Then I heard that Shopify had literally shut down and sold their offices. It's not actually possible for the company to go back to the office because they don't exist.

So that's where I work now.

I've worked fully remotely for the same company for almost 6 years now. Having worked in an office before, one belief I've formed over the years is that working at a place that doesn't have remote at the core and that has staff that's remote and staff that isn't, would create a two-tier system and I'd be very afraid of trying it.

In fact for a lot of the company history, we've had an office in a location next to the founders, that people were not allowed to use as a work place. You could go there for a day here and there but not as a group and not as a regular activity. There weren't even spots for more than 5 or 6 people at the same time in there, so mostly used to receive mail. This sort of thing won't even be in the minds of a huge corporation that is only doing remote because the pandemic forced them to.

So my advice if you want to go remote, is to find a company that was either fully remote before the pandemic, or a company that has truly embraced it and shifted completely.

edit: seems like there's a bit of attention here, if you're struggling with remote or starting something and you want to exchange some war stories for fun, I'm always up to share some thoughts even though the internet is full of experts on remote nowadays. I've done it as an engineer in a company of 12, later as an engineering manager and more recently being manager of managers and we've surpassed 250 people, so I have thoughts about it from multiple angles. You can figure out how to contact me from my profile.

I suspect other companies are in a similar situation, and it's part of the growing pains of getting larger. But fuck is it hard to be happy with it.

I will no longer work for those sorts of companies.

(Edit: typo corrected, thanks kaapipo)

I think my main point still stands: you can't always just pack up your things and leave (or rather, you can, but the consequences aren't always a simple job hunt, sometimes they involve relocating internationally) so you may be willing to tolerate more abuse or conditions that are less than perfect for you.

My manager doesn't have much control of the WFH thing, it's the CEOs directive. I'm just a junior engineer with not much sway so my remote request was denied by their bosses boss who has never met me.

(anybody who may be interested in working at such a company, check my profile)

Bonus points for those companies because they didn't have to "figure it out" or change upper management corporate culture to go remote.

I'm actually onboarding at a remote position right now where the people I work with are clearly used to everything happening in an office. It's Thursday, I started Monday, and I have spent a grand total of maybe 3 hours speaking to my teammates or direct manager.

I've been dumped with a ton of documentation and stuff to read, but I feel extremely isolated. No one on my team has reached out to welcome me or make themselves available for questions or anything.

If this is what some people are experiencing in the remote world I don't blame them for wanting to go back to the office. It certainly is not how I've experienced remote work in the past so far.

From there, start being proactive about asking questions or starting conversations. Do not wait for others to reach out. You must initiate. That is a huge part of remote culture.

If you are initiating on instant messaging and not generating feedback or conversation, then you have a much bigger problem.

Expecting a new hire to initiate is pretty unrealistic imo. Even in an office, leaders should be encouraging employees to reach out to the new hire and make that connection. In person new hires would be getting a team lunch of some kind at most companies I've ever worked at, some kind of scheduled time to meet and interact with people.

I don't see why remote should be different really. Onboarding should be a hands on process for the whole team to participate in, remote or not.

So, yes. I am kind of wondering if this is a bigger problem or if once I have stuff to work on things will improve.

Moreover, senior roles absolutely require you to initiate. If you are in a junior role, proactive behavior will help you advance past those who wait for things to come to them.

In general terms, initiating is an active behavior, while expecting others to initiate is passive. If you want “hands on” from others, tell those hands that you need their engagement.

In general, I strongly advise against passive behavior, unless you want your career driven by the good graces of others.

Interviewing can definitely be a numbers game but in hindsight (and just my experience) it's important to only go for companies where you think you'd be happy working.

As for onboarding, whether it's a remote first, omg-remote-because-of-covid, or an in-person company I've had varied results. My experience at most startups is that onboarding is pretty low on the priority list and quality is very dependent on the hiring manager and the team you've been hired onto.

I was warmly welcomed and immediately partnered with a senior person. People were extremely helpful and if I needed help, people were always open to hopping on a call to get me unstuck. Most people respond to slack messages quickly.

