zlacker

The cynic in me thinks that for any number of potential candidates who feel the same, there are exponentially more candidates that just want to work there regardless, and the recruiting team knows this.

>>strong+(OP)
They could be alienating vastly more people than that. However, they only need to higher a tiny fraction of the US workforce each year. So, it’s still not a significant issue.

>>strong+(OP)
Literally anyone at Uber, Palantir, or Facebook has got to be on their short list of people to recruit.

>>Retric+A3
Their pool is not the entire US workforce, it's a relatively small group of highly skilled workers in a market where those workers can make tons of money at many different companies.

Alienating a fraction of that workforce will impact them, I think.

>>birdyr+85
Sorry to break it to you, but anyone who is still at Facebook at this point thinks they are at the top of the heap and a lateral move to maybe Google, Apple, or Microsoft would be worth considering if it included a bump in grade. Amazon is a place Facebook recruits from, it does not go in the other direction. [FB and Amazon have the same moral issues if you work there but the environment at FB is an order of magnitude better, particularly for mid-level engineers.]

>>evgen+le
Can confirm, Amazon in Seattle is literally just a testing ground for people who couldn't get into Google/Apple/FB/Microsoft/etc. on the first try.

Amazon becomes their best available option, and once they work there for a year or two, improve their skills, get some experience, and get tired of dealing with hell that is working at Amazon, they get hired at all those companies they couldn't initially get into. No one says Amazon is incompetent at tech, quite the opposite. There is a lot people can learn while working there, and all those other competing tech giants know it.

I've heard of very few moves the other way around, and in every single such scenario I personally witnessed, there was a lot of very specific circumstances for the person that lead them to that point.

>>static+Ua
Warehouse workers are not highly skilled. But, even if you’re talking just say programmers they still employ less than 1% of us.

>>Retric+OA
I am referring to programmers, and specifically a subset of programmers that can pass a difficult interview - most developers are absolutely terrible, probably > 50%, so cut that number in half at least. It's a relatively small number.

>>strong+(OP)
And every year there's a new batch of suckers.

>>static+0M
You can cut 90% of programmers that would not pass an interview for whatever reason and there are still easily 10 times more people that qualify than work for Amazon. More so if you consider whatever fraction they need to onboard each year. Absolutely worst case is just slightly increase pay or open a few more offices across the US.

>>Retric+l71
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

612k engineers. Let's assume that Amazon aims to hire the top 20% (I would expect software engineering skills to follow a power curve), so roughly 100k qualified workers.

That's pretty small if you're looking to employ 2-5k of them. That's a lot of competition given that there are likely at least 50 companies making Amazon-type offers.

I'm not saying they can't hire people if 10% of that pool decides they won't work there, but I'd imagine they would want to extend their pool to maybe top 30% at some point.

>>static+Na1
That’s more or less the numbers I was thinking.

Amazon does a wide range of software development from robotics, backend AWS, internal software, and front end web development. So, most developers have relevant skills even if some positions are much harder to fill. That said their dev teams have many non programmers like systems administrators and testers etc so I suspect it’s closer to 2k US developers than 5k. As it looks like many of their openings are in Canada, Ireland, India, etc.

>>Retric+Te1
To me, a company that wants 2% of a pool has to be extremely competitive. 2% is a lot.