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

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

#181

Post by noego »

burger_moon wrote: post #84
noego wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know at Amazon works 8 hour days, completely disconnect when they finish with work, and have tons of flexibility for working from home when family related issues arise. I don't doubt that you know specific people who are having the opposite experience - Amazon culture varies a lot based on which vp/director you work for. But your friends' experience isn't indicative of all tech employees.

I worked for Amazon until earlier this year. They worked everyone hard as fuck. Even principal engineers worked nights and weekends. It was the worst experience of my life. For people reading these comments you need to understand these people who say it's blown out of wack and FUD (lmao no) it isn't. And typically the people who get themselves into positions where their job is butter at Amazon is because they threw a…

Why do you think that your anecdote should trump someone else's? I know a large number of people working at Amazon, and they have had the opposite experience as what you're describing. Making vast generalizations like "They worked everyone hard as fuck. Even principal engineers worked nights and weekends" are so ridiculous, they just make you sound silly to anyone in the know.

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

#182

Post by plausibilities »

notus wrote: post #127
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…

I'm a senior software engineer and my experience is much different for contrast. I get a response from almost every place I apply.

If you're not a scrub, go through non-scrub recruiters, and manage to get through a handful of high-vis projects relatively unscathed, word travels extremely quickly and from then on out you can pretty much coast mostly on reputation.

It's a small world out there sometimes.

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

#183

Post by GreenJelloShot »

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…

Amazon has a huge amount of churn. Most employees only stick around for 2 years and then leave shortly afterwards (once the cash bonuses stop and they start dribbling out stock instead).

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

#184

Post by GreenJelloShot »

mindfulplay wrote: post #67
astura wrote: post #47

If they have this many applicants then why are their recruiters always contacting me on LinkedIn? Is everyone applying really junior?

I would imagine they have one of the highest attrition rates ever for any tech company. I am a lifelong Amazon customer but choose never to be an employee of theirs.

> I would imagine they have one of the highest attrition rates ever for any tech company.

Pretty much this.

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

#185

Post by manfredo »

hourislate wrote: post #95
throwaway5752 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what. F-1s, OPTs, H1B, are people too and as a rule are taking an enormous risk in life uprooting to a new country and a different language. Most of them have advanced degrees. Hundreds of them apply to open jobs too. They are human beings, and there are a lot of human beings - regardless of arbitrary imaginary lines that divide us - who are looking for work.

So you believe they have more rights to work in the USA than US citizens? A US Citizen can't even apply for the job the company slated for an H1B applicant.

In my experience, roles are not "slated" for H1B applicants. Rather, companies have to evaluate whether or not the applicant is worth burning an H1B visa to hire them. The result is that the hiring bar is higher for foreign workers.

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

#186

Post by harry8 »

aripickar wrote: post #60
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.

I’ve gotten those and I work for Amazon. The recruiters spam everyone.

and trash amazon's reputation.

Can't even do a mail merge from 1983, wow, AI ML expertise at amazon on show there. I bet it makes you feel valued as an employee too.

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

#187

Post by csydas »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #136
elliekelly wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely need to know someone to get your application to the top of the pile. Perhaps the legal industry is an extreme outlier but aside from my very first job as a “summer associate” (read: intern) I haven’t gotten a single job from blindly applying. And even the summer program was an “inside recommendation” of sorts since the school organizes the whole OCI process.

Blindly sending email to managers who might hire you works better than sending an application off blindly to HR. Of course, the former is often seen as SPAM though can work if you have the right qualifications and they have the right needs.

As a manager who might hire you, I would tack on some caution to this advice.

This works for smaller businesses that can be flexible and are not really liable/viable targets for anything.

Once a business gets even some traction and size, this becomes a wasted effort, if not an annoyance to the manager. Most of the time I choose not to respond as it's just the safest option for us, or I redirect the email to our HR.

Most of the managers making the decisions do not do hiring as a full time job, it's just an aspect of their job. While it can be enjoyable, it's also very emotionally draining and physically taxing (non-stop interviews on top of regular responsibilities) and when people go outside of the normal process like this (and worse, raise a stink if you don't respond to their deviation well), it just adds more headaches for me.

So the above advice might work sometimes, but be aware there is another side.

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

#188

Post by kamaal »

hi41 wrote: post #105

My friend’s wife took almost 8 months to find a production support job. Why are jobs so hard to get these days? Is it because competition is so high and for a single job there are 20 applicants?

People expect you to ace rounds of leet code style interviews or worse, whiteboard coding interviews.

A lot of people get filtered out.

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

#189

Post by hvidgaard »

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…

I am sorry you had to go through that, it sound truly awful. I however get so many applicants that I need to reject the majority, and that is about the simplest initial litmus test I can think of. I am rather confident that the majority are not panicking, and those that are get significant slack - I'd rather spend 10 minutes more establishing some trust and comfort if they express the need to me, than outright dismiss them. I'm too emphatic for anything less.

If it's any comfort, stage fright is something you can overcome. It's not easy, but it's doable.

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

#190

Post by hvidgaard »

pingyong wrote: post #110
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…

How do they get that far, does their resume look good?

Their resume states relevant experience, and they have some projects or spare time work in the field.
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