The only downside is the codebase/tech stack sucks and the technical culture leaves something to be desired. But they have really nailed the remote experience.

I will never willingly go back to the office. My employer definitely gets more productivity out of me than if I were in office. It really is a win-win in my case. [Edit]:removed repetition

Mine is not a remote first company, it's a an office-first company that moved to remote for covid and is trying to embrace it.

That's why I was expressing a desire to find a remote-first company instead, to get the kind of experience you are describing.

Baring in mind this could be worse than 2008. It's not going to be pretty and workers will ultimately feel the brunt.

I am beyond sick of my current company pretending like everything is going to go back to normal one day. We have 75% of people working from home although not labeled remote and maybe 25% back in some offices. The CEO pushing that we are an office company has destroyed communication and meant that over the last two years instead of adjusting how we work just pretending like nothing every happened. So now we have terrible communication even within teams and no one who wants to fix it because that would be a waste of time since soon everyone will be in the office. This has been going on for over a year.

Maybe they will fix this but it’s completely destroyed my desire to work for what was once a great company. They have over 1k employees. It’s unbelievable how much time and energy have been wasted because management has refused to accept the current situation. If i had taken this same approach when things changed at this current job or others I would be fired. I need to switch to management.

> management has refused to accept the current situation

You don't state what country you're in, but in the US, the pandemic is effectively over. Everyone (that wants to be) is well-vaccinated, many 3 or 4x, Omicron blew through the country and left us mostly unscathed, and the news hasn't talked about daily numbers in at least two months. There is little reason to wear a mask indoors unless you want to lessen your chances of catching the flu - which is ticking up a bit.

We probably don't meet the scientific/medical definition of the end of a pandemic, but socially, we're there.

However, if you're in the US and still feeling this way, you may be suffering from some low-grade PTSD. Don't be afraid to reach out for help.

And if anyone is interested in for real remote work, we're hiring SDE & Sr SDE frontend (React) and backend (Python). See my profile for contact info if interested.

No contact info on profile (not interested, just saying).

Frankly I need to back off on HN as well.

From experience dealing with recruiters for the last 25 years they universally lie to both sides to pocket the commission at all costs.

I drove 400 miles once to do an interview for a solution architect position. Got there and the company were recruiting an Oracle DBA. The recruiter had plain up lied because I had some Oracle experience on my CV. They assured me they would ream the recruiter and bought me lunch and gave me an Amazon voucher to cover the fuel and time though which was nice.

So I called up a consultant firm I knew in LA and sez, “hey I’m in town interviewing at X for Y, but I don’t like them and I wonder if you got any Y jobs" and they got me a (consultant) job as the technical lead for the job the X company had placed the other DBA at.

Later I had my attorney send a letter with my documentation to X company and settled up for time, expenses, and atty fees.

Hah! it was a 3 month DBA contract at an LA legal firm that specialized in converting publicly available data from court cases and data mining the results for various ordinary and/or predatory legal practices...I upgraded the SQL Server databases, fixed the document vector mining, fixed the license compliance issues (this was during the Business Software Alliance predatory compliance era). I didn’t want to continue because I didn’t like the culture, but I did work with the guy I supervised to help him achieve a perm position. I got paid, got my stipend, got my bonus, got my expenses with no delay after my attorney letter. The lying recruiter faded out of sight, I didn’t pay any attention to what happened to her because my pals at the consulting firm put me into a new contract immediately with a higher pay rate.

FAANG mostly (completely?) use in-house.

It just doesn't work well to have a non technical person be the middle man between two technical people

The interview went well, the coding test was good. Finally, I were just chatting with the CEO, and he asked "So you're ok with spending 2 years on site in Kazakhstan?"

Needless to say we both agreed that it was a wasted interview and that the recruitment agency should have mentioned the Kazakstan bit...

Now they announced RTO, his manager said: "We're excited to have you at the office" - he was really confused about this messaging, so they forced him to apply to work remotely (even if he had been hired as such) denied his application on the grounds that this SWE role that requires a lot of cross regional interaction and virtual meetings - requires "intense collaboration that you can only get in an office". Total BS.

