment services' dept is all outsourced/contracted. They mask this internally through cheap tricks (don't present the staff in exactly the same manner as contractors in our internal system, etc), but do a little research and you'll figure out what's going on. I'm guessing they have hundreds, possibly thousands of contractors on the payroll running the operation.
They literally don't give a shit how it all goes down. I've escalated situations up the chain multiple hops and get nothing back, just silence. No acknowledgement, nothing. Talk to other Director/VP level friends in HR and they don't even know who to talk to.
I run a small to mid size department (think around 50 FTEs and some contract/consultant staff) and when we get openings posted, we run the recruiting ourselves and just instruct the internal recruitment team when we're ready to write/extend offers. They are usually still working on the initial candidate screen doing who knows what, dicking people around with video interviews and stupid phone screens.
Corporate HR and recruiting is totally broken - avoid at all costs.
This. Ignore corporate HR. Speak directly to your potential manager about the specific needs and tasks to be accomplished by you. Present as the solver of those specific needs. That is all they want or need. The rest is pointless bureaucratic growth, just like any fiefdom, and is to be avoided. This manager avoids corporate HR too, because he/she is a problem solver and needs more peers. Be that peer.
> Two years ago, after a rather unpleasant interview process, I asked to be put on a do-not-contact register
Great! Clearly he's closed that chapter in his life and he can move on. It'd be a bummer if they contacted him again, luckily he can just say "No thank you" like a normal person. But wait!
> here I am reading yet another email from an Amazon recruiter asking to talk to me about a possible opportunity. Will this horror never end?
This gets the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster.
> This is a retelling of the two tedious months that Amazon put me through only to tell me that I can't code, which I now find funny, but at the time it was rather insulting and humiliating
Is this guy serious? He didn't meet the bar, but instead of working on the weak areas of his skillset, he's claiming he's was insulted and degraded.
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Amazon clearly was not a fantastic company to interview with, but man this guy really milks it to the point where I don't have a lot of sympathy for him.
I hear about companies telling candidates they "can't code" or "can't communicate" a lot. This just seems like a really rude and arrogant thing to tell someone. If you want to give a candidate feedback, give specific feedback and give it politely. The people who want to improve will get the picture. If you don't want to, just thank them for their time and interest.
Other than that, I think you're right. Some of this was really pretty normal and not worth being upset about.
He also noted that he was asked interview questions for a job that he wasn’t applying for and hadn’t prepared for! It’s not surprising if he didn’t do a great job at answering frontend questions when he was applying for a backend position.
You are being a little harsh there. I'm not sure if turnover/burnout is high at places like that or they just keep on hiring but I've experienced it whereby recruiters are repeatedly chasing you for the same job over and over again. This is probably partly due to the companies and/or recruiters also having a high turnover. So, if you fail to get the job, you can sometimes almost expect to have other people get in touch with you over and over again for the same role. It can get very, very strange.
>> here I am reading yet another email from an Amazon recruiter asking to talk to me about a possible opportunity. Will this horror never end?
> This gets the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster.
I get why you're saying that, but as a totally average developer, I feel like I can corroborate this: Amazon recruiters email me _constantly_. I do not think I should be a target for them (I doubt I could pass their interview process), I think they're just desperate and take the shotgun approach to recruiting.
>> This is a retelling of the two tedious months that Amazon put me through only to tell me that I can't code, which I now find funny, but at the time it was rather insulting and humiliating
> Is this guy serious? He didn't meet the bar, but instead of working on the weak areas of his skillset, he's claiming he's was insulted and degraded.
I do agree with you on this one, though. I read the story and for the most part thought that nothing they did was too bad. Yeah, they changed up some things, messed up some scheduling (they are human after all), but if you're being considered for a certain level and you don't perform at that level (for them) then what should they tell you? Saying they're "going in a different direction" or "opted for a more qualified candidate" doesn't really give you the feedback you want, does it? I want to know if I'm not performing at the level I think I am.
Hey, at least it was Amazon. I had a similar experience interviewing for an _airline_ company a few years back. A recruiter contacted me, mentioned a job opening they had. You know how job postings list 20 different “requirements” but they don’t expect you to actually have all of them? I actually did have expert-level experience at every single item on their list. They phone-screened me, brought me onsite for three in-person back-to-back interviews (during normal working hours, so I had to take time off of my then-current job to go interview). They called back a few days later and said they wanted to bring me back onsite AGAIN for a full day of back-to-back interviews. So I took another PTO day, showed up and interviewed for 6 hours (9 different interviwers) - only to never get another call back.
Amazon recruiters are some of the least organized. There have been times when I got contacted by 3 recruiters during same week but none of them knew about others. There have also been times when Amazon recruiter calls me and I tell them I was contacted before and they have no ability to verify or look up what happened before! Many of these recruiters also look like one-off vendors working on some twisted reward scheme so they often don't care about candidate experience or long term maintenance of information. There is simply no organizational memory of some very basic things like candidate profiles, pipelines, leads etc. Compared to this Google has invested enormously in maintaining beautiful detailed profiles of anyone who ever contacted them.
Perhaps one reason for this Amazon chaos is also that they really don't care about employee turnover. Attrition is the way to weed out less productive folks so you just keep hiring en-mass and keep firing en-mass. Someone might say this would create huge voids in project memory and continuity but its perhaps good because it forces to create documentation and other artifacts with assumption that others won't be around soon. This is very different than Google culture and it seems to have worked at least to some extent.
Anyone else find this reading a bit over dramatic. I don't find any horror here though I agree its not the best candidate experience and that is sad. However, horror story is just being dramatic because OP is salty he didn't get hired when he feels he is of the calibre to be hired at Amazon. Recruiters are non-tech and Google and Facebook have had timezone problems during my recruiting and this was only in US timezone so I imagine international this is even more horrendous.
No I got them, I just think OP is being over dramatic because he didn't get hired. Then feels offended because some recruiter from a company with hundreds of thousands of employees reached out to him 2 years after he said to never contact him again.
