200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week • Hacker News Board

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#151

Post by rayvd » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

mempko wrote: post #114

rshnotsecure wrote: post #36

This is not unusual. My spouse works for Glassdoor. Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications (not bots) within about 72 hours. Desperate people from all over the US. I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore. Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in…

But we have such a strong economy!

True, but even at low unemployment levels, 3% of a vast workforce is many millions of people. :)

(Yeah, I know you were being sarcastic, but the economy IS in good shape)

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#152

Post by keltor » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #145

eastendguy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm this. I personally know of two companies were accurate but negative reviews were taken down by Glassdoor. One was the company I worked for. In this case it was triggered at the request of the CEO, who was heavily criticized in the reviews. He made HR sign up for a Glassdoor Premium account, so that they took the reviews down. All negative reviews were 100% accurate from my point of view and not insultin…

So Glassdoor is pay for prestige.

Contrary to what the GP is saying, Glassdoor seems EXTREMELY resistant unless the review is actually fake and/or contains proprietary information. It's absolutely nothing like Yelp.

I do understand that they have their "own" system that automatically reviews posts and removes them. Sadly that hasn't worked out fantastically at my employer, they mostly remove these 5 star reviews.

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#153

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

keltor wrote: post #152

rhacker wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Glassdoor is pay for prestige.

Contrary to what the GP is saying, Glassdoor seems EXTREMELY resistant unless the review is actually fake and/or contains proprietary information. It's absolutely nothing like Yelp. I do understand that they have their "own" system that automatically reviews posts and removes them. Sadly that hasn't worked out fantastically at my employer, they mostly remove these 5 star reviews.

[deleted]

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#154

Post by HillaryBriss » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

ahnus6 wrote: post #87

hourislate wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications There are some major Corporations here in DFW, some that have hired 1000's of H1B's (Car companies, Airlines, etc). It doesn't surprise me that Americans are desperate for work.

What does hiring qualified h1b visa holders have to do with anything? The desperate Americans are not qualified for the job. If they were it would be in the company’s best interest to hire the American. The h1b program requires paying a local market wage. Even if you don’t believe it does the effect would be to just lower wages, it would still be better to hire the qualified American at reduced wages rather than spon…

Historically there's been a lot of anti-foreign bias and discrimination from US workers and companies, which in part goes under the heading of "cultural fit." But I've often wondered about it going in the opposite direction too. In an office where most of the workers have come from the same country (outside the US), is there ever a bias against US based, English-only speaking workers?

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#155

Post by oralty » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

alfromspace wrote: post #144

oralty wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that doesn't change the economics at all. the money paid to the worker through a middle-man has no bearing on the labor market as seen by the company and their bottom-line. You could send your paycheck into the incinerator every month... it makes no difference. as you say the $80k is the rate to avoid hiring a US employee. maybe that's lower than what it would be with no h1-b, but then what are these displaced americ…

>what are these displaced american workers doing for more than $80k? Being unemployed and making 0k. Avoiding hiring US employees for over $80k doesn't mean they're hiring those who accept below $80k. They're not being considered for those jobs at all in the first place. I assure you there are legions of very smart lawyers who work very hard on the process for employers - I would know, I've prepared the petitions, an…

The lack of perspective and basic reasoning on this is staggering.

> shitty wages, hours, and work environment.

A "shitty" wage is better than being unemployed and making 0k. Perhaps not if we were talking about at or near minimum wage. But we're not. We're talking nearly double the median income of the location in question and well beyond the poverty line.

If there were really this untapped market of native talent to replace H1-B imports, that are on average making $80k (actually $100k for tech), then that immense pool of workers can settle for $70k, $60k, $50k, $40k, $30k... and why wouldn't these companies take them at some low price between $100k and minimum wage? Why would these companies insist on hiring H1-Bs at a $100k a head if there was this large population of native, qualified, unemployed workers making $0 that would be lucky to get a measly $40k (to throw a number on it).

"Legions of smart lawyers" also sounds expensive. You don't need a legion of smart lawyers to hire from this large, unemployed, qualified, bonafide American talent pool that you insist exists.

The mental gymnastics H1-B paranoiacs go through does not fail to impress. During the first dot-com bust and post-recession at least it had a whiff of plausibility. But tech employment is at all time highs, it's beyond ludicrous.

And another thing that doesn't add up, the average for non H1-Bs in that pdf was close to $200k. And the unemployment rate in Texas is lower than the national average which is already low. In tech heavy cities like Austin it is even lower (near 2%!). So I have seen no strong evidence that H1-Bs are pushing American tech workers out of the middle class, the opposite in fact.

If you really know someone in tech that is unemployed and making nothing, then either they are not qualified or they have some other limitation making them unemployable. There are plenty of job listings at all levels across the US that are not open to H1-B sponsorship and some that are open just to US citizens (and do not require an existing clearance). Scapegoating H1-B programs in this economy isn't even offensive, it's just sad.

