Tell HN: Recruiters are lying about remote positions
I've spent the last several months going though a FAANG interview. A recruiter from the company reached out to me and said they were hiring for remote. I got a hiring manager on board, spent evenings and weekends preparing for the coding and design interviews, and made it to the last step - my application had to go through a hiring committee.
The hiring committee said no, they didn't want remote hires.
I have friends in arguably worse situations. They were recruited for remote positions, accepted the jobs, and are now being told they have to show up onsite. When they pointed out they had been hired as remotes they were met with a collective shrug - the job opening didn't say remote, the agreement they signed didn't say remote. The recruiter was wrong but that's not the company's problem.
I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is, but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect.
454 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadWhich FAANG? Name and shame.
I'll put it this way. One FAANG I wouldn't work at under any circumstances. One FAANG has been very clear that they want employees on site. One FAANG has a recruiting proc where you are hired once you pass the interviews, you can figure out your team later. One FAANG doesn't really fit in the FAANG acronym.
Uh Amazon? I hope it's Amazon, not Facebook.
> One FAANG has been very clear that they want employees on site.
Both Netflix and Apple.
> One FAANG has a recruiting proc where you are hired once you pass the interviews, you can figure out your team later.
Google?
> One FAANG doesn't really fit in the FAANG acronym.
Amazon? Apple? Facebook because they've changed their name to Meta?
Google?
That's definitely Facebook.
I suppose Google fits here, but Facebook is even stronger in that you generally have to accept the offer not knowing what you're going to work on and team match after boot camp.
Amazon
> One FAANG has been very clear that they want employees on site.
Apple
> One FAANG has a recruiting proc where you are hired once you pass the interviews, you can figure out your team later.
Meta/FB
> One FAANG doesn't really fit in the FAANG acronym.
Netflix
QED
Wouldn't work ever - Amazon
Wants on-site - applies to Apple, Google, Netflix. My guess is Apple.
Team assigned later - Facebook/Meta with its bootcamp process
Doesn't fit FAANG - Netflix, it's not uncommon for folks to exclude it due to much smaller size
So most likely op interviewed at Google, which seems all the more likely given a months-long interview process that the company is infamous for, and usage of a hiring committee. My general sense is that their remote story has been somewhat inconsistent over time, so I'm not particularly surprised at internal misalignment.
One thing to notice about FAANG and other large companies is that the team assignment is not as important as you think. Reorgs are often large and frequent so suddenly you work on something completely different. How much choice you have in this process varies based on many factors, the company being one of them.
...One FAANG to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Pre-COVID, they had a WeWork office, but some employees were remote around the USA. Once COVID hit, they left the WeWork and became fully remote. We don't have an office, and now have people from all over the world.
HR and the C-suite make a big point of advertising both internally and externally that we are a 100% remote company. They've also arranged full-company gatherings so we can meet each other and put an actual person behind the face we see in Zoom. A couple months ago, it was in Chamonix, France.
Not to mention we hired people all around the country, so most of them don't have a place to come in to.
tl;dr: Telecommuting has been around for decades and is only going to become more common, not less. The pandemic merely accelerated the trend.
I completely agree with your post.
If you're good enough that they need you, they'll hire you anywhere with a net connection.
Honest critique is one thing, mob mentality outrage is not an honest critique.
They deserve the outrage and the outrage is the only thing that's gonna fix this.
Also to answer your question. Literally every single positive change in this country has come out of focused outrage.
Civil rights movement LGBT rights Women's rights The basic amount of worker and consumer rights.
What is being discussed is responsibility for actions.
The other commenter basically said focusing outrage was not problematic. I don't have any issue with honesty and transparency around hiring practices. However, I do think the appropriate place to do something like that would be on a site like glassdoor, and not a platform like twitter. I think as a country we have way more than enough "outrage" at the moment, I don't see any benefit to adding fuel to fire and communicating it a way that is likely going stir up hashtag vomit.
Would you encourage the same policy of not naming the the accused parties with the #meToo movement? Because it's not productive or worthwhile to focus on a few individuals? And where would that movement have gotten if none of the parties involved had ever been named?
I have known many people that have picked up and moved across the country for "the dream job," only to return, a couple of months later, tail between their legs, because the job turned out to be unsuitable in any of a dozen different ways (usually, it was because the duties did not match what they were told, but I know of at least one case, where the pay was drastically reduced, or they were hired as a contractor, even though they were told it was a salaried employee of the corporation).
