Company reputation hurts prospects?

[Felon]

Background, I was knackered and came out of Amazon AWS (L6 network engineering) back in June after covid and being isolated overseas, ended up interviewing for a bunch of places - never had a problem getting interviews, to be arrogant but frank - normally it's me turning them down.

Long story short, I ended up working for a small(ish) company, who I basically accepted as they just offered a lot of money and outbid everybody else (3 other offers at the time)

Cut 6 months later, I hate it, absolutely hate it - it's the crappest place I've ever worked, complete waste of time, full of idiots, total dead-end and I regret ever stepping foot into the place, regardless of the money and I've been trying to get out since September.

My CV is really good, I've had it professionally reviewed, I know the industry, I have 20 years experience and skills to boot.

I'm being turned down for literally ******* everything, as in - not even getting interviews, it's really messing with my head.

Then I spoke to a recruiter who laughed, "Yeah, we don't normally take people from there"... and ever since it's left me a bit rattled.

I'm considering deleting every aspect of this role from my CV and linkedin, as I've started to wonder whether being associated with this place is hurting my prospects, and it might just be easier during any interview to say "I decided to take 6 months out" or something...

Am I being paranoid? :/

 

[Felon]

Yeah I mean, I was just wondering has anyone else ever had this problem, or done this? Or, am I just being a nob? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I did wonder if it might cause me problems at some point, but apparently not - apparently it's not fradulant or "naughty" to remove a job from your CV.

 

[Felon]

How can a small place have such a bad reputation?

Yeah it's interesting, technically it's not that small, (I think about 1000 employees) I shouldn't really have used the word small, technically their medium sized.

In terms of them having a bad reputation, it wasn't really something I wondered about until at least 2x other recruiters mentioned it to me, out of the blue.

It's just odd, and I think because I'm struggling maybe I'm looking for things to blame.

On the other side of the coin, the tech job market is a bit weird at the moment, lots of roles are on hold, people are being laid off and some jobs I've looked at have been deleted due to budget cuts and costs..

I was on Discord with a former colleague in Australia who I worked with, the company currently has all roles on hold and nothing new on the horizon..

Maybe I'm overcomplicating things and it's just the environment which is a bit *******.

I have one opportunity on the go at the moment, if that doesn't go anywhere, I think I will remove the current job from my CV and see if there's a difference!

 

[Felon]

In short, and with respect, yeah I think you are being paranoid and you've become a little bit big headed based on previous success and ease of finding work now that things dried up a bit.
I'd probably be the same based on my past experience as finding work when I have needed to has always also been easy for me, but that might just be right time right place, rather than me being awesome.

I think you're probably right to be honest.

 

[Felon]

If it's full of idiots (I'm assuming you mean they're not very skilled), can you not stick it out and you'll be running the place in a year?

Meh, I mean there's no point really - most of the customers have left or are leaving, there's no critical mass of new business, opportunities, growth or expansion - it's just a diminishing business.

Because of that, there's no appetite, budget or real reason to push hard and make a product or system that makes sense, because the whole thing is being slowly wound down, so it's just depressing lol.

 

[Felon]

I think I'm just being fragile :|

 

[Felon]

It's definitley a lot harder out there, way harder.

I was lined up for an interview with a largish cloud provider, then I got an email from them saying "due to the economic situation and our budget constraints, we've decided to put the role you were interviewing for on hold" and it's basically just been cut from the department.
Currently interviewing for one of the big CDN providers, I managed to get a referal from an existing employee which helped - but they have so many applicants, I think even getting an interview was a result in itself!

But to answer OP, unless you work for something which has questionable morals, then prior employers are not that important. E.g. if you worked for big tobacco then many people would question why you would work for companies that are quite literally evil and kill people.

Yeah I think I was just being a bit pretentious and big-headed to be honest, but I think it mostly came from being frustrated as hell with my current situation.. I think if the current opportunity doesn't progress, I'll probably quit looking for a while, and just lay low and make-do with what I've got, until things perk up a bit in the summer, hopefully.

 

[Felon]

At Amazon it was almost impossible to fill vacancies at one point, we were offering jobs paying in the region of $250-300k usd, and we just could not fill the positions.

It even got to the point where we were having monthly meetings with recruitment, so we could as individuals - go through our LinkedIn contacts and friends trying to get new hires.

But in the end it was all just covid bloat, and now they’re cutting so many

Finding good people is very hard, it’s true that you get heaps of applicants, but so many of them are a waste of time, some of them are outright liars and scammers.

 

[Felon]

That was a meme at some point, I remember seeing someone on tech or finance Twitter sharing a LinkedIn screenshot of DM's and there were like 15+ messages from Amazon recruiters!

I guess on one hand they're not going to drop their standards, they're still going to have a standard FAANG style interview with leetcode type questions + some Amazon-specific fluff ones, does this candidate talk a good game re: Amazon's published values etc.. on the other hand they do seem to have a reputation for shorter tenure/higher turnover so I guess they have needed to hire a lot more, especially while tech firms have been expanding headcounts.

The biggest problem were the horror stories which have been circulating for years, many people I know simply didn't want the agro or didn't want to take the risk, especially the more senior guys who just don't need the stress.

Although, i will say that many of the horror stories on the AWS side were the result of people being unable to say "No", or foreign workers in Ireland who were totally unaware of their rights or employment laws.

They'd be worked to the bone, and be afraid to say no to anybody in fear of being put on a PIP, looking weak or losing their visa and having to go back home. Whereas guys like me simply refuse to work until 11pm every day, unless there's some critical incident, planned work or I'm oncall - my laptop gets shut at 6pm every night, no exceptions. (Amazon don't like guys like me )

 

[Felon]

If your paid for it then there's no problems with it as long as you don't get burn out. Which happens to about 100% of people who just keep working - eventually it comes and you either start falling asleep at work or you die trying.

Pretty much.

My manager was once bragging that he'd been up at 6am and was likely going to be working until 11pm and he loved it. I was like "yeeeeeaaaahh.." it'll catch up with you eventually..

Burnout wrecks entire teams, it got to the point with us - where we had work for 100 people, but we had about 12 - it was just miserable, nobody talked, socialised or anything - there was just no time.

Technically the work was amazing, in terms of the stuff I got to do, but doing it in that way - where the only stuff you're working on, is whatever has been on fire for the longest totally sucks, and just as you're finishing that job - the other 3-4 things in your queue are already on fire.