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#156

Post by simonh » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

tryitnow wrote: post #120

Great clickbait. The first sentence provides crucial context - Amazon wants to hire 30K. So they had, on average, about 7 applications for every job. That actually doesn't seem so great. It's even less impressive when it's incredibly easy to get a ton of low-quality matches when recruiting. So if Amazon execs wanted to tout a big number of applications they could just advertise these positions in a wildly aggressive…

They were hiring in 6 cities, so that's an average of 30k applicants per location. That's a heck of a lot for a single community, even in a large city. How many businesses get tens of thousands of job applicants at a single location?

One of the locations is Arlington Virginia, the future location of HQ2, but they're only hiring 400 there now. In future they expect that will go up to 24k, which is about 10% of the population of the city!

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#157

Post by cpitman » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

growlist wrote: post #58

csydas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither :) You're missing an adjective from your observation: qualified. For any given position, even when you're pretty specific on the requirements, you will get an onslaught of applicants who have absolutely no business trying to apply for said position, but they do it anyways just because it vaguely matches a skillset they have and they need a job. This isn't a criticism of such persons; it's foolish for people t…

qualified* (*and will accept what we're paying)

Are you claiming that there are a large number of qualified applicants that are currently unemployed because there are no openings paying as much as they believe they are worth?

Or are you saying that if they paid more, already employed applicants would jump from another company, leaving a job opening at their current company? If this is the case, it still means that there are fewer qualified candidates then openings, and no amount of raising pay will (in the short term of ~4 years) mean there are enough qualified candidates.

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#158

Post by Fins » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

df wrote: post #45

on the other hand - I can't imagine I'm the only person to have been getting quite a few "come work for us" emails from Amazon via LinkedIn recently (two in the last month, six in the last year). The solicitations do not appear to be very carefully targeted - they seem to mention everything from machine learning to mobile app development.

Lucky you, to get so few of them. I gopt 4 in just the last month, and usually it's at least one every 3 months.

And that when the first line of my profile very explicitly states that I would never work for Amazon.

Not sure if they are so desperate to get any warm bodies in, or just general Amazon's incompetence.

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#159

Post by NeverFade » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

cdolan wrote: post #54

rshnotsecure wrote: post #36

This is not unusual. My spouse works for Glassdoor. Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications (not bots) within about 72 hours. Desperate people from all over the US. I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore. Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in…

Not to hijack, but do you or your spouse have an opinion on the WSJ story about companies intensely curating their reviews (maybe even paying/threatening the employees and/or Glassdoor)? I noticed a local company I follow had fluctuating review counts between 30-45. I wrote a web scraper to see if reviews were being taken down, and for this company, over 20 1 or 2 star reviews have been taken down, but any new 5 star…

In my experience, it's far easier and more common for companies to simply flood their review pool with bogus positive reviews, rather than bother about negative reviews.

Plenty of startup founders boosted their rating by telling HR, family, friends, and foreign clickfarms to post 5 star Glassdoor reviews.

It's extremely easy to inflate your rating this way. Glassdoor does nothing to prevent it. There are small startups with more 5-star Glassdoor reviews than employees.

As long as your bots also upvote every other 5-star reviews, anyone looking at your review pool, sorted either by recency or "most helpful", will have to scroll through dozens of these bogus 5-star reviews before they get to any real negative review. By that point, the negative review will seem like a biased exception posted by a disgruntled employee - if they even get to it.

The worst aspect of this is how easy it is for truly terrible companies to royally screw their employees yet retain an eye-popping 4.2+ rating on Glassdoor. I've seen a couple of cases where companies badly mistreated employees, got a well-deserved torrent of 1-2 star reviews as a result, then flooded their pool with hundreds of fake 5-star reviews. Now these terrible companies, that truly do mistreat and abuse their workforce, have a Glassdoor page and review pool disguising them as a top 1% employer.

Re: 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

#160

Post by namibj » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #142

hvidgaard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy what people think is acceptable. At least half of all the people that apply to our junior positions cannot answer simple question such as "how would you find the first "42" in an array of integers, and give me the index". If they don't have an idea of how to count with a for loop and write an if statement, they're not qualified for programming. Some even ask if they can take the "assignment" home and get b…

Well I don't know, I recently interviewed on a phone interview and then they wanted me to do some coding during the phone call through some shared codepen solution, what they wanted was not much more complicated then what you describe and something I should be able to do with eyes closed. Really it was exactly in my wheelhouse where I do things a thousand times more complicated every day to general acclaim of the peo…

The term is stage fright, and most do not believe in it until they feel it. The trick is to reassure yourself that your judgement is way good enough, and that you can't do worse than try your best. Of course you need to be fine with presenting unclean/broken/bad code. Train with non-code situations, if you can find them. They are less rigid than code, and thus task your judgment much more, so code won't push you as hard.\