Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Låb 126 is on the Prowl Again

I got an e-mail from J.P. of Låb 126 which ran (honey side up):
My name is J.P.and I work for Låb 126. If you’re not familiar with us, Låb 126 is a wholly owned R&D subsidiary of Amazon located in Silicon Valley. We design and engineer high-profile, portable, hand-held consumer electronics products, including the hugely successful line of Kindle eReaders and HD tablets.

I read a little about your work and extensive technical background, specifically your deep expertise with embedded systems, Linux kernel programming, ARM architecture, and divers SW development experience. I have a couple of development teams that would like to speak with you about some very interesting engineering opportunities here at our R&D site in Cupertino and Sunnyvale, CA. We're selectively looking for highly talented engineers to join our design and development teams working on both existing and next generation products, as well as number of "stealth projects" in emerging technologies that we feel will be "game changers" and soon be seen and used by millions of people.

In fairness he actually looked at my Resume however he did not put forth a job description or spoke of the the-what-that-corporate-recruiters-do-not-name ($$).

Having interviewed with this outfit before and having wasted my time on boring-to-tears whiteboard exercises [they did not bother to make it interesting] I kind of snapped at him:

Has Låb 126's interviewing style improved since my last in 2008? [...] As recall it the interview was dreary. [...] I have a strong preference for recruiters who come forth with a job description as the conversation has a subject. I do not like to discuss vague opportunities.
Not all battles are to be won, eh?

-ulianov