Needless to say he's leaving. This is such a travesty, total misdirection.

Just to be clear, I really loved my Google recruiters -- they were very forthright and open with me during the whole process, and the Facebook recruiter was honest too. Great recruiting experiences. They worked really hard to move fast, and I think I went from initial phone screen to offer at FB within two weeks, and from phone screen to team matching at Google within three.

At some point, Google won't be the kind of place that people wait around for. Then they're really screwed.

Google used to hire A+ players -- the cream of the cream of the crop. The workforce at early Google was spectacular. Everyone wanted to work there -- tenured faculty were leaving their jobs.

Right now, Google hires good people, but the very best people I know all work elsewhere (and many are former Googlers).

Nonsense like this won't discourage B or C players, who fight tooth-and-nail to get there, but it does discourage the people were Google is fighting for individuals with other employers.

I haven't heard any elite university faculty leave for Google in close to a decade, for example. It used to be common. Google would poach from Stanford and MIT.

I've seen companies go this way, and this kind of slide only tends to accelerate. Folks like Sebastian Thrun bring in the cream of Stanford, and the cream of Stanford brings in everyone else. Once you lose those top two tiers....

God forbid you have an unusual niche in industry -- last time I applied, the recruiter took at least two weeks with regular calls to update me on their attempt to get me an interview for the niche I work in. Google's software output definitely reflects just how bureaucratic and convoluted their hiring process has become.

Their hiring model is theoretically a bell curve but when you cut off the top percentiles it severely affects the resulting performance (ie you failed to hire the 20% of ppl who were going to do 80% of the good work)

But how on earth do civil lawsuit records in the US end up anywhere where the background-checking industry can get their grubby paws on them?!

Are civil suit records not public not in Germany?

But hearing that a criminal history check is illegal in Germany outside of specific industries continues to reinforce my belief that everything just works right in Germany.

How do I get residency?

Usually, the verdict of popular lawsuits is published but with all PII redacted to a reasonable degree, and you can request a redacted copy of a verdict if it hasn't been published [1].

Additionally, 99.9% of all court proceedings can be visited and listened to by anyone, the exception being matters involving minors, national security and especially if psychological examinations of the accused or participants or details of sexual and domestic violence are being discussed, highly private details of someone's life - that is usually done only for the relevant period of a proceeding.

To me, that's a fair balance between the interest of the general public and the rights of the people subjected to the court - especially that to the right to live a normal life once one has served their sentence.

[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bgh-hzivilgerichte-...

I wonder where I'd find software job postings in Germany (or possibly other EU) that are suitable for blue card (looks like salary must be sufficient, possibly other requirements).

It is increasingly apparent to me that the USA is a fully broken society, and a dangerous place to live.

> General Work Permit – You can apply for this type of German work permit if you have found a job in Germany which could not have been filled by an EU national. You don’t need to have extraordinary skills as long as you are qualified for the job. Highly Skilled Worker Permit – You can apply for this type of work permit if you are a highly skilled worker with a lot of experience and a high income. The EU Blue Card for Germany – You can apply for an EU Blue Card if your salary will be at least €56,800 per year or €44,304 per year if you are in a shortage occupation.

Software Devs are in such demand that any of these conditions are easily fulfilled.

The concept amounts to "a material change in working conditions", and covers pay, work load and type, work location, and location in the hierarchy (aka demotions, even if the company doesn't call it one).

(It's also why I made sure my paperwork specified "remote" rather than "LA")

The easy thing to do, I would think, would be to demand in the hiring contract specific language guaranteeing 90%+ "remote" work.

And then if they go back on it, keep working there, look for a new job, don't go to the office even if they tell you that you have to, and bring up that you have it in writing that it's 100% remote.

And if they fire you anyway, you've got a good basis for a wrongful termination suit, while hopefully working at a new job and/or collecting unemployment.

I attended and then later worked at a graduate program in a high-demand niche of computer science. When I was a student a company rescinded an offer that had been signed months before and left one of my classmates scrambling at the last minute.

