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The startup I work for slashed everyone's pay by 50% starting from March and as much as I'd love to believe that "we're just waiting on some investor paperwork to finalize" before everything goes back to normal I finally flipped the LinkedIn switch that turns on the recruiter flood. So far it has pretty much all been either sketchy contract to hire stuff or Amazon. I finally bit on one of the Amazon recruiters and have a final interview in 2 weeks. They said it usually is a 6-8 hour interview but because of the circumstances they've cut it down to 3-4 hours. Part of me is very prepared to bail even if I get an offer because of all the evil stuff, but also I feel like pretty much any company paying me to touch a computer is going to be doing some vile poo poo so maybe the best thing is to stack what I can with a goal of escaping to the woods or something asap
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Jul 18, 2020 04:07
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 05:53 |
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still haven't had the amazon interview yet but the recruiter just sent me a list of questions to answer and included "what is your expected compensation?" Is it a bad idea to respond with something along the lines of: "it's too early for me to have a good idea of a specific number, but most likely somewhere in the range of what glassdoor/levels.fyi says for SDEs in my location"? Am I better off just dodging the question completely until after the interview?
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Jul 25, 2020 18:58
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PIZZA.BAT posted:if you give them a "range" your absolute best case will be the bottom of that range Yeah I guess this was what was making me uneasy the most. Thanks all for the solid answer. I do kind of feel like an rear end for presumably making the recruiter's job more difficult, but thinking about it this is the first time I've really dealt with interviewing for a company with over 1000 employees so maybe he's used to it.
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Jul 25, 2020 19:47
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Just finished the amazon interview. Didn't feel like I did stellar but also didn't feel like I completely whiffed. They were cool enough to at least promise a decision by end of day so at least I can focus the weekend on either success drinking or failure drinking.
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Jul 31, 2020 21:34
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Got an offer!  Hiring manager called me and very much wanted me to say a number and I did not say a number and then he eventually said a number and it ended up being over double what I was making before the salary cuts so things look good. I made absolute sure to not expose in any way that the startup I am at now was having money issues but I think he was able to assume it and kind of poked at that to try to get me to break but I pulled through.Thanks everyone in this thread for all the advice. I hope that everyone finds their dream job/number(but dont say it), you all are the best and deserve it.
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Aug 1, 2020 02:14
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SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE posted:Well done! What kind of excuses did you come up with to avoid number-saying? I'm sure I sounded super flustered the whole time but someone had posted earlier in this thread something along the lines of "I expect a competitive offer based on the market for this position and my level of experience, if the company is concerned that they might not be able to meet that, please let me know" so that was mostly what I was trying to get across. As was posted last page, the second part of that doesnt really apply to Amazon, and me and the HM both kind of nodded to that. I also said that it was really hard to materialize how much it would take for me to leave my current position, especially without having more insight into the team/tools/culture I'd be moving to. That is something that is still kind of eating me tbh. I interviewed with 4 technical people and only 1 was from the department I was applying to and they were in a completely different city than I am so I think they are on a different team in the dept. HM said that there really isn't a lot he can tell me before I accept and sign a bunch of NDAs, but he assured me that if the team fit was poor for whatever reason, it is very common and easy to transfer departments. I haven't accepted anything yet, but it is a lot more money than I was expecting.
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Aug 1, 2020 17:16
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bob dobbs is dead posted:well, you'll roll the dice on the team. you know about the scummy backloading thing they do w RSUs right Yeah I've got a good friend at a different department in amazon so he gave me some details on the RSU situation (and also some solid tips on the interview structure). I can definitely see how the RSU scheming can make it difficult to compare total compensation and it kind of fucks with the levels.fyi numbers. Ultimately though just looking at base salary I'm still at at least a 50% raise. I've still got a few days before I need to provide an answer but I'm v leaning towards taking it. Current job probably wont be able to come anywhere near matching. I do feel bad since they are in a bind clearly, but in these trying times maybe one less person on the payroll works out for the better.
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Aug 2, 2020 00:03
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The whiteboarding experience in my virtual Amazon interview wasnt as bad as a lot of the stories I've seen posted here. Since it was virtual I got to at least use a shared text editor but no compiler. I absolutely whiffed an optimization to O(1) on one problem but still got an offer. It definitely felt like they cared more about thought process and whatnot. They have a really rigid interview structure and AFAIK the recruiter should lay it all out before the interview. I ended up grinding leetcode mediums on the evenings for a week, prepped a bunch of "tell me about a time when X" stories, and didnt feel caught off guard by anything by the time it rolled around. Much less painful than having a take home hackathon type project. This was for SDE so if you are going for something else ymmv I guess.
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Aug 27, 2020 14:36
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 05:53 |
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Job I just left had unlimited PTO ("We're all adults here, just use your best judgement") and it was a big factor that made me start my search. I've never been somewhere that would buy out vacation days but that seems like it would create situations where some person that never takes time off becomes a single point of failure. Combined with the mentioned additional accounting burden I have no idea why a company would choose it over "use it or lose it".
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Aug 28, 2020 21:37
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