I had similar experience with Uber last month. My recruiter scheduled an introductory phone call with me and then she forgot about it. The call was rescheduled and then she forgot again. On the third time she did call me but never apologized or anything. Then she scheduled a technical phone screen for me a few days later. On that day my interviewer called me two hours earlier than the scheduled time - no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy, so I guessed I didn't pass that phone screen, but the recruiter didn't even bother telling that to me - she just ignored my emails and she never even gave me her phone number.
P.S. I was invited to 6 onsite interviews in other companies and in the end I've got all 6 very good offers. So, good riddance, Uber.
Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...
Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.
Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt.
However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection.
We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim.
Another fun feature with Gmail is that you can add arbitrary text to the end of your email addresses.
This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.
Plus-based subaddresses are relatively common (sendmail supports them, Sieve has RFC 5233, etc), but dot-insensitivity is/was unique to gmail as far as I'm aware.
Hem it's not a GMail specific feature but a common one (sub-addressing/plus addressing, RFC 5233) that skip inbox and drop messages in the +$name/tag dir/label...
The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).
Ahem. There's someone with whom I apparently share both first name, last name and, against our will, the gmail email address.
So apparently my email address is lastname.firstname@gmail.com (firstname.lastname@gmail.com was already taken) and this guy has lastnamefirstname@gmail.com.
How cool that GMail ignores dots in the middle, right ?
Sometimes I wonder if he is receiving my emails, because I often receive his emails. I tried and forwarded him his email, GMail was stupid enough to deliver them back to my inbox.
The "ignore the dots in the middle" is truly a major google brain fart.
Wait, what ? How could that not have triggered a test somewhere at Google ? Did they just implement the dot thing after they already created both addresses ?
I'm going to chime in here since everyone downvoted the OP. My guess is he got the Gmail account early. This was a known bug early with Gmail. They fixed the signups, but it seems there were some issues that continued if you had already gotten an email address that collided prior to the"fix".
I created an account for my daughter that had this issue and it was really messed up; we can see emails sent and received by another person which included a bunch of personal information; job application conversations, flight details, etc...
We ended up just switching our daughter to a new address, but if we had a more malicious nature; this is a big security issue.
I have a similar email address, and I get emails for three or four people with the same name as me. I get wedding invitations, tax documents, job application responses, even a grad school application response once!
I can only assume there are small differences in the actual addresses and the senders are careless when typing in the "to" field.
Downvoting this comment, wich usually pops up whenever somebody talks about the dots in hn, won't make the problem disappear. I too receive emails for someone who created an account with my namesurname but with a dot.
That's not possible. As has already been discussed in this thread, you cannot create another email that is the same but with dots. Google will consider it a duplicate and tell you the address is already taken.
A quick google of the name and you can see he is; however I agree: anyone could have that email address. If he's legit from Uber and wants correspondence about an Uber interaction he should be listing his @uber.com address.
I tend to not give out my Uber email as I get a ton of solicitations every day. Forum/web email scraping is still very much a real thing unfortunately.
Yikes, couple of people I know interviewed recently at Uber also. They seemed to have good experiences and were surprised about quality of questions and culture. Offers, if true, seemed competitive, beating all others (2 out of 3 took the offer).
But I guess if something goes bad, it goes really bad...
no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy
That's a red flag too - a professional interviewer, once you had explained that you weren't expecting the call until the agreed time, would have apologised and called you back later. Done it a bunch of times myself. Everyone in the industry who's been around the block knows that recruiters are generally pretty flaky and wouldn't have held it against you. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with that individual anyway.
Even when I’m calling a phone candidate at the scheduled time, I make sure to ask if it’s still a good time, are they ready and in an environment where they’re comfortable doing the interview. At phone interview stage, candidates Are about to get their first real experience of interacting with your company, and if they’re any good you will be one of many phone interviews they are juggling to fit in around their current work and normal life. It is an appropriate time to be accommodating and understanding.
FYI sometime's its not the company itself (I have no idea with Uber) but rather a third party's ineptitude. I just had a series of phone interviews scheduled with candidates through an external vendor and multiple times they forgot to provide the candidate's contact information before the interview. I'm sure that's not what they told the candidate when I wasn't able to call them.
I had a friend (super sharp guy, very very good in programming) long time ago - whenever he is bored, he'll schedule an interview with some company, clear the interview, and start negotiating the salary, just to see how much he could get. Once he gets an offer, he'll use that offer to drive up the offer from some other company that he interviewed with. Mind you, he had no intention of joining any of these companies, it was just a hobby/time-pass for him.
I used think he is a jerk for doing this, wasting everyone's time. After reading how companies treat the candidates, I am not so sure ...
Only the guys at the top are allowed to operate things like a business. For the people in the business itself, they are not allowed to operate like that silly
I had a member from the Uber team contact me directly via email by using a template they had prepared for everyone they contact. I knew because they used the wrong name. I declined to do anything with Uber, not just because they couldn’t put in a little effort to write directly to me on our first contact, but in part because of all the terrible media talk about Uber culture and treatment of employees.
I got an appointment with Goldman Sachs for a 30 minute screening interview with one of their analysts. The guy called me 25 minutes late and without introducing himself proceeded to give me a highly specific question about how options work and immediately tell me he only has 5 minutes because he has to go to another meeting.
They have a special term for staff that haven't spent their entire career at GS: "lateral hire". A friend joined as a lateral hire, and was only really accepted as an equal when he voluntarily gave up his five days paternity leave for his first born to bail out a project in crisis. Work life balance doesn't exist at GS. If you're happy to give your whole self to GS, work evenings and weekends and socialise with colleagues, you can do very well in terms of career progression and pay. If you want a life outside work, GS may not be for you.
Similar for me with Nest/Google. Got invited to an onsite and my recruiter went dark. This was after the screw ups with scheduling the for the multiple phone screens and online coding tests. What ended up happening was that I never got to the onsite because after I was invited and asked for times days and what city I would be flying out of for tickets I never got another reply and I tried to contact the recruiter multiple times after. Got nothing.