Several years later I taught there and found out the employer was still blocked from participating in the program's recruiting events. Had there been a handshake instead of a written offer it would be unlikely that they would have maintained that block for so long. The written offer was also referenced when communicating with the company in question, students, other programs in our niche, university administration, and especially other recruiters.

Needless to say, no student has had a similar issue since.

I agree with you, but in my experience that’s also a recipe for misery. If management is determined to get rid of you, they will find a way. And you’ll be stuck on awful do-nothing projects in the meantime.

Admittedly it’s much nicer to do that while being remote though. Just saying that it feels better to work at a place where management has your back.

How do you think I feel! :)

> I agree with you, but in my experience that’s also a recipe for misery.

Agreed. When management doesn't have your back it's time to move on, which is why my advice starts with, "start your next job search", but in the meantime you can at least push back. At least you still get paid for do-nothing work!

And also try to get an actual contract and not just an offer. Most decent companies will actually give you a real contract beyond the offer that details what the job duties are and the compensation and anything else you've agreed on if you ask nicely. Or you can write one yourself and ask them to sign it.

But of course a lot of that depends on what leverage you have -- how badly do they want you on board.

I've gotten that advice, but I've almost never seen it to be helpful:

- It's almost impossible to win a law suit for being fired, unless it's clearly based on sex/race/etc.

- If you sue, you'll burn bridges

- If future employers find out you sued, they won't want to hire you.

It's one of those things that's nice in abstract, but in practice, seems like a waste of time, relative to practising for interviews, applying for jobs, or trying to fix things with the old employer.

My advice is to jump ship, and leave on good terms.

Companies aren't people. I once worked for a company which wasn't a great employer, but I'm glad I left on good terms. The place no longer exists, and there are lots of people there whom I value.

I respect the ideal state you’re shooting for here, but that “may” leaves too much wiggle room for HR sleight-of-hands. I sit here and tell you with a straight face I’ve watched first hand companies doing some pretty shady things under the banner of HR that raised several ethical flags, but because they weren’t outright illegal, when the employee came back with plenty of documentation they still walked away with no judgement, no settlement, and no job.

“Showing” HR that I’m documenting just seems like a REALLY good way to get a very large target painted on my back and… I don’t know if people want to show their hands like that.

It's true, it doesn't always mean that. But as with anything legal, it might mean that, it's mostly how well you can convince a judge!

This is exactly how it works, recruiters don't get paid unless they get a candidate hired. Despite all the words they write and say to you, they only care about getting you and the hiring manager to say yes and _everything_ else doesn't matter or is immaterial to them.

Unfortunately it's nothing new to see recruiters being less than honest. In their defense, right now is a weird time with many companies who were firmly in the remote only culture now backtracking and reopening again. It could be the case when this position opened things were much different with its requirements.

But ultimately never trust a thing a recruiter says unless it is signed in writing from your hiring manager/HR of the company. Never believe anything they say about compensation, the future of the company or your position, etc. Never.

It’s not a contract but a precursor and some lighter level of commitment. Common in enterprise sales scenarios but not in mid level job searches.

Unless we're talking about freelancer/indie recruiters, of course.

Not exactly. I mean yes - exactly. But they also typically have riders on the contract. Firstly, our recruiters do not get the same cut if the new hire doesn't pan out. Also recruiters I have worked with in the past tend to get a percent of the salary number. That helps as the recruiter is really trying to get you the highest number.

So yes, and no.

They're also holding back-to-the-office meetings where they want local individuals to come in a few times a week and remote individuals to come in on a somewhat regular frequency (e.g. once a month). I told them to shove it, I'm not coming in, ever. I don't need their money that badly. I'd rather slash my salary in half and work somewhere that's not trying to screw me over at every turn. I think after 3-6 months I'm quitting anyway.

EDIT: I should mention I just started at the company and it's already pissing me off. Thankfully my old cushy job will take me back any time.

In my experience working remote for the past decade "remote" usually involves coming to the office or having an offsite once a quarter. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.