Companies are huge and they can hurt many people at scale. Individuals are small, relatively powerless and easy to manipulate. Especially if they don't organise themselves. Spreading information is the first step of getting organised.
I would not encourage people early-to-mid-career, to do this.
I've had recruiters claim that if I use the offer they got me to negotiate a raise from my current employer, they'll make sure I never work in this town again - and yet recruiters keep calling.
Really. I know people with felony convictions for serious crimes who got back into the industry they offended against. It turns out that background check firms are only reliable when the applicant has no criminal background, heheh.
Maybe it's less prevalent than it has been in the past, but managers hate "troublemakers," even if the "troublemakers" are 100% correct.
Also, this is a FAANG company. Get problems there, it's likely to metastasize. It would be another thing, if it were BillyBob's WebApp Emporium.
Credibility is paramount on these things, and a recruiter doing this is wasting people's time and money.
Why do you believe the company should be able to keep bad behavior secret?
We don't even need to promote much discussion on it TBH. If OP is to be believed, the company blatantly lied to OP and wasted a large chunk of his time.
Just like in anything else in life, if someone is not held to the consequences of their actions, they'll keep doing it.
It's frankly pathetic if this remains the norm for our profession.
It's not like most of us applicants go in, blatantly lie, and waste the companies time. We, and every other worked applying to any job, should at least be treated the same as a bare minimum.
Someone deserves to be named and shamed, with the caveat of, there must be an agreement to actually accept the results of further digging.
If the recruiter said yes to a remote position that wasn't, the fault is rightly on the recruiter. If the recruiter was told remote was fine only for eventual reneg when ink was being put to paper... That is absolutely a reputation hit the client of said recruiter needs to take.
Fixing a fault requires identification, localization & characterization, and remediation.
This fault has been identified, but not localized and characterized.
Ergo, if remediation is the goal, naming and shaming absolutely needs to happen.
And everyone involved, up to the company execs making the decision themselves should understand the importance of this dynamic unless they've all been playing games to get to where they are, in which case, the callout is doubly needed.
They will lie to you, blatantly.
They'll use non-standard English that will have tons of ambiguities and brokenness. I believe this is a benefit to them, to provide ambiguity.
The remote/hybrid/in-person status is whatever you ask, and will be updated to the real answer when talking to the client.
The job will flip/flop from to w2 and c2c by whatever you seem to express.
Pay is whatever they think you will like.
There's "benefits" until it flips to contract with no benefits.
Now, that's not to say that a standard American recruiter is somehow good. They're also pretty sketch as well. But so far, in 2y of looking for a new job, 100% of the Indian recruiters have not "did the needful" for me.
Sounds like a 'win' to me.
This doesn't seem to be the companies fault.
Frankly, I'd say the vast majority of recruiters are bad. They are worse than a used car salesperson, and I will never deal with any of them again besides the occasional one that's actually working directly for the employer, as opposed to third-party recruiters from large recruiting firms.
A few years ago, I was working on some software that would find quality job listings and auto-apply for them (in theory; I don't believe I finished the form-filling part). Part of that filtering involved removing any listings from third-party recruiting firms. Blocking on the person-level really wasn't practical. While it worked somewhat, it seems that more of these firms appear and change names every year. It would always be imperfect unless someone was constantly monitoring the countless number of recruiting firms.
My best experiences were with small-time recruiters who worked for themselves. I'd much rather identify who these recruiters are and then ignore all the other ones by default.
I won't say my sample size (about 5 people who worked there and 10 people that have interviewed) is massive either, but mine is 100% negative. Yes, all IT people, so I'm not even dealing with the poor line workers.
Their turnover numbers IMO validate the negative views of Amazon. The ass-covering and lying during their downtimes over holiday also show a degrading culture.
Their UIs also show a poorly managed IT staff. I can understand warts, but why not gradual improvement? The biggest sign was their awful redesign of the console, which was demonstrably worse and has not improved.
"You're not supposed to use the UI in AWS"
Well OK, their APIs are not well documented. When you have a command with literally 100 options, you need a LOT of examples. The documentation of their error codes is basically "stackoverflow", and change over releases with no warning. And this is for their most used services, who knows what the various other crap is like. And they only show examples of invocations, they almost never show the OUTPUT format.
This is something that should be actively improved for the leading cloud provided that will probably hit 100 billion in revenue in 2022. You can't invest .0001% of your revenue to better documentation and tooling? Like that HASN'T cost you 1000x that in services and revenue already with people unable to get their prototypes off the ground or fix problems to scale more quickly?