It’s things like this, and the open optimizing for low false positives over low false negatives that makes me totally unsympathetic to claims that high tech companies can’t find sufficient workers and need a legislative solution. Reveled preferences don’t show a desperation for qualified workers.
Absolutely. And I think your notion of "optimizing for low false positives" is generous. I think most bad interviewers are optimized for a) employer convenience and b) feelings of power on the part of interviewers.
Part A is understandable in that the standard hiring process is optimized for the common case: scarce jobs and abundant, interchangeable workers. That gets you bulk resume submission, minimal human interaction, and indifferent, slipshod processes. Part B is just jackassery, but it gets you things like brainteaser interview questions, high-stress interviews, and a lot of biases smuggled in under things like "culture fit".
That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. A few years back, I said, "Wait, we spend all this time optimizing our software for user experience; why don't we do the same for job applications?" I ended up with a significantly different process, one that was a little more work for us, but a way better applicant experience. I also shifted focus from finding flaws to looking to see people at their best, which is not only a better experience, but I think gets better people. I encourage everybody to apply their design thinking and user empathy skills to their own hiring process. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
> That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce.
The thing that is not scarce from the recruiters' view is applicants or maybe even resumes. This is because anyone looking for a job can easily, due to the magic of the internet, apply at dozens or even hundreds of jobs. And applicants don't even have to apply for jobs any more. If you're on LinkedIn, they can come looking for you, and again, due to the magic of the internet, there are plenty of possible people to consider for a job.
So instead of artificial scarcity we have artificial abundance.
This problem seems to be analogous to the online dating problem. Technology has made one part of the problem far too easy and this causes big problems in other parts of the pipeline.
That’s fine for the first stage of the funnel. I send in a resume and hear nothing back no harm, no foul.
But by the time a candidate is past a phone screen that’s a validated lead. A company that was really desperate to hire wouldn’t treat validated leads so poorly. That they do means that they aren’t and we should disregard self-serving claims to the contrary.
> But by the time a candidate is passed a phone screen that’s a validated lead. A company that was really desperate to hire wouldn’t treat validated leads so poorly.
They certainly shouldn't treat validated leads poorly, but we've seen ample evidence that they often do. Part of the problem may be (I'm less sure about this part) is that it is essentially the same people -- and same organization -- managing the overall hiring process through all stages of the funnel. They start with a shotgun process and they keep using a shotgun process in later stages when they absolutely shouldn't be.
It's better if you've got a prospective hiring manager inside the company that wants to hire you and is keeping an eye on the overall process -- this is what often happens whey you're recruited by employee referral. However, this just isn't an option at places like Google (and I think Facebook and Amazon as well) where you get hired into a global pool rather than hired into a specific team.
Yes, exactly. Ease of applying is one of the things sustaining the problem. It makes companies feel overwhelmed with resume spam.
A few years back when I was hiring at Code for America, I redid things so that it was harder for the lazy applicant but easier for the serious one. I asked people to send me something resume-like (LinkedIn was fine), but to skip the cover letter and instead write a short answer to 1 of 5 questions: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hi...
It was great. Anybody who did that got a call back from me, usually within 24 hours, just to chat a bit about what we each were looking for. Starting from that made it much easier for me to treat each person like an actual person.
What's interesting about these practices is that the _best_ candidates will have no patience for this and say "no thankyou" so they're not getting the cream of the crop. Everyone, even an obvious bad fit, should be treated respectfully and the interviewee's time and schedule should be honored.
I was headhunted by someone for Uber's ATG. After reaching out she whiffed our web meeting and turned standoffish when I politely asked if she wanted to reschedule. Maybe I was part of the bycatch? Seemed like a very meat market kind of attitude to building a team.
A friend suggested a position at Github for an Elasticsearch Manager.
A couple weeks go by and I'm in the interview. It's all MySQL questions. And really specific questions too.
I ask them flat out what the position was for and they said "MySQL Engineer" ...
I replied with "I'm actually more of an Elasticsearch guy" and was told that they're ditching Elasticsearch.
So not only did they decide it was a good idea to slot me into a position from ES to MySQL but they also decided to bring me down from Engineering Manager to individual contributor...
This seems to happen quite a bit. Though not often.
Over the summer I interviewed for a large bank and was told they were modernizing their apps from HTML5 PhoneGap/Cordova to native code, maybe React Native. I was told point-blank by the recruiting company exclusively contracted to fill roles for this project that my profile would be a perfect fit, and I agreed.
Then I get into the interview, and it turns out I would be working on middleware to connect one set of APIs to another, entirely backend, and in a completely siloed department structure.. The interviewers were not sure how any of my front-end skills would be applicable. It was a waste of time on both sides.
I have to wonder why more places, when scheduling interviews, don't email prospective candidates directly before the interview and repeat again, verbatim, what job positions they're looking for and the titles of those positions and descriptions/expectations.
I mean, I might be unusual, but if I were to see a job posting before such an interview which very clearly doesn't match what I thought I was applying for, I'd reply and either cancel the interview or see if there were other positions available.
After all, not only am I wasting their time, but I could have been more productively interviewing at other companies during that time! :)
On the other hand, I've certainly interviewed people that wanted a leadership position, but didn't do well with leadership questions. But, they did do well technically.
Offering a position lower than the one advertised, in that situation, seems okay to me, provided it's not a step down from where they are now.
I went for an interview for Senior .NET Developer role at NineMSN in Australia once. Had full on 2 hour technical interview of .NET and SQL Server. Thought I didn pretty well cos the interview lasted so Long and they were happy with me. Towards the end I asked some questions. The last question was “so what would I be working on?”
Basically they said: “oh well our api is already written so you should be doing all the website integration work with the api” I asked on top of that meant I’ll be doing the .net work of the apis? “No just the HTML/css/JavaScript”... I didn’t accept the offer.
I interviewed at Amazon and was rejected, main reason is that I was totally unprepared(don't even know its 10 principles or something, not to mention the freshman style algorithm stuff preparation).