If you are unable to fit this in your schedule, or are actually that mentally unfit you cannot oblige your fellow humans in your job... Every once in a while? Then you should not have that job. This should be considered reasonable by any standard.

Not wanting to deal with humans most of the time... Fine. Not being able to deal with your human colleagues, who do want to deal with each other, ever? Not fine. $0.02

For full disclosure, I have a neurological disease with physical ailments, I have digestive medical problems which would make it embarrassing for me and very uncomfortable for them, and I have a personality disorder which includes anxiety and depression as a bonus. All of which makes onsite participation literally torture for just a few hours, let alone a whole week of it. Clearly I've done my job so effectively for so long that I can work anywhere in tech and demand top salaries, so your comment about "not having that job" is not only extremely lacking in empathy, but downright wrong.

EDIT: just to clarify, this is only relevant for employers that do not disclose the requirement during the hiring phase. If they disclose it ahead of time, then I might agree with you.

For the vast majority of jobs though and in the vast majority of cases I still feel it is very normal for people to expect to see each other every now and then in person. Even when the work itself can be done equally well remote and even when there is a significant effort involved.

That said, for a highly paid role at a company like Amazon one should expect that they'll have to occasionally travel. Demanding that you never visit the office is unreasonable. The job is not simply sitting in your room shipping code—it also involves in person conversation from time to time.

Ought to be well-structured to be productive. My old employer used to set up a full day of 1:1 or small meetings with folks, end-to-end with short breaks in between. These were pretty informal (often walks) and cut across the company (not just my part of the org).

Whole story changed when it came to hiring on as an FTE. Occasional travel was required and no guarantees on getting hired with some wired interview process that they actually took seriously. Total bait and switch trash.

I went through with it because I had already left my previous job fucking six months earlier. I hired in at, as I come to find out, some illustrious Senior Staff level that is nearly impossible to achieve for people starting thier career there. I was soon meeting people who had been kissing ass for a decade who were getting denied senior level.

I spent the next six months telegraphing my lack of enthusiasm for the company and was laid off when the pandemic set in. People were offering me other jobs etc but I refused and took the package...which was very nice at my level. I had just been paid full bonus and I received a bonus the following year for time I spent with the company on the next bonus cycle. A year after being laid off another $5k drops in my account. These people are batshit.

On that last point: I haven't had issues getting in the door anywhere for the last decade, but I think if the industry were to sour, it would help my resume stand out from other candidates.

Sadly "remote" is just a buzzword to a lot of people. But on the flip side a lot of companies are truly serious about it.

That crowd is almost incapable of just applying for jobs that have always been remote, if the job description doesn't lead with that in the title. Many software startups and the development consultancies they rely on have been this way for many years.

So instead they get led on by things catering to the remote and digital nomad industry than just having a job that already had supported the lifestyle they wanted!

I about flipped shit on the recruiter.

The study monitors outcomes for a group that were all infected at some point in 2020. The vaccine was released at the end of 2020. The study monitors the infection status of these people in May-June 2021. It's purposefully selecting people who had no recent exposure via natural infection and comparing them to people that recently had the vaccine. I don't know how they can use this to support their recommendation with a straight face.

On top of that: A recently recovered infection provides probably even more protection than a recent vaccination.

It’s difficult to reason about all cases, in my opinion.

If you don't want to be required to take the vaccine, we can have that conversation, but enough spouting nonsense to cast doubt on a correct point.

The original point is an interesting example of being correct, but also misleading in that it paints getting the vaccine after natural infection as the best course of action. It has benefits, but probably not as many immune benefits as having a second asymptomatic infection after the original one.

I'm not anti-vaccine at all, but the CDC presents the vaccine to everyone in every circumstance as the optimal course of action and it's very clear the science on that is not settled. Blanket statements and their inability to acknowledge edge cases are the reason their credibility has been so badly eroded in the past few years. In their quest not to give anti-vax people a thread to pull on, they've treated the public as too stupid to understand nuance and created an even larger distrust than they would've had to begin with.

