I went to the HackerX recruitment event this week and, while it was interesting, the event was awkward. It's a bit like speed-dating: 36 companies show up and you have five minutes per company to hear their pitch and make your own, and then time is called and you move on to the next company. The round lasts an hour, so you have time to visit at most 12 recruiters.

The problem is that three times as many people showed up for the event as there were seats. In order to "facilitate" this problem, you were placed in a waiting line per row, and depending upon your starting position you could fall out of your line, in which case you got to pick a new waiting line. And the lines were initialized in order, with the first person in line being sent to the end of the row.

In other words, if you were a go-getter who arrived early, you got to talk to exactly one recruiter before you fell out of the room and had to go to a waiting line, and there was very little chance you'd get back into the room.

Even worse: that recruiter was always Amazon. The last entry of every row was Amazon: AWS, Amazon Logistics, or Amazon Internals. It didn't matter. It was Amazon. All Jeff, all the time.

I was second in line. I got to talk to two recruiters, and I really didn't care to talk to Amazon, although the people behind the table were nice enough. In line (I really wanted to talk to the Edu startup), I did get to talk to a woman who was looking to move from startup to enterprise, and some recruiters did come out and talk to us in line, having mercy on our patience, but they were the HR assistants to the engineering recruiters, and couldn't answer many of my questions about work environment, tooling or projects.

I'd probably go again, but I'd really prefer less of a free-for-all.