All I want to say is that, after the hiring experience and learned how their R&D was running afterwards a bit, I'm not going to hold its high flying stocks.
The hiring process sucks, the bar raiser is a joke.
Of course I'm negative after having been spurned by Amazon and Google, but I worry about the continued success of these companies after seeing their hiring processes. Then again, they only have to be less stupid than their competitors in order to continue being successful.
I think one of the weak spots is the recruiting team. I feel like the recruiters, often contractors, get paid based on hiring rates alone. There's nothing disincentivizing them from sending unqualified recruits through the pipeline.
In the end, I landed a nice position with a 'tier-2' valley company(not FANG, but close), so I can go back to not giving a shit about the broken hiring process. Hopefully the industry wises up, but I suspect that the big companies will be staffed by people who survived the modern interview process and therefore nothing will change.
I had a recent fun experience where I did a code screen for a company. It involved writing a very basic key value store API in Ruby. However, the challenge was extremely unspecified. There were no specification for persistence (database? file? none?), the precise semantics of the requests (should PUT-ing the same object multiple times overwrite it? According to the HTTP definition of PUT, yes, but who knows for sure?), or even how the code was being run (rackup? Separate script?). Note that there wasn't a clear way to ask questions either. Even better, the code was to be tested via an automated script. Yeah...automated scripts and unclear specifications are not a good combo.
I wrote the code to the best of my ability, then submitted it. I got a rejection a few weeks later and when I asked the person who sent it for feedback (I will say, that the company at least had a real, very nice person contact me), they cited a policy of no response.
Granted, I messed up in that I refused to use Rails, since, c'mon, it's a key value store. Instead I decided to just write it in pure Ruby with Rack and the SQLite gem. But I suppose that could have been a mistake since A. Rails is a lot more robust when it comes to input space and B. the testing harness is probably designed for Rails. Second, it's quite likely my code was just not good. But I'd at least like some feedback then, or even a printout of test failures.
This is a company I hold in extremely high regard, so I sincerely hope that this is just a fluke.
I’d be inclined to agree, except there was no way to contact anybody technical. I was only put in contact with HR and was sent the challenge via an automated email from an address that didn’t respond when I emailed it. Not really sure where else I could have gone to get a response. Unless this was some kind of CTF where I had to find a hidden email.
If it was CTF you'd probably try to get the official solution from their recruiter's computer. I wonder if it would give them pause if it was verbatim the same.
Nope. As far as I could tell there wasn’t any way to test. I think they encouraged writing your own tests, which I did, but that’s still guesswork on my part.
It’s appalling how one-sided many orgs see the interview process. Instead of treating the candidate as a partner - someone to work together in making a decision - the candidate might as well be a box of staplers to them.
The candidate is barely a human being to these mega corps. They freely dispose of the candidates time without any consideration beyond what the hiring team needs.
An interview CAN be as much about helping the candidate find what’s best for them. Heck where I work we actively talk and promote other options where someone might be happier. We make referrals for people. When it’s not a good fit we try to give them feedback and genuinely want them to succeed.
Any company that interviews as much as these do is going to have a process that resembles sausage making, and the candidates are the ingredients. It's all about volume, not quality.
> It’s appalling how one-sided many orgs see the interview process. Instead of treating the candidate as a partner - someone to work together in making a decision - the candidate might as well be a box of staplers to them
With maybe 1 in 5 on-site interview candidates making it, and the amount of interviewing individuals at Amazon do, it can often get to the point where it's really hard to see interviewees as people. I tried really hard, especially as one of the more limited-pool of systems engineers (I specifically put myself out there for other teams to leverage, so that systems engineers didn't end up with a full dev loop). The number of interview loops done is only exasperated by Amazon's inability to hold on to engineers for more than a few years. One team I dealt with regularly would lose a sizeable chunk of their syseng staff every 9 months or so.
I can't even begin to imagine how hard it gets for the bar-raisers, who might interview 4-5 candidates a week or more.
I've found it actually works to throw a little temper tantrum, Go right to the most senior person and just lay into them in a manner they cannot defend, because they are clearly treating people unfairly, taking advantage of the unbalanced recruiting situation. That's how I got my first C-Suite (reporting to the board, not the CEO) Senior Director position.
I can never tell whose side the recruiters are on. Are they on my side, because if I get hired, the recruiter gets a commission? Or are they on the company's side?
speaking as someone not in tech (im an engine mechanic by trade) and who has had to hire people in the past
sometimes the recruiter is miles off. its an indication of serious communications problems, for example i had a job posted for a senior level (ASE type) certified mechanic with trade school completed. Because HR gets in a rush, and because newspapers cost money per character printed, half of the requirements got cut off.
So imagine my surprise when I get a junior level tech walking in on monday morning and I sit down with an hour long interview that starts out with me asking her to diagram the one-thousand pound diesel engine in my office. half an hour in im throwing questions about yanbar piston rings, fluid dynamics in the compression cycle and asking for six fault conditions on a HINO engine during warmup and takeoff. I was getting stonewalled in the interview, and getting a little pissed off that this "senior" level mechanic was blowing smoke up my ass, wasting my company time, or so i thought.
I asked her to "cut the bullshit." She nearly had a panic attack. She was nearly in tears, trying desparately to explain how she was working as best she could to finish school, but that she hadnt any experience with "the bigger" engines yet. Confused, I asked her more about the job offer and she conspicuously forgot half of it. Fetching the newspaper from the waiting room and checking it myself, I saw the problem. I'd spent 30 minutes roasting a trade school kid and felt awful about it.
Anyhow i guess what im saying is, its not always you. Sometimes Shirley doesnt double-check the article before she goes on her margaritaville cruise off the coast of south carolina.
So where you work, requirements are actual requirements?
In software, it's often the opposite. You see a fuckton of "requirements" that aren't requirements at all (or the company is looking for unicorns but inevitably end up having to hire a totally average human being), so people just apply whether they have the required skills or not.