It makes no sense to compare getting the vaccine to getting a second asymptomatic infection. It is impossible to control the level of symptoms you get from a natural infection.

Getting exposed turns out to be similar to having gotten one shot, though Im sure the immune response has a wider antigen coverage.

Keep in mind that getting infected has a substantially higher risk of bad outcomes than getting the vaccine. Getting the vaccine substantially reduces the risk of bad outcomes.

Getting infected then getting the vaccine is not as good as getting vaccinated then getting infected.

Also getting infected likely makes you completely immune to that variant. But getting vaccines/boosters likely gives you stronger partial immunity to mutated variants.

The natural reaction to viper venom is blood coagulation in the veins.

There's no reason to believe, a priori, that the natural reaction to a biological antagonist is the best one.

But that said, I dislike surprises in employment agreement terms, and I've started to ask for people to send over their employment agreement along with offer letters so I can include terms in negotiation.

I don't understand. Do people sign a contract that states something differently than they were being told verbally before?

Imho what isn't in writing doesn't exist. Especially when it comes to "promises" from potential employers.

For example I would not trust a promised raise in 12 months when nothing was done in writing. Even with the best of employers I would not agree to anything if they didn't agree to writing it down.

Yes. All the time.

And verbal agreements are valid contracts too, if you can prove they exist (but good luck in that).

Anyway, this particular case looks more like the OP believed on the promises of a 3rd party (the recruiter), so it's not actually a contract.

When I got my offer and contract to sign which stated remote work I made damn sure it was in the contract along with compensation, holidays, sick leave etc. If any of these differed from the job advert, interview discussions etc then I'd be bouncing it back to the employer to correct.

These are not "pretty hard standard[s] to hold" a potential employer to.

If I had applied to a remote position and the contract did not specifically state it's primarily a remote location, I would demand the contract was changed to reflect this before signing.

In other words, they barely seem to read resumes or anything else so if they totally screw up key details of the position, that is probably par for the course.

(Insert rant about losing StackOverflow Developer Stories, which actually allowed explicit tagging of things like preferred tech which made matching really easy.)

I'd love to meet one. Every recruiter I've worked with had trouble walking and chewing gum. It's infuriating that they aren't better at their jobs given how much they can make by placing even 1 developer.

Considering how insanely difficult it is to hire right now, I predict most of times they will do nothing. However this might sour your relationship with your manager so you might want to consider looking internally for someone who supports remote work, or look for another company that's more honest and transparent.

This doesn't seem to be the companies fault.

I have known many people that have picked up and moved across the country for "the dream job," only to return, a couple of months later, tail between their legs, because the job turned out to be unsuitable in any of a dozen different ways (usually, it was because the duties did not match what they were told, but I know of at least one case, where the pay was drastically reduced, or they were hired as a contractor, even though they were told it was a salaried employee of the corporation).

Companies are huge and they can hurt many people at scale. Individuals are small, relatively powerless and easy to manipulate. Especially if they don't organise themselves. Spreading information is the first step of getting organised.

I've had recruiters claim that if I use the offer they got me to negotiate a raise from my current employer, they'll make sure I never work in this town again - and yet recruiters keep calling.

Maybe it's less prevalent than it has been in the past, but managers hate "troublemakers," even if the "troublemakers" are 100% correct.

Also, this is a FAANG company. Get problems there, it's likely to metastasize. It would be another thing, if it were BillyBob's WebApp Emporium.

Really. I know people with felony convictions for serious crimes who got back into the industry they offended against. It turns out that background check firms are only reliable when the applicant has no criminal background, heheh.

Honest critique is one thing, mob mentality outrage is not an honest critique.

Would you encourage the same policy of not naming the the accused parties with the #meToo movement? Because it's not productive or worthwhile to focus on a few individuals? And where would that movement have gotten if none of the parties involved had ever been named?

The other commenter basically said focusing outrage was not problematic. I don't have any issue with honesty and transparency around hiring practices. However, I do think the appropriate place to do something like that would be on a site like glassdoor, and not a platform like twitter. I think as a country we have way more than enough "outrage" at the moment, I don't see any benefit to adding fuel to fire and communicating it a way that is likely going stir up hashtag vomit.

