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Employee #1: Amazon

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Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#71

Post by skaphan »

philodespotos wrote: post #50
skaphan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

Lucid Emacs is now XEmacs. Work would've begun right around 1989, so it's likely you just never crossed paths with it. =)

After leaving Lucid I was really not paying much attention to what they were doing. It wasn't long before things started going badly there and they were out of business a few years later. But indeed, I had forgotten what little of the Emacs history I might have known. Here it is: https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#72

Post by gtirloni »

cookiecaper wrote: post #10
mywittyname wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this was more honorary than anything. It sounds like he didn't necessarily have the skills necessary to be a true executive, but putting him on a team where he's managed by someone else would seem like a slap in the face. This was a decent way to keep him compensated fairly for his past contributions. I've seen at other companies where people like this are moved into "R&D" so they can keep working on cool pro…

Personally I actually wish more liberal use would be made of this strategy. I've worked at a lot of companies where obstructionist employees are kept in their slots due to management's concern over the personal fallout (both for their relationship with the employee and for the employee's relationships with others). It's none of my business whether they stay on payroll or not, and I don't mind at all if they do if tha…

That's an awful way to burn someone. Better to fire this person or really put an effort to find a better position that he/she really wants.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#73

Post by exolymph »

0xmohit wrote: post #38
grahamburger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be so. These were pretty easy questions, though. Like 'What steps/commands would you use to reset the password on a [Make] [Model] managed switch through the serial port?' Very easy to Google. Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google.

> Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google. Never underestimate anybody. I've seen numerous examples wherein folks would copy/paste an obviously inferior answer (or even incorrect) from a Stack Overflow post that contains a much better answer.

You mean never overestimate anybody. Or maybe, "You can never underestimate anybody."

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#74

Post by pcsanwald »

sliverstorm wrote: post #49
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He failed to gain greater power in the organization and accomplish greater tasks after being promoted out of the role in which he was very competent. This implies that he wasn't very good at being a CTO. If he was, he would have had a bigger role in the projects and a larger team with which to accomplish his desired tasks. This may have been intentional as a courtesy rather than accidental due to the Peter Principle,…

Where does an awesome CTO get promoted to? It kind of seems like the end of the road, with the possible exception of CEO, but that position is probably occupied.

I agree that typically a CTO doesn't get promoted anywhere. In a smaller company, the role of an executive is about growing and evolving the business as a whole, and the technical strategy and choices that allow for that. I was CTO of a growing company for the past 4 years, and my concern was always around growing the business and the company.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#75

Post by cookiecaper »

gtirloni wrote: post #72
cookiecaper wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I actually wish more liberal use would be made of this strategy. I've worked at a lot of companies where obstructionist employees are kept in their slots due to management's concern over the personal fallout (both for their relationship with the employee and for the employee's relationships with others). It's none of my business whether they stay on payroll or not, and I don't mind at all if they do if tha…

That's an awful way to burn someone. Better to fire this person or really put an effort to find a better position that he/she really wants.

It doesn't seem like more of a burn than leaving them in a position where they are regularly breaking things. Refusing to either move them into a position where they are more effective (read: less damaging) or provide the necessary training is worse than making up a new sidelined position -- it shows paralysis, inaction, and it's compounded by the negative effect such an employee has on his peers and subordinates (if he has any subordinates). Inaction on that matter can be crippling and reflects cowardice at the top.

The moved person cannot be compelled to accept the position if they don't like it. Move them out of the way, or if they insist, fire them (and this has happened to me -- I wasn't upset that they were trying to sideline me as much as I was that they were not straightforward enough for me to understand the nature of our disagreement until after the arrangement had already fallen apart (for the record, I didn't accept the sideline position)). Most likely the employee would accept the new position and start to look for employment external to the company if he/she was displeased with it.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#76

Post by mikeleeorg »

cookiecaper wrote: post #53
grahamburger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a previous job I put this in to practice. I would give interviewees a short list of questions on a piece of paper and after the interview they could use a browser and take as much time as they needed to answer the questions. Some were logic type questions that would be difficult to Google, some were just process questions that very few people would know off the top of their head but should be able to Google. The i…

HR should have no input into technical hiring processes. I don't understand the thought process by which they feel they should have this authority. HR interference was a MASSIVE pet peeve of mine at a previous employer. I eventually was able to strong arm them into forwarding me all resumes directly, but it was a battle.

I've been lucky to have had good HR recruiters, though there was a time when some routinely sourced me really awful candidates and resumes. It got so bad that I started sourcing them on my own. I was so successful that - to their credit - the recruiters asked me to train them on how I did this. These techniques later became standard practice across the company. It was awesome of them to be so open-minded and adaptable.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#77

Post by Mtinie »

grahamburger wrote: post #68
cookiecaper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR should have no input into technical hiring processes. I don't understand the thought process by which they feel they should have this authority. HR interference was a MASSIVE pet peeve of mine at a previous employer. I eventually was able to strong arm them into forwarding me all resumes directly, but it was a battle.

Agreed, it was very frustrating. They required that we follow the exact same set of interview questions for every candidate, verbatim. We were not allowed to ask technical questions or do any kind of proficiency questioning / testing, etc. When pressed, they said that we could ask follow up questions to their set of questions, and that we should be able to determine technical proficiency by inquiring about past exper…

Giving your HR group the benefit of the doubt, in my experience, when the pendulum has swung that far to the "process" side, it's because the company has been burned in some way in the past.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#78

Post by BatFastard »

BatFastard wrote: post #27
abc_lisper wrote: post #12

The most important question left unasked : Did he make enough money to retire after it?

Unquestionably! Lets say he had a typical 5%, no conservatively lets guess 1%. So 1% of 366 billion! Let you do the math. On the other hand if he had 10% which would not be unreasonable, he would be very rich.

So I got down voted on this for WHAT reason?

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#80

Post by rpeden »

grahamburger wrote: post #68
cookiecaper wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR should have no input into technical hiring processes. I don't understand the thought process by which they feel they should have this authority. HR interference was a MASSIVE pet peeve of mine at a previous employer. I eventually was able to strong arm them into forwarding me all resumes directly, but it was a battle.

Agreed, it was very frustrating. They required that we follow the exact same set of interview questions for every candidate, verbatim. We were not allowed to ask technical questions or do any kind of proficiency questioning / testing, etