I know a local Amazon director and he was spending a lot of time with recruiting, he had to hire a very large amount of people and that was his top measure for that year. Even paying above the market, with their reputation and the competition on the market it was difficult to meet the target.

If they were contacting you with a specific interesting position, that would be something. If they were contacting you with a generic position they just needed to fill...that sounds like a lot of cringe.

I have only actually talked with the guy from Facebook. All he did was talk about how great his teams are, how super intelligent his engineers are, etc. While he politely listened to what I had to say, he was definitely on a mission to market his little slice of Instagram and get me interested in running the Facebook interview gauntlet.

He even suggested that it would be totally okay if I was one of those people that wanted to study for a month or two before interviewing. Study?! For a job interview?

It was a weird experience. I normally shun recruiters, but I was just curious enough to hear what this guy had to say. His LinkedIn profile didn't indicate any past involvement with recruiting, so I wanted to know why a senior manager would spend time recruiting random people -- he must spend every waking hour on these calls.

Studying a month for a job interview...well, if you need a job and have the time, it can definitely work out well in the end. The leetcode problems are kind of fun to work on once you get into them, but they are definitely of limited use.

My Facebook interview was weird also, but the people were super nice and the coding problems were fairly easy. I failed on distributed systems architecture, oddly enough, as it was an area I had no experience in for a senior hire (but I got an offer from Google the same day I was rejected from Facebook, so I didn't have much time to be sad about it).

But managers recruiting random people, just seems weird to me. If they wanted me for my specific skill set, that would be great! But if they were just looking for general hires, they must have lost a bet or something.