They show management, they show low worker motivation, their marketing and press is so bad that Walmart seems like a good corporate citizen in comparison.
All of their policies can be glossed over with growth.
Unfortunately, AWS isn't a startup company anymore, it is a utility, an important core component in the foundation of the internet. Their culture and hiring and communication show that their growth HR policies are going to backfire in the coming decades as all their systems are likely on the their third or fourth "generation" of people being responsible for it.
Consider getting a software job at Amazon: likely you're getting shunted onto some "legacy" (you know, written 4 years ago, 2 employee generations ago) and are expected to know a big complicated messy codebase with no docummentation and no organizational memory, and then you get saddled with ridiculous expectations.
You either get to greenfield redevelop it (if you have a nice manager) which is risky, or you are utterly fucked from an advancement perspective and you are just meat to chew.
please, any readers, i beg of you: think three times before diving in that swamp.
I don't think most of us want to go for the lottery.
Also:
Majority of amazon alumni I've had experience with (to be fair it's not a lot) has been extremely toxic and a they've been a jerk. I don't blame the individuals. They are probably required to be a jerk to survive at Amazon and unlearning that is hard as fuck.
It's true that some people leave, and sometimes you're not sorry to see them go. This is true in every line of work.
Will avoid 10/10.
I believe they were molded to survive the Amazon culture, unfortunately.
What parts of Amazon did you not like?
Leaving aside the efficiencies of commingling inventory, even the simple filter option to only show sold and shipped by Amazon.com search results was deemed not to be a customer need. In fact, it was removed. Quite a puzzling “culture” of solving customer’s needs.
So... Where's the "Report counterfeit" button again?
Oh yeah. That's right. There isn't one. Intentionally.
- NYSE Trading Desk Employee
"Amazon cares about you"
- A deep water explosives petroleum rig diver
"Amazon is a supporting and caring environment"
- Ukrainian volunteer soldier
"Amazon cares about the success and long term health of every employee"
- A Russian soldier digging trenches near Chernobyl
1) Recruiter was misinformed and/or policies changed while you were interviewing. A lot of companies, including some of the big names, have been changing their remote policies in 2022. They're also playing off each other and the hiring market, so the situation is evolving quickly. Given what I've seen lately, it's possible that they were hiring remotely when your process started but they ended that policy before you crossed the finish line. (EDIT: Op mentioned scheduling interviews around the holidays in a different comment. With such a long interview cycle, I'd expect changing policies is the most likely explanation)
2) Recruiter was lying. I actually don't think this is likely because the recruiter would just be wasting their time. Recruiters don't actually gain anything and lose a lot of opportunity cost by running dead-end candidates through the pipeline for jobs they know won't be accepted.
3) You might have been switched to a different opening or department during the interview process. If the initial hiring manager declined you, they may have found someone else who wanted to pick up the thread. They should have notified you about the difference, of course.
4) Finally, it's possible they decided you weren't a good fit for remote work. Hybrid remote/in-office companies are becoming more picky about who they're allowing to work remote because not everybody can handle it. Usually the strongest candidates are afforded remote opportunities, but borderline maybes will be asked to be on-site at the start so they can be closely mentored.
Well, I might if we were talking about an internship and there was someone on site I trusted to keep an eye on them. Otherwise, one of the most important things I look for in any direct report is the ability to do their work without the need for a lot of hand-holding. IOW, if I don't trust them to work remote, then I just don't trust them.
It really depends. There are a lot of good people out there who don't do well with remote work. A lot.
If your company is mostly remote, it makes sense to pass on people who aren't great at remote work. But if you have in-office teams where they'd be a good fit, it can still be worth bringing them in if (and only if) they're interested in an in-office position.
It's really hard to tell if someone can handle remote work during an interview, though. People who have successfully worked remote and have good references are easy. People who have only worked in offices and want to go remote are much harder to evaluate in an interview context.
I apply for a job at a university. Job description says a college degree is required. I state in the cover letter that I do not have a degree, but hoped my experience would make up for it.
HR emails a few days later. Phone interview? I disclose NoDegree. Not a problem, she says.
Phone interview with her goes fine. She passes me off to the department and a C-level dude who apparently has to sign off on all hires for this category.
Phone interview with the C-level dude. I disclose NoDegree. Not a problem, he says.
Email from the department business manager asking for an in-person interview. Disclose NoDegree. Not a problem, when can you come in?