They deserve the outrage and the outrage is the only thing that's gonna fix this.

Also to answer your question. Literally every single positive change in this country has come out of focused outrage.

Civil rights movement LGBT rights Women's rights The basic amount of worker and consumer rights.

What is being discussed is responsibility for actions.

Someone deserves to be named and shamed, with the caveat of, there must be an agreement to actually accept the results of further digging.

If the recruiter said yes to a remote position that wasn't, the fault is rightly on the recruiter. If the recruiter was told remote was fine only for eventual reneg when ink was being put to paper... That is absolutely a reputation hit the client of said recruiter needs to take.

Fixing a fault requires identification, localization & characterization, and remediation.

This fault has been identified, but not localized and characterized.

Ergo, if remediation is the goal, naming and shaming absolutely needs to happen.

And everyone involved, up to the company execs making the decision themselves should understand the importance of this dynamic unless they've all been playing games to get to where they are, in which case, the callout is doubly needed.

They will lie to you, blatantly.

They'll use non-standard English that will have tons of ambiguities and brokenness. I believe this is a benefit to them, to provide ambiguity.

The remote/hybrid/in-person status is whatever you ask, and will be updated to the real answer when talking to the client.

The job will flip/flop from to w2 and c2c by whatever you seem to express.

Pay is whatever they think you will like.

There's "benefits" until it flips to contract with no benefits.

Now, that's not to say that a standard American recruiter is somehow good. They're also pretty sketch as well. But so far, in 2y of looking for a new job, 100% of the Indian recruiters have not "did the needful" for me.

Why do you believe the company should be able to keep bad behavior secret?

Credibility is paramount on these things, and a recruiter doing this is wasting people's time and money.

We don't even need to promote much discussion on it TBH. If OP is to be believed, the company blatantly lied to OP and wasted a large chunk of his time.

Just like in anything else in life, if someone is not held to the consequences of their actions, they'll keep doing it.

It's frankly pathetic if this remains the norm for our profession.

It's not like most of us applicants go in, blatantly lie, and waste the companies time. We, and every other worked applying to any job, should at least be treated the same as a bare minimum.

Sounds like a 'win' to me.

And yes, other companies are just malicious.

None of these people actually read the crap they shovel onward.

I do think the bait and switch of offering employees who entered the workforce full time employment and then asking them to come into the office two years later is disgusting. There's something bigger going on with how fast this has been swept under the rug.

If you're reading this and want to be fully remote, don't settle for anything less. People have been doing remote work for decades at this point and contributing more than most people do in an office. If you prefer to work at an office then do whatever suits you.

I remember the hiring manager walking me out of a prospective employer's high security area after a really successful interview, and I asked him in the hallway about the full employee conversion process. He said the entire team is interviewing to keep their current jobs and they'd be shutting down their office to consolidate on the east coast. No way I'd accept after that. I still wonder if he was lying to me since I've talked to their kubernetes people at DevOps Days, so I know they have a team here still.

I've been working in the tech sector in the US for a long time, and have had an employment contract at literally every company. I'm genuinely surprised to hear that people are working without one. That seems unwise.

That that contract does not contain terms modifying the default at-will status of employment does not mean it is not a contract. (A terminable at will contract is still a contract.)

While getting it in writing is good, it doesn't actually protect you. Vast majority of people are working at-will. Which means either party can change the terms of employment whenever. And if the other party disagrees then employment is terminated.

In this case meaning, if your contract says remote then they can change it to not remote at any time. That said, any company that will pull shenanigans like that you don't want to be working for anyhow as they don't respect you and that will impact you across all aspects of your work.

While the recruiter lying is the cause of the problem, there are several points during the process when they could have confirmed the relevant job details. Just before signing the agreement is the last such opportunity.

> but that's not the company's problem

If it causes enough problems, such as people not signing when offered because they have read the agreement or people leaving without notice during probationary periods (in most legal jurisdictions these periods work both ways) because of the divide in expectations, it will become the company's problem, and they'll stop using those recruiters.