The part titled "Next 3 Weeks" is where I lost all sympathie for the author. If you're willing to put up with this shit and sacrifice 3 weeks of family time to learn useless algos you're asking to be treated like a piece of cattle.
A lot of ndas at interview time are really just cover your ass in case your company looks like an idiot. I've also been through the amazon interview treadmill where they interviewed me for a different job than I was approached about working on. wasted time writing a stupid essay. got no questions about it. what a waste of time. never really gave me clear feedback that i wasn't being offered a job.
Since when is the office layout considered part of the interview process? Unless it’s some high security defense contractor, I don’t see how disclosing the office layout damages the company in any way. Unless thee are damages, there’s nothing to enforce with an NDA.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadCloudflare isn't that necessary, you can go far with just a proper static serving nginx config. But yeah cf makes like easy.
It's also a more accurate model of what's going on.
I'm talking about the labor market in general, and my point is that your value is not $X/year, your work's value is, and it's good for your mental health to make that distinction, whether X happens to be high or low.
You're talking about understanding the recruiter's incentives, and you're right that, like any sales people, they've focused on making the sale and getting their commission.
I don't remember there being anywhere on the interview app for me to put in feedback. I see lunch buddy's responsibility being to make sure you're well fed and caffeinated, and ready for the afternoon interviews/excited about the team/org.
[edit: Wow, so much down votes.
I have interviewed and been interviewed at multiple big tech companies. In all cases the lunch has been part of the interview process, in most I’ve even been given an explicit “this is X, they’ll be talking about Y over lunch”, or it’s been called “lunch interview”.
If the company isn’t treating the lunch period as an interview you’re wasting your engineer’s (or whatever) time, and the candidates. ]
Currently an Amazon employee. 40+ interviews + debriefs. Not once has "what did the lunch buddy think?" ever been uttered.
I've been a lunch buddy myself a handful of times. My goal is to have a good time, answer any questions the candidate has, and squeeze as nice of a meal (+ coffee) outta the process as I can. I've never been asked for feedback
I think it is worth it to the company for me to spend the 5 extra minutes of my time (since I'm going to eat lunch anyway) and $25 on lunch to defuse those concerns and sell them on the team. With the phone screen, the interviews, the feedback forms and the debrief, the company is spending a ton of time on each candidate brought on site. Loosing a candidate you make an offer to is the worst waste of time.
And what do you tell them / what do you think?
The lunch buddy doesn't get the option to enter feedback for a candidate and often doesn't even get invited to the interview debrief. They really are there just for lunch.
Source: have been a lunch buddy several times.
Usually they will tell you whether lunch is also an interview or if it's just lunch. From my own experiences, Microsoft typically does a more touchy-feely interview (still a real interview) over lunch, but Google typically doesn't. With the tech giants, you can take this at face value.
That doesn't mean your lunch buddy will be a good conversationalist though. Mine mostly were not (including at AirBnB, but I only point that out for the irony against their stated cultural values). I would sometimes just ask for the last 20 minutes to meditate.
Also that's not an insult or a judgement. Being a good conversationalist in professional settings is hard, and interviews doubly so because interviewees are nervous for good reasons. So I don't judge engineers or even PM's by how good at bantering they are during interviews, because it's not their job to be good at it.
I interviewed once with a finance company that recorded the entire day, openly, including the break room. I interviewed with another company, where the ride from/and to the airport was part of the interview - I was a little suspicious at the time due to the nature of the "conversation" and had it confirmed through a contact later.
Human creativity exists on both side of the hiring table.
I've heard old stories of interviews where you park the candidate somewhere, and get the janitor to come by and drop something, or ask for a hand - and they see how you respond. Was it like that?
I've never experienced anything like the janitor stories, although I can well believe them, but I did once work for a company in LA, where I struck up some really interesting friendships with a couple of the janitors who were unemployed script writers. They had some stories to tell...
That said, like many similar interview/hiring stories shared here, it reeks of single-sidedness. Specifically, there is not enough detail regarding your interactions with the interviewers to warrant calling this a horror story. The only points of interest in this piece, in my opinion, were that the interviewers were late and there was a clear communication issue (particularly when it came to scheduling the interviews).
Other than that, all we know is that you tripped up during some of your interviews. In those situations, based on your post, it was never really your fault, which is not the best attitude to have.
Finally, them saying that your engineering skills needed more work shouldn’t be insulting. Amazon hires tons of engineers and they are generally very technically competent. However good you think you are, there are millions who are just as good, and there are thousands who are better. Amazon can only hire so many people and this was likely their way of saying they simply had more candidates with more experience.
I know it is frustrating. I can say this because I have absolutely been in your shoes. (Dream job, all the way to the last stage, then no offer.) At the end of the day, we have to acknowledge the competitiveness of our field and use that to drive us to become better.
The whole process outlined in the post was needlessly disrespectful of the candidate and his time.
I wouldn't excuse a Godless megacorp like Amazon with this awful scarcity mindset. It is poison.
Cosmic justice would probably be better served if we just kept our mouths shut, and let them make their own beds.
> Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action.
The keys are not to let it phase you, stay positive and ask clarifying questions to give clear answers. It's often far more about personality than you may think.
Honestly, I just need to know that they can code to the level expected, work together, and aren’t completely looney.
I've worked with all types of personalities. The only ones that ever really bugged me were the excessively arrogant. Some types just grate on you. It's how you deal with and interact that is important. Can you get along with people that are different? Different backgrounds, personalities, cold, super-warm, etc. The culture fit is incredibly important for good or bad. One person can make a team very toxic very quickly.
I hope not. If so management need to be replaced
Inability to work with all types here is primary displayed by the "less than typical" personalities through. Not by someone who decides that he does not want to answer insults with "please may I have another one, sir". I understand importance of not being overly sensitive, but so should be valued ability to control yourself and not be abrasive in the first place.
Otherwise being asshole becomes competitive advantage in that company.
I don't mean to say that less then pleasant people should not be in team, but that criticising them and refusing to accept that behavior should be standard and accepted responses by other people. Including leaving the room or directly defending themselves.