In-person interview with the business manager, a lab assistant, and about 6 or so faculty members. The faculty in particular love me. Disclose NoDegree to each of them. No problem, they say. Lots of experience.
Two weeks later, not a peep. Email the business director.
Response: "sorry, we went with a candidate with a degree."
Fucking assholes wasted easily 40 hours of my life on that bullshit.
In the future, I would suggest not even mentioning that you don’t have a degree (unless there’s a legal/licensing requirement for one).
Simply do not include an “education” section on your resume.
You’re not being dishonest, and given sufficient work experience, most people won’t even notice the section’s absence. The few that do notice, won’t care.
Throwaway account for obvious reasons.
What you sign MUST reflect the terms you agreed to…
The author's friends were a bit careless.
Then I heard that Shopify had literally shut down and sold their offices. It's not actually possible for the company to go back to the office because they don't exist.
So that's where I work now.
I've worked fully remotely for the same company for almost 6 years now. Having worked in an office before, one belief I've formed over the years is that working at a place that doesn't have remote at the core and that has staff that's remote and staff that isn't, would create a two-tier system and I'd be very afraid of trying it.
In fact for a lot of the company history, we've had an office in a location next to the founders, that people were not allowed to use as a work place. You could go there for a day here and there but not as a group and not as a regular activity. There weren't even spots for more than 5 or 6 people at the same time in there, so mostly used to receive mail. This sort of thing won't even be in the minds of a huge corporation that is only doing remote because the pandemic forced them to.
So my advice if you want to go remote, is to find a company that was either fully remote before the pandemic, or a company that has truly embraced it and shifted completely.
edit: seems like there's a bit of attention here, if you're struggling with remote or starting something and you want to exchange some war stories for fun, I'm always up to share some thoughts even though the internet is full of experts on remote nowadays. I've done it as an engineer in a company of 12, later as an engineering manager and more recently being manager of managers and we've surpassed 250 people, so I have thoughts about it from multiple angles. You can figure out how to contact me from my profile.
I suspect other companies are in a similar situation, and it's part of the growing pains of getting larger. But fuck is it hard to be happy with it.
(Edit: typo corrected, thanks kaapipo)
I think my main point still stands: you can't always just pack up your things and leave (or rather, you can, but the consequences aren't always a simple job hunt, sometimes they involve relocating internationally) so you may be willing to tolerate more abuse or conditions that are less than perfect for you.
I will no longer work for those sorts of companies.
My manager doesn't have much control of the WFH thing, it's the CEOs directive. I'm just a junior engineer with not much sway so my remote request was denied by their bosses boss who has never met me.
(anybody who may be interested in working at such a company, check my profile)
Bonus points for those companies because they didn't have to "figure it out" or change upper management corporate culture to go remote.
So they just can't, and I mean CAN'T, handle the idea of all-remote.
At all.
I'm actually onboarding at a remote position right now where the people I work with are clearly used to everything happening in an office. It's Thursday, I started Monday, and I have spent a grand total of maybe 3 hours speaking to my teammates or direct manager.
I've been dumped with a ton of documentation and stuff to read, but I feel extremely isolated. No one on my team has reached out to welcome me or make themselves available for questions or anything.
If this is what some people are experiencing in the remote world I don't blame them for wanting to go back to the office. It certainly is not how I've experienced remote work in the past so far.
From there, start being proactive about asking questions or starting conversations. Do not wait for others to reach out. You must initiate. That is a huge part of remote culture.
If you are initiating on instant messaging and not generating feedback or conversation, then you have a much bigger problem.
Expecting a new hire to initiate is pretty unrealistic imo. Even in an office, leaders should be encouraging employees to reach out to the new hire and make that connection. In person new hires would be getting a team lunch of some kind at most companies I've ever worked at, some kind of scheduled time to meet and interact with people.
I don't see why remote should be different really. Onboarding should be a hands on process for the whole team to participate in, remote or not.
So, yes. I am kind of wondering if this is a bigger problem or if once I have stuff to work on things will improve.
Moreover, senior roles absolutely require you to initiate. If you are in a junior role, proactive behavior will help you advance past those who wait for things to come to them.
In general terms, initiating is an active behavior, while expecting others to initiate is passive. If you want “hands on” from others, tell those hands that you need their engagement.
In general, I strongly advise against passive behavior, unless you want your career driven by the good graces of others.