Unfortunately some are desperate enough for work that they'll just go with it until finding something else, so there may not be enough signal to insight change that way. Especially given that there are apparently very few recruiters who don't act in similar ways.

> but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect

That is exactly how it works.

If it is any consolation they often lie to the employers too, though that isn't quite as easy to get away with due to the differing power dynamic.

Overall, they weren't one of the worst third party recruiters I've dealt with (though I shouldn't have dealt with them at all), but they told me in the first few calls that the position was "fully remote". This was only half-true. It turned out that the employer wanted me to come in 1 to 2 times a week. That was during late-pandemic, so who knows whether that would have been changed to not being remote.

Maybe it was miscommunication, but there's no way I can know that. An honest or competent recruiter would have sorted out those facts.

IMO, do whatever you can to bypass recruiters. Networking, doing presentations, and even just finding the emails of those who are really in charge of hiring, have a much greater payoff with modest effort than dealing with recruiters, particularly of the third-party kind. I believe this is particularly true for junior developers. If you are junior developers, expect most recruiters who reach out to you to be scum of the earth who will drop you like a hot potato if a single employer doesn't end up hiring you. They will tell you that you have "all the skills" and are "perfect" for a position and then they'll ghost you just as fast. Don't take it personally. Those people suck.

Will avoid 10/10.

I believe they were molded to survive the Amazon culture, unfortunately.

Leaving aside the efficiencies of commingling inventory, even the simple filter option to only show sold and shipped by Amazon.com search results was deemed not to be a customer need. In fact, it was removed. Quite a puzzling “culture” of solving customer’s needs.

So... Where's the "Report counterfeit" button again?

Oh yeah. That's right. There isn't one. Intentionally.

What parts of Amazon did you not like?

I don't think most of us want to go for the lottery.

Also:

Majority of amazon alumni I've had experience with (to be fair it's not a lot) has been extremely toxic and a they've been a jerk. I don't blame the individuals. They are probably required to be a jerk to survive at Amazon and unlearning that is hard as fuck.

It's true that some people leave, and sometimes you're not sorry to see them go. This is true in every line of work.

I won't say my sample size (about 5 people who worked there and 10 people that have interviewed) is massive either, but mine is 100% negative. Yes, all IT people, so I'm not even dealing with the poor line workers.

Their turnover numbers IMO validate the negative views of Amazon. The ass-covering and lying during their downtimes over holiday also show a degrading culture.

Their UIs also show a poorly managed IT staff. I can understand warts, but why not gradual improvement? The biggest sign was their awful redesign of the console, which was demonstrably worse and has not improved.

"You're not supposed to use the UI in AWS"

Well OK, their APIs are not well documented. When you have a command with literally 100 options, you need a LOT of examples. The documentation of their error codes is basically "stackoverflow", and change over releases with no warning. And this is for their most used services, who knows what the various other crap is like. And they only show examples of invocations, they almost never show the OUTPUT format.

This is something that should be actively improved for the leading cloud provided that will probably hit 100 billion in revenue in 2022. You can't invest .0001% of your revenue to better documentation and tooling? Like that HASN'T cost you 1000x that in services and revenue already with people unable to get their prototypes off the ground or fix problems to scale more quickly?

They show management, they show low worker motivation, their marketing and press is so bad that Walmart seems like a good corporate citizen in comparison.

All of their policies can be glossed over with growth.

Unfortunately, AWS isn't a startup company anymore, it is a utility, an important core component in the foundation of the internet. Their culture and hiring and communication show that their growth HR policies are going to backfire in the coming decades as all their systems are likely on the their third or fourth "generation" of people being responsible for it.

Consider getting a software job at Amazon: likely you're getting shunted onto some "legacy" (you know, written 4 years ago, 2 employee generations ago) and are expected to know a big complicated messy codebase with no docummentation and no organizational memory, and then you get saddled with ridiculous expectations.

You either get to greenfield redevelop it (if you have a nice manager) which is risky, or you are utterly fucked from an advancement perspective and you are just meat to chew.