> There are times when you've been working 16-18 hour days for a few days and can get cranky.
That is planning and organizational failure. Also self-awarness failure. No one is effective at 18 hours a day and demanding that collegues tiptoe around you or and spend effort on your crankiness instead of work is a.) unfair b.) ineffective.
If others can't tell you about you mistakes or question you or just have to deal with abrasiveness because you are cranky after sleep deprivation, then it is your fault and you are slowing others down.
Interviews are mostly (~80%) about evaluating the candidate for fit. They almost always have a time limit. The interviewers job is sometimes made harder by a candidate who answers a question different from the one asked, or who rambles unnecessarily, or who continues talking after the interviewer is satisfied with the answer to a particular question.
In these situations, the interviewer needs to quickly cut off the candidate and move to a different line of enquiry in order to collect enough useful signal during the allotted time.
This can come across as abrasive to some people, particularly if it happens multiple times during a single interview. And the impression can be compounded if they feel the interviewer cut them off as they were saying something which would have increased their odds of success.
Interviews in our industry are the chaotic mutant hybrid of "Guess what I'm thinking!" and fraternal hazing rituals.
I've been interviewed a few times by self-declared bar raisers. Not impressed.
One raiser dismissed outright all my work on grammars, saying the tool (ANTLR) did all the work. Awkward pause. Has he never written a parser? Is he making a joke? Oh. He's serious. Unfortunately, I eventually sarcastically replied "Ya, and the compiler writes all my code for me."
I'm not a CS researcher. Our pithy jobs are client/server CRUD apps with some glue. Cut a string from here, paste it over there. Do some validation. Make sure the concurrency scales.
Not rocket science. Stop treating me like an initiate. I've been doing this longer than most.
For example, a company may practice test driven development (TDD), and may evaluate for a candidates ability and desire to use TDD as part of their engineering culture fit. TDD is not necessarily better than alternatives, and a candidate may not necessarily be better because they can do it. It might mean passing on better candidates who don’t prefer TDD.
Culture fit can cover many different aspects, and most are not about being past a “good enough” bar, but rather valuing the same things as the company. To “fail” a culture fit interview is arguably a good thing as otherwise the candidate may have found working at the company unfulfilling, uninteresting or difficult.
No more startups for me, thank you very much.
If you had been asked a bunch of questions in your interview that boiled down to "do you like surfing", then you may have "failed" that interview, but that would have been good for you and the company as you ultimately did not have the culture fit they were looking for.
Obviously desire and ability to surf does not correlate with software engineering ability (I assume that's what you applied for?) but things like communication, learning practices, candour, empathy, etc, can correlate highly.
I was informed that they liked to go surfing together during the interviews. It just turned out that bobbing around in freezing water with surfboards shooting at me from every angle just wasn't my thing at all.
Of course that's not the real why, my team lead was an arrogant and ignorant asshole who liked to throw developers under the bus to cover his own ass. Which doesn't work that well on people with a tiny bit of experience and integrity.
But cultural fit, like codes of conduct is a fine tool when you want to get rid of someone.
Some engineers have strong feelings and would prefer not to work in some ways. There are ways to do great engineering without TDD, they may be great engineers, but for a company that practices TDD they may be a poor fit.
To take it to a bit more of an extreme: I like code review. I believe it's a good thing. I want to have my code reviewed and to learn from that, and I want to be able to review my colleagues' code and know that they will take the feedback seriously. I would not work somewhere that did not do code review as I believe it correlates with good engineering practices. In this way, I would be a poor culture fit at somewhere that did not do code review, as I would be pushing to have code reviewed, or wanting to.
Yes, it is, because no one wants to work with jerks and weirdos. It is jerk and weirdo discrimination, which is fine.
Assuming they have roughly equivalent experience and backgrounds. It comes down to how well you might get along working with someone. Every office has a culture, and working where you and the company are a bad fit sucks a lot. It usually means sticking it out for a few months just to see if it settles down, or that things get better. Then starting the whole interview process all over again. I'd much rather self-eliminate or be eliminated quickly. Hell it's often after several interviews that you just get a bad feeling, or are dropped from the other side.
It's ALL descrimination. That doesn't mean they are descriminating by a protected class (gender, sexuality, race, etc). If everyone in the office went out for drinks every night at the end of the day, working into the evening, I wouldn't be comfortable with that. Once in a while, sure. It really depends on specifics, that doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
Not a horror story, in that case.
I once had a recruiter try to line me up with a javascript position when I had java experience, not understanding the difference.
You have to really police their behavior and almost babysit them, otherwise you get situations like this.
Our internal 'recruitment services' dept is all outsourced/contracted. They mask this internally through cheap tricks (don't present the staff in exactly the same manner as contractors in our internal system, etc), but do a little research and you'll figure out what's going on. I'm guessing they have hundreds, possibly thousands of contractors on the payroll running the operation.
They literally don't give a shit how it all goes down. I've escalated situations up the chain multiple hops and get nothing back, just silence. No acknowledgement, nothing. Talk to other Director/VP level friends in HR and they don't even know who to talk to.
I run a small to mid size department (think around 50 FTEs and some contract/consultant staff) and when we get openings posted, we run the recruiting ourselves and just instruct the internal recruitment team when we're ready to write/extend offers. They are usually still working on the initial candidate screen doing who knows what, dicking people around with video interviews and stupid phone screens.
Corporate HR and recruiting is totally broken - avoid at all costs.
Great! Clearly he's closed that chapter in his life and he can move on. It'd be a bummer if they contacted him again, luckily he can just say "No thank you" like a normal person. But wait!
> here I am reading yet another email from an Amazon recruiter asking to talk to me about a possible opportunity. Will this horror never end?
This gets the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster.
> This is a retelling of the two tedious months that Amazon put me through only to tell me that I can't code, which I now find funny, but at the time it was rather insulting and humiliating
Is this guy serious? He didn't meet the bar, but instead of working on the weak areas of his skillset, he's claiming he's was insulted and degraded.