I was warmly welcomed and immediately partnered with a senior person. People were extremely helpful and if I needed help, people were always open to hopping on a call to get me unstuck. Most people respond to slack messages quickly.
The only downside is the codebase/tech stack sucks and the technical culture leaves something to be desired. But they have really nailed the remote experience.
I will never willingly go back to the office. My employer definitely gets more productivity out of me than if I were in office. It really is a win-win in my case. [Edit]:removed repetition
Mine is not a remote first company, it's a an office-first company that moved to remote for covid and is trying to embrace it.
That's why I was expressing a desire to find a remote-first company instead, to get the kind of experience you are describing.
Interviewing can definitely be a numbers game but in hindsight (and just my experience) it's important to only go for companies where you think you'd be happy working.
As for onboarding, whether it's a remote first, omg-remote-because-of-covid, or an in-person company I've had varied results. My experience at most startups is that onboarding is pretty low on the priority list and quality is very dependent on the hiring manager and the team you've been hired onto.
Baring in mind this could be worse than 2008. It's not going to be pretty and workers will ultimately feel the brunt.
And if anyone is interested in for real remote work, we're hiring SDE & Sr SDE frontend (React) and backend (Python). See my profile for contact info if interested.
No contact info on profile (not interested, just saying).
Frankly I need to back off on HN as well.
I am beyond sick of my current company pretending like everything is going to go back to normal one day. We have 75% of people working from home although not labeled remote and maybe 25% back in some offices. The CEO pushing that we are an office company has destroyed communication and meant that over the last two years instead of adjusting how we work just pretending like nothing every happened. So now we have terrible communication even within teams and no one who wants to fix it because that would be a waste of time since soon everyone will be in the office. This has been going on for over a year.
Maybe they will fix this but it’s completely destroyed my desire to work for what was once a great company. They have over 1k employees. It’s unbelievable how much time and energy have been wasted because management has refused to accept the current situation. If i had taken this same approach when things changed at this current job or others I would be fired. I need to switch to management.
> management has refused to accept the current situation
You don't state what country you're in, but in the US, the pandemic is effectively over. Everyone (that wants to be) is well-vaccinated, many 3 or 4x, Omicron blew through the country and left us mostly unscathed, and the news hasn't talked about daily numbers in at least two months. There is little reason to wear a mask indoors unless you want to lessen your chances of catching the flu - which is ticking up a bit.
We probably don't meet the scientific/medical definition of the end of a pandemic, but socially, we're there.
However, if you're in the US and still feeling this way, you may be suffering from some low-grade PTSD. Don't be afraid to reach out for help.
I don't understand. Do people sign a contract that states something differently than they were being told verbally before?
Imho what isn't in writing doesn't exist. Especially when it comes to "promises" from potential employers.
For example I would not trust a promised raise in 12 months when nothing was done in writing. Even with the best of employers I would not agree to anything if they didn't agree to writing it down.
If I had applied to a remote position and the contract did not specifically state it's primarily a remote location, I would demand the contract was changed to reflect this before signing.
When I got my offer and contract to sign which stated remote work I made damn sure it was in the contract along with compensation, holidays, sick leave etc. If any of these differed from the job advert, interview discussions etc then I'd be bouncing it back to the employer to correct.
These are not "pretty hard standard[s] to hold" a potential employer to.
Yes. All the time.
And verbal agreements are valid contracts too, if you can prove they exist (but good luck in that).
Anyway, this particular case looks more like the OP believed on the promises of a 3rd party (the recruiter), so it's not actually a contract.
However, I'm a pretty senior engineer so it may be harder for more junior roles.
There are three models of recruiting, first-party, retained and commission. You do not want to speak to recruiters working on commission, because they take the shotgun approach and have the least information and least incentive to tell the truth. One of my first questions to third party recruiters is "are you retained or on commission" and if the second, end the conversation.
My first week I mentioned something to my boss about being remote after the first month and he had no idea. The recruiter had simply lied about "negotiating" so that I'd accept the offer.
Luckily it all worked out. Although company policy was officially no work from home, my directly manager didn't care at all. And shortly after corona hit and they company ended up going 100% remote anyway.
Sounds like bicycle speed.
I did try it via bicycle, and it did take about the same amount of time. But the streets here are vary narrow and southern hospitality ends when you get in a car.
Not sure what the solution for us is. Having someone promise you something that is totally disconnected from what you later receive in writing reeks of exploitation of your sunk cost. Not accepting it is the first necessary step.