No, you aren't wrong. That recruiter did not do a good job. The salary range talk is always up front to ensure that candidates and the company aren't wasting one anothers time. If the process gets to the offer stage, it needs to be in the range discussed up front. It costs me money (in terms of PTO) to come out and interview, and it costs the company thousands in time and expenses to conduct it. That recruiter essentially pissed away a couple grand without any real prospect of hiring. As a hiring manager, I'd be upset about that if it happened in my company.

I had this happen early in my career. Recruiter and I talked about a range, went through 3 rounds of interviews, and I got an offer below what I was currently making. Absolutely not in the discussed range. The offer came via email and I was insulted - I declined without negotiation. I still have the email, and I was apparently pretty polite. A week later they pinged me back to ask if I had considered it, if I was dissatisfied and that they could go up. I just politely restated my decline. They'd already wasted my time, and as junior as I was, my time was still valuable - I took time out of work, traveled, etc. That was almost 10 years ago and I'm still salty about it. That should tell you what kind of impression this behavior leaves behind. Looking back at the emails now, I am very surprised at how professional and polite I was about it - my memories of 20-something me are apparently overblown :)

I got a couple of experiences worse than that, including one where they were stupid enough to put in writing a suggestion to enlist as a contractor/freelancer with a shadow organisation of them to match my requested range (which was nothing special)...I just replied in a sarcastic tone that for that situation my prices where 10 times that value, and fortunately, it was the last I heard from them.

When I've seen this with people interviewing in Amazon, it's generally because they're tagged to a higher level position, and during the interview, they decide they're not a fit at that level, but possibly at the one below it. i.e., he might have originally been interviewing for an SDEII position, but they felt his skill-set was closer to what they look for in an SDEI, but still wanted to make him an offer to join the team.

The comments in the original blog post suggests a gap of 60k with the offer. Your comment makes sense only if he was interviewing for a Principal Engineer position or something, but instead was offered an SDE-I position. Plus I'm pretty sure very few (if any) non-Principal SDEs at Amazon actually get 200K in the first year.

Yes. If you can be promoted directly from SDE-I to SDE-II, there should not be a ~60K gap between. I've had the described thing happen (start interview by assuming level 3, but hire at level 2), and the gap is more like 20K. In other words: they should have known better.

Ex-Amazonian here, this is indeed the answer to this question.

Then the issue is the fact that this exact point was not communicated to the author. "Sorry, we really think you'd be more suited to role X rather than Y, and the range for that role is B rather than A. But we'd still like you to work for us in role B!"

This is the correct answer.

I've only received one job offer in my lifetime that wasn't open to negotiation.

It was bad form to make an initial offer that far below the author's stated salary requirement, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't room for negotiation. The author didn't mention whether he tried pushing them higher.

You are not wrong, but there are always other factors to consider.

The recruiter has no incentive to tell the truth regarding salary unless it's way off. Think of it this way: worst case scenario, exactly what happens happens. The recruiter gets someone to apply who everyone likes but they don't accept an offer. Best case scenario, something makes the guy take the lower offer - whether it's his wife losing her job or he gets wined and dined enough that he's willing to take the hit to COL to have Amazon on his resume.

The recruiter already got "credit" for having the person apply.

What isn't clear is whether he countered. It sounds like he didn't because he mentions family as the main reason not to leave. But I imagine had he countered he could have easily gotten to that $170k number or very close.

I interpret "low 6 figures" to be less than $120k, so it seems a stretch that he could have got anywhere near $170k just by asking.

I would imagine a recruiter who has a track record of declined offers is not going to be viewed very well by their managers.

This is how business works -- people will openly lie to you to get what they want. The recruiter most likely knew that number was out of range, but also most likely didn't care, because they probably get paid based on how many people they put through the process that reach some milestone in the interview process.

Recruiters are just sales people. They usually have limited if any tech background and heavy business or sales background. They should be treated skeptically, like any other sales person.

I was going to say the same thing. I would be infuriated, considering this to be another recruiter ploy to make commission.

If they clearly can't afford your salary range then this should be made upfront.

Internal Amazon recruiters don't make commission. The likely scenario is that candidate was initially tagged for a senior position, but during the interview only qualified for a lower band offer.