---
Amazon clearly was not a fantastic company to interview with, but man this guy really milks it to the point where I don't have a lot of sympathy for him.
Other than that, I think you're right. Some of this was really pretty normal and not worth being upset about.
> This gets the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster.
I get why you're saying that, but as a totally average developer, I feel like I can corroborate this: Amazon recruiters email me _constantly_. I do not think I should be a target for them (I doubt I could pass their interview process), I think they're just desperate and take the shotgun approach to recruiting.
>> This is a retelling of the two tedious months that Amazon put me through only to tell me that I can't code, which I now find funny, but at the time it was rather insulting and humiliating
> Is this guy serious? He didn't meet the bar, but instead of working on the weak areas of his skillset, he's claiming he's was insulted and degraded.
I do agree with you on this one, though. I read the story and for the most part thought that nothing they did was too bad. Yeah, they changed up some things, messed up some scheduling (they are human after all), but if you're being considered for a certain level and you don't perform at that level (for them) then what should they tell you? Saying they're "going in a different direction" or "opted for a more qualified candidate" doesn't really give you the feedback you want, does it? I want to know if I'm not performing at the level I think I am.
In the end, I do feel it's often more about personality and culture than anything technical, once you get past the pre-screen technical interviews.
Many companies just drop all contact at any given point.
Perhaps one reason for this Amazon chaos is also that they really don't care about employee turnover. Attrition is the way to weed out less productive folks so you just keep hiring en-mass and keep firing en-mass. Someone might say this would create huge voids in project memory and continuity but its perhaps good because it forces to create documentation and other artifacts with assumption that others won't be around soon. This is very different than Google culture and it seems to have worked at least to some extent.
That said, I do think the big tech companies have abysmal hiring processes. It’s not horrifying, but it’s a bit depressing.
Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(
Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...
Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt.
However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection.
We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim.
This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.
The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).
So apparently my email address is lastname.firstname@gmail.com (firstname.lastname@gmail.com was already taken) and this guy has lastnamefirstname@gmail.com.
How cool that GMail ignores dots in the middle, right ?
Sometimes I wonder if he is receiving my emails, because I often receive his emails. I tried and forwarded him his email, GMail was stupid enough to deliver them back to my inbox.
The "ignore the dots in the middle" is truly a major google brain fart.
This is to say... Like, Just, be aware of this.
I created an account for my daughter that had this issue and it was really messed up; we can see emails sent and received by another person which included a bunch of personal information; job application conversations, flight details, etc...
We ended up just switching our daughter to a new address, but if we had a more malicious nature; this is a big security issue.
Thanks you for understanding.
You should be able to receive emails at last.nam.e.fir.stn.ame@gmail.com too
Try it
I can only assume there are small differences in the actual addresses and the senders are careless when typing in the "to" field.
That's a red flag too - a professional interviewer, once you had explained that you weren't expecting the call until the agreed time, would have apologised and called you back later. Done it a bunch of times myself. Everyone in the industry who's been around the block knows that recruiters are generally pretty flaky and wouldn't have held it against you. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with that individual anyway.
I used think he is a jerk for doing this, wasting everyone's time. After reading how companies treat the candidates, I am not so sure ...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/former-goldma...
* How about MDB1?
culture
Goldman's seems to have become the pantomime villain of Wall Street. Some of it's justified, most of it's not.
> I'm about to accept an offer next week
Speaking as someone who has never worked at GS, congratulations.
Part A is understandable in that the standard hiring process is optimized for the common case: scarce jobs and abundant, interchangeable workers. That gets you bulk resume submission, minimal human interaction, and indifferent, slipshod processes. Part B is just jackassery, but it gets you things like brainteaser interview questions, high-stress interviews, and a lot of biases smuggled in under things like "culture fit".
That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. A few years back, I said, "Wait, we spend all this time optimizing our software for user experience; why don't we do the same for job applications?" I ended up with a significantly different process, one that was a little more work for us, but a way better applicant experience. I also shifted focus from finding flaws to looking to see people at their best, which is not only a better experience, but I think gets better people. I encourage everybody to apply their design thinking and user empathy skills to their own hiring process. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
The thing that is not scarce from the recruiters' view is applicants or maybe even resumes. This is because anyone looking for a job can easily, due to the magic of the internet, apply at dozens or even hundreds of jobs. And applicants don't even have to apply for jobs any more. If you're on LinkedIn, they can come looking for you, and again, due to the magic of the internet, there are plenty of possible people to consider for a job.
So instead of artificial scarcity we have artificial abundance.
This problem seems to be analogous to the online dating problem. Technology has made one part of the problem far too easy and this causes big problems in other parts of the pipeline.
But by the time a candidate is past a phone screen that’s a validated lead. A company that was really desperate to hire wouldn’t treat validated leads so poorly. That they do means that they aren’t and we should disregard self-serving claims to the contrary.
They certainly shouldn't treat validated leads poorly, but we've seen ample evidence that they often do. Part of the problem may be (I'm less sure about this part) is that it is essentially the same people -- and same organization -- managing the overall hiring process through all stages of the funnel. They start with a shotgun process and they keep using a shotgun process in later stages when they absolutely shouldn't be.
It's better if you've got a prospective hiring manager inside the company that wants to hire you and is keeping an eye on the overall process -- this is what often happens whey you're recruited by employee referral. However, this just isn't an option at places like Google (and I think Facebook and Amazon as well) where you get hired into a global pool rather than hired into a specific team.
A few years back when I was hiring at Code for America, I redid things so that it was harder for the lazy applicant but easier for the serious one. I asked people to send me something resume-like (LinkedIn was fine), but to skip the cover letter and instead write a short answer to 1 of 5 questions: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hi...
It was great. Anybody who did that got a call back from me, usually within 24 hours, just to chat a bit about what we each were looking for. Starting from that made it much easier for me to treat each person like an actual person.
Does anyone claim that? I thought "high tech companies" have just enough candidates even with this kind of bad practices.
A couple weeks go by and I'm in the interview. It's all MySQL questions. And really specific questions too.
