[p0rkbelly]

We are all about junior people making a mistake, but, heaven forbid it's a recruiter and not an engineer (recruiting for an SDE II would be a junior recruiter). It's sort of a dick move for a CTO post that, since the "NN" still potentially identifies the recruiter. This recruiter will be at a minimum the subject of ridicule or worse, let go.

[silisili]

Recruiters have well, one job. A great recruiter actually takes time to research people and find good fits. They are incredibly rare, but worth their weight in gold IMO.

The vast majority of recruiters just do lazy keyword searches and spamming. He or she obviously didn't even bother to read the title or profile of who they were bothering. Spamming is more of a dick move than calling out spam, IMO.

[p0rkbelly]

maybe they had multiple windows open, scrolled too far, saw a previous job history? Or an automated script gone wrong?

Nobody is saying the recruiter did a good job here, when someone messes up code in Azure, you didn't see the CTO go "OMG my intern wrote the worst code! Let me post it on Twitter so everyone laughs".

This is a teachable moment -- not a shaming moment.

[jlawer]

The CTO of Azure has no responsibility to an Amazon recruiter. While the recruiter could likely be identified if you searched hard enough, most people aren't crazy enough to care.

This is a teachable moment. Amazon shouldn't engage in these practices and should manage the people they employ so this doesn't happen.

If this was an innocent mistake, you shrug, cop a few jokes with your co-workers and deal with it. No one is going to sack you solely over an incident like this unless you've been going against a strict policy.

[p0rkbelly]

This has nothing to do with MSFT or AMZN. A good CTO is at any company provides an example of what to aspire to become. They are mentors and teachers to the technical community as a whole.

[lightbendover]

This has everything to do with Amazon. Recruiting there needs to fix their archaic sourcing strings.

[gkop]

What’s your point? A junior recruiter out to prove themselves will need to cut corners just like all the other recruiters do. Give them an opportunity to make mistakes, I guarantee you the great recruiters have made and learned from their fair share. Plus, if this is that bad of a mistake, the organization is partly responsible for not having safeguards in place to prevent it.

[p0rkbelly]

exactly. Everyone has "one job". E.g. Engineers write code -- they also make mistakes and write bad code.

[silisili]

Depends how you look at it. I'd consider writing bad code and or bugs more akin to misspellings and grammatical mistakes in this context.

This is more akin to being asked to write an auth api, but delivering a fizzbuzz function instead...in that I obviously didn't even read the problem/ask, but instead spammed code to keep the numbers up.

Secondly, every job is different in severity and scope. A surgeon making a mistake is not a fry cook making a mistake is not a civil engineer making a mistake is not a lawyer making a mistake. And public facing roles have different expectations and risks compared to the others. It's what you sign up for, I guess.

To be clear, I don't think this person should be fired or hunted down or anything. I just don't see a big issue bringing it to light with the information given. Amazon could identify them if they wanted to already. I doubt anyone outside could, given there's probably multiple NN recruiters working there.

[jlawer]

Yeah and I have written bad code, and I expect to cop a few jabs if I do something stupid and my PR manages to brake something important.

I don't have a problem with my co-workers saying I did something dumb. That's not the same as saying I am dumb.

You should be a little embarrassed if you screw up. You only get embarrassed if you care. Its part of the motivation to improve.

[silisili]

Well said. I was going to write something similar, but kept stopping because I felt I was implying we should seek to embarrass people.

We should absolutely call out mistakes, and it's good if people feel embarrassed for them. I have a few moments in my career where I felt so embarrassed I wanted to slink away and disappear. I'll never forget them, nor the lessons each taught.

[wuunderbar]

What's to say this isn't an automated email?

[minhazm]

Amazon recruiters are just mass emailing people with mail merge. In the past few months I've gotten emails from probably 20 different Amazon recruiters. Some of them have read my profile, and others are just sending nearly the same pre-formatted text. This isn't someone making a mistake, it's just lack of effort.

[p0rkbelly]

all recruiters for the most part.

[jlawer]

I don't see the harm. Either this was following Amazon's standard practices or it wasn't. This SHOULD be the subject of ridicule! No one is saying hunt the guy down and dox him over it. If this is against Amazon's standard practices and they let the recruiter go its because of THAT not because some senior person decided to share it. You can't expect secrecy if your doing a cold approach.

This is exactly the kind of incident that helps bring recruiters back to reality. Getting dozens of cold approaches about roles that are obviously not a good fit if someone spent 5 minutes researching can be infuriating (or even knew what they were recruiting for).

[p0rkbelly]

I think there would be less harm if the possibly identifying information about the recruiter was left out. Everyone in Amazon recruiting is going to be made aware of this now, and this individual is being called out. Usually performance coaching is done privately, but, now the entire org will know "NN" is this person and I'm sure it's embarrassing.

[CoffeeOnWrite]

Because the power imbalance between CTO of one of the biggest cloud platforms in the world, and a rank and file recruiter. It’s a bad look, to those of us that care. Punch up not down.

Probably was a win for Microsoft Azure and its CTO though, with all the viral mindshare

[victor9000]

Making a mistake is fine, but you should also expect some good natured razzing when you make a bonehead move like this. Having said that, this happens all the time. I've gotten plenty of messages to apply for SDE-I & II roles while employed as a Director or CTO.

[p0rkbelly]

razzing from a lateral co-worker on your team is one thing. That's typically good natured (though I'm sure technically an HR Issue). Publicly called out from a CTO at your biggest rival, is not apples to oranges.

[dilyevsky]

Mistake implies they aren’t intentionally spamming every email from some database