Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters.
I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 weeks. Is there any chance I can get an offer from Google beforehand?" only to receive complete silence and had to go with a different offer. 1-2 months later, the recruiter gets back to me with an offer, I have to decline.
The most hilarious part about it: after I decline, I get interviewed by some team at G that tries to figure out why people declined. I guess they're expecting some teachable moment, some nuance and insight. My answer both times started with "lemme show you an email thread that is very one-sided..."
Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume.
He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions".
I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that. It's not even the manager of the team you'd be working on, just some recruiter that probably doesn't have any of the skills/background the job they're recruiting for requires. Yet they need to make you feel small and worthless right out of the gate.
Is it just prepping you for how you'll be treated there? Trying to select for people that are okay with being belittled?
One positive thing I heard from Amazon folks is that everyone there is honest that they hate the company and hang there only for moneys. Both ICs, their managers, and managers of their managers. At least no hypocrisy.
Oh ya this. Also their recruiters aren’t the best but they are the most persistent. Meta seems to be going in the Amazon direction unfortunately, I still think Google is the least bad of the three.
> I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these places have such a superiority complex that they need to belittle people like that.
Many, many years ago I sat next to HR in an open plan office while on a freelance gig.
They treated almost all candidates like subhumans, both when talking about the candidates within the team and when speaking on the phone to candidates.
They handled everyone from factory worker and janitorial roles, to specialists to director level. I very clearly got the impression that they only treated candidates well if those candidates could turn into people who had any power over them within the org.
I've carried that with me since and I often recognize it in HR staff I interact with now.
Linkein is now full of recruiters looking for work, who never had any network.
The barrier of entry to become a receruiter in general is very, very low.
At Amazon? Yes, very likely.
I remember a few years back when it seemed anyone who (1) had a pulse and (2) had rumors circulating that they might be a software developer got a contact from an AMZN recruiter about once a month if not sooner. It was frequent to have somebody complain on HN about how they could not get an interview with FAANG and I'd say "you really haven't gotten interviews with AMZN" and of course they were getting interviews with AMZN.
I once wrote a reply email to an Amazon recruiter saying effectively, "If Amazon were the last software company left on earth, I would rather become a carpenter than work there. Please never ask me to interview there again."
Anyhow a couple years later I got called by a recruiter from Amazon asking me if I'd be willing to relocate to work there.
I had a similar experience with Facebook, although my email was much more aggressive (this was when their recruiter contacted me right after I got tripped by one of their UX dark patterns in a way that translated to real world harm). I kept getting invites until I put a clear statement expressing my desire to never ever work for Facebook into my LinkedIn profile
FWIW I think it's because recruiters at most companies are effectively contractors and don't have access to all history of communications.
Well the guy was technically in line - your conditional wasn’t satisfied.
I think I wrote an email along those lines, at some point, although it was as much annoyance with the persistence of a particular recruiter as it was a desire not to work at Amazon.
+1, it's been a while since I interviewed with Google, but this brought me back to how annoying it was. I've never had a good interview experience with Google. I only interviewed during college for internship and then a full-time new-grad role and got a consistent "we're doing you a favour by even talking to you" attitude from them— the delays, the impersonality, the delays to the general vibe of the emails, etc.
They became significantly more attentive when I got an internship offer from a competing big-tech company, but as much as my recruiter seemed to try, the process just seem to be deficient beyond their capacity to do anything about it. It had to go through many steps, and be reviewed by many people who seemingly had better things to do.
Eventually they reached to the right people to tell me my decision before my other deadline. I _was_ going to get an offer. They couldn't get me the actual offer letter, or tell me if I had guaranteed host-matching though. I happened to know Google can send intern offers that don't guarantee you'll be matched to a team, and if you're not, the internship just doesn't happen. In my book that's not only as good as no offer really, it's also just disrespectful. I knew people who had this type of offers and didn't get teams.
I took the other offer. "You will get an offer, the details are just taking a while" is not enough to decide on, and the whole process didn't particularly warm me up to Google. For comparison, and to give credit where credit is due, the other company was Meta (then FB). My recruiter was very response, understanding, and personable, which is especially appreciated as an college student— you're nervous, unexperienced and have a lot going on beyond interviewing. They sent me pictures of their dog to lighten the mood. I had told them I'd appreciate quickness, and by the time I was eating dinner after my on-site, I had the offer letter in my inbox.
I remember at the time being frustrated that, after in person interviewing, they left me hanging for four months. I had a NSF grant that had been approved and if Google X had offered me a role I would have turned down the grant, but after months of silence I had to tell Google that I needed an answer or the decision would be made for me.
It was incredibly inconsiderate, the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
>> the only thing I could guess is that they're intentionally horrible to applicants in order to filter out the ones that won't tolerate it.
I had two friends within the span of 18 months have this experience where they've run the gauntlet of pre-screening, get invited out to Google offices. Run through two days of grueling interviews, all the while getting a lot of great positive feedback about their performance. They end the last day, go back to the hotel, thinking about leaving the following morning.
They get a call around dinner time. "Hey, we had two more directors that wanted to speak to you tomorrow, it would only be for a few hours, but they were really impressed with the feedback and wanted to have some more time with you. Can you stay for one more day?"
Both later found out this is a complete ruse to find out how bad you want to work at Google. This forces you to change your flight plans, pay for the change to your ticket, pay for another night at a hotel, etc. If you do, they line something up that's super casual. If you reject the offer and return home, they conclude you didn't want to work their bad enough to change all of your plans and remove you from the candidate pool.
Same thing, once you turn them down and maintain your plans of leaving the next morning, they just ghost you and you never hear back from them. The irony was one of the two was contacted a year later from a different department asking him if he would be interested in interviewing for another position there. He said he rolled his eyes and politely declined the offer. He said it was pretty unreal to treat him like garbage and then come back and see if he was interested in another role there. As if everything there is so disconnected or they thought this was just completely acceptable behavior.
This doesn't pass the sniff test.
Why would the candidate be on the hook for the flight change and extra night at a hotel?
When I interviewed with Google ~10 years ago, they booked and paid for my my flights (from China to the US), hotel and car hire. I didn't have to book, pay and then ask for reimbursement, let alone foot the bill myself.
The 'two days' sounds weird to me as well. In my experience (on both sides of the table) face to face interviews were scheduled to be on a single day.
Perhaps things have changed or your friends were interviewing for very specialist roles?
The phrasing “from start to end” got me thinking—tangential, but—they were an extremely cool company when Millenials were in school and looking to join the workforce. Anybody would have jumped at the opportunity to work for them.
Actually, I can’t even think of a similar company nowadays.
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a really bad hiring pipeline as a result. Why work on the skill of hiring, if people will jump through flaming hoops to work for you.
As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
> As MS converts into IBM, and Google converts into MS, I guess they will have to figure that out.
Shocking how real this is.
Just wait for IBM to turn into Red Har Linux or maybe Infosysl
That would be nice, if it turned into Red Hat.
But IBM was first, right?
IBM owns Red Hat, and companies grow to resemble their acquisitions all the time, though I think more people believe Red Hat is already deep in being borgified to be IBM Linux more than the other way around.
I’m aware… it just seems too good to be true, that IBM could be corrected by Red Hat.
Sometimes, good things are worth the wait. The two times that you accepted roles other than Google, did they turn out better than waiting for Google?
I am surprised that you accept. I would never waste my time. If these companies refuse to provide reasonable interview feedback, why would you provide it to them?