Amazon recruiters can you please be more careful!
Short Version: Two recruiters screw up L5 vs L6 discussion and didn’t even convey my L6 intent to Hiring Manager, who was shocked to know that I asked for L6 and apologized! Long Version: Got an offer from Amazon, here is how the scenario played out: Recruiter 1: email - we have a great position blah blah blah. Call from R1- Me:I want to be considered for L6. R1: we look L6 in everyone. Me: I’m not talking about generic, but I want L6 loop. R1: Ok Coding assessment. phone interview. Done. Called for onsite. Connected with new recruiter R2 Me: Hey R2, I told R1 also that I’m looking for L6 so can you see it. R2: yes I can. Me: should I mention that to hiring manager in the interview? Just to be clear. R2: don’t do that it’s bad. Committee will meet before your interview and I’ll tell them Onsite done. R2 calls with Congratulations, I’ll get back with offer details. Next day. Call with Hiring Manager (HM) HM: Congratulations, so the offer is blah base blah stock. (I didn’t know HMs discuss numbers) Me: can We first talk about level. HM: L5 Me: oh did I not do well enough for L6? HM: we didn’t interview you for L6. It was L5 loop. Me: narrate whole story of Recruiter 1&2 HM: sorry, they didn’t even tell me you are considering for L6. Let me talk to them and get back to you. So Amazon recruiters can you please do a better job and save everyone’s time please !!!
Decline the offer and email Jeff Bezos with the story. It'll probably be fixed very quickly. Regardless life's too short to accept an offer you don't want.
From personal and friends experience... Amazon / AWS are the worst of the bunch. They lie and backstab each other on the candidate's expense!
I am suspicious of the story since at Amazon recruiter communicates the offer, not hiring manager
That is what surprised me most. Recruiter scheduled the call with HM and said it’s just time for you to ask questions about team and blah. The call begins with - “Congratulations, happy to have you. Here is the offer” . It took few seconds for me to come out of the shock because I wasn’t prepared to discuss numbers!
Not my experience at all. Applied for Senior (L6) online, got a L6 offer. Simple.
Did you ever ask R1 and R2 after you got the offer about this? What did the manager suggest to you for L6, if you did well in the interview, could they not up level you?
I think it’s s nice way of saying you’re not all that you think you are
Well I don’t mind them saying that. Instead the HM was surprised to know that I was looking for L6!
If recruiter was surprised then they have summed you up below
I had exactly the same experience interviewing Amazon, also around the same date (few days ago). I just declined the SDE2 offer even without negotiation.
Did they attempt to negotiate?
Yes, in their response they showed the attitude of that is not a final offer. However I was just losing interest
Btw, I don't think it's about careful. I feel it's more like intentional and hoping by luck some people will accept the downleveled offer.
Amazon recruitment lol, where do I start. They decide L5 or L6 with one round. That puts everything in question. 45 mins to decide if a person is better than 50% of the in-house L6. My recruiter lowballed with a L5 offer, then tells me the max is 175k TC. I told him my current TC is 230k. His response “people join amazon for good quality work, we have candidates joining at lower TC than before” 🤣
Usually bar raisers or HM or other interviewers L6+ can detect L6 candidates from interview perf. If they find out that you are L6 they will make sure to upgrade the loop as necessary. But at the same time, it could have been the case that nobody looked/knew for L6 signals.
An l6 loop has to have l6 interviewers so if the BR thinks that while they can up level their own questions they can't find new interviewers with no notice.
I agree! But here is what my Hiring Manger told me. In his own words! “If you apply for a certain position, we will create the loop according to that, and we’ll evaluate skills for that level. It’s very rare that we elevate that person to next level”! He was very honest that they were not even looking for L6 skills in me and he apologized multiple times for the miscommunication. Also the bar rising round which was with Hiring Manager went very well. He gave me multiple direct statements in the interview itself saying I rocked it. Ex: when I said “I want to explore this, but this may be too off the topic for what you asked” Him:”Please feel free to explore whatever you want because you yourself asked all the questions that I wanted to and also answered them. Please go into whatever direction you want to”! He literally used something like - “you hit it off the field” of something like that, I’m not familiar with baseball terminology so I don’t remember what he exactly said. But I could tell during the interview and while discussing the offer that he was extremely satisfied!