I ask them flat out what the position was for and they said "MySQL Engineer" ...
I replied with "I'm actually more of an Elasticsearch guy" and was told that they're ditching Elasticsearch.
So not only did they decide it was a good idea to slot me into a position from ES to MySQL but they also decided to bring me down from Engineering Manager to individual contributor...
Over the summer I interviewed for a large bank and was told they were modernizing their apps from HTML5 PhoneGap/Cordova to native code, maybe React Native. I was told point-blank by the recruiting company exclusively contracted to fill roles for this project that my profile would be a perfect fit, and I agreed.
Then I get into the interview, and it turns out I would be working on middleware to connect one set of APIs to another, entirely backend, and in a completely siloed department structure.. The interviewers were not sure how any of my front-end skills would be applicable. It was a waste of time on both sides.
I have to wonder why more places, when scheduling interviews, don't email prospective candidates directly before the interview and repeat again, verbatim, what job positions they're looking for and the titles of those positions and descriptions/expectations.
I mean, I might be unusual, but if I were to see a job posting before such an interview which very clearly doesn't match what I thought I was applying for, I'd reply and either cancel the interview or see if there were other positions available.
After all, not only am I wasting their time, but I could have been more productively interviewing at other companies during that time! :)
That happens all the time. Chances are if they aren't reaching out to you it's a bait and switch opening.
Easy way to discriminate is whether you'll have your budget or not.
Yep. Though it's usually easier for them to just go with the bullshit line, "We can't afford to pay someone with your level of experience."
Translation: We don't hire people over 30, but we don't want to get hit with a federal lawsuit.
Offering a position lower than the one advertised, in that situation, seems okay to me, provided it's not a step down from where they are now.
Basically they said: “oh well our api is already written so you should be doing all the website integration work with the api” I asked on top of that meant I’ll be doing the .net work of the apis? “No just the HTML/css/JavaScript”... I didn’t accept the offer.
All I want to say is that, after the hiring experience and learned how their R&D was running afterwards a bit, I'm not going to hold its high flying stocks.
The hiring process sucks, the bar raiser is a joke.
I think one of the weak spots is the recruiting team. I feel like the recruiters, often contractors, get paid based on hiring rates alone. There's nothing disincentivizing them from sending unqualified recruits through the pipeline.
In the end, I landed a nice position with a 'tier-2' valley company(not FANG, but close), so I can go back to not giving a shit about the broken hiring process. Hopefully the industry wises up, but I suspect that the big companies will be staffed by people who survived the modern interview process and therefore nothing will change.
I wrote the code to the best of my ability, then submitted it. I got a rejection a few weeks later and when I asked the person who sent it for feedback (I will say, that the company at least had a real, very nice person contact me), they cited a policy of no response.
Granted, I messed up in that I refused to use Rails, since, c'mon, it's a key value store. Instead I decided to just write it in pure Ruby with Rack and the SQLite gem. But I suppose that could have been a mistake since A. Rails is a lot more robust when it comes to input space and B. the testing harness is probably designed for Rails. Second, it's quite likely my code was just not good. But I'd at least like some feedback then, or even a printout of test failures.
This is a company I hold in extremely high regard, so I sincerely hope that this is just a fluke.
It sounds like the test script itself was the spec for it.
The candidate is barely a human being to these mega corps. They freely dispose of the candidates time without any consideration beyond what the hiring team needs.
An interview CAN be as much about helping the candidate find what’s best for them. Heck where I work we actively talk and promote other options where someone might be happier. We make referrals for people. When it’s not a good fit we try to give them feedback and genuinely want them to succeed.
Ugh
There is a reason companies refer to employees as “resources” these days. Well at least they’re honest.
You can't beat the corporate system because the corporations are not the cause, only the effect of the slime that gets in and raises to the top.
With maybe 1 in 5 on-site interview candidates making it, and the amount of interviewing individuals at Amazon do, it can often get to the point where it's really hard to see interviewees as people. I tried really hard, especially as one of the more limited-pool of systems engineers (I specifically put myself out there for other teams to leverage, so that systems engineers didn't end up with a full dev loop). The number of interview loops done is only exasperated by Amazon's inability to hold on to engineers for more than a few years. One team I dealt with regularly would lose a sizeable chunk of their syseng staff every 9 months or so.
I can't even begin to imagine how hard it gets for the bar-raisers, who might interview 4-5 candidates a week or more.
I wonder if anyone can come up with a long lasting score card of recruiters. How do the new hires do after 2 years?
Or maybe even the managers should be graded in how the new hires are hired.
sometimes the recruiter is miles off. its an indication of serious communications problems, for example i had a job posted for a senior level (ASE type) certified mechanic with trade school completed. Because HR gets in a rush, and because newspapers cost money per character printed, half of the requirements got cut off.
So imagine my surprise when I get a junior level tech walking in on monday morning and I sit down with an hour long interview that starts out with me asking her to diagram the one-thousand pound diesel engine in my office. half an hour in im throwing questions about yanbar piston rings, fluid dynamics in the compression cycle and asking for six fault conditions on a HINO engine during warmup and takeoff. I was getting stonewalled in the interview, and getting a little pissed off that this "senior" level mechanic was blowing smoke up my ass, wasting my company time, or so i thought.
I asked her to "cut the bullshit." She nearly had a panic attack. She was nearly in tears, trying desparately to explain how she was working as best she could to finish school, but that she hadnt any experience with "the bigger" engines yet. Confused, I asked her more about the job offer and she conspicuously forgot half of it. Fetching the newspaper from the waiting room and checking it myself, I saw the problem. I'd spent 30 minutes roasting a trade school kid and felt awful about it.
Anyhow i guess what im saying is, its not always you. Sometimes Shirley doesnt double-check the article before she goes on her margaritaville cruise off the coast of south carolina.
Yikes.
In software, it's often the opposite. You see a fuckton of "requirements" that aren't requirements at all (or the company is looking for unicorns but inevitably end up having to hire a totally average human being), so people just apply whether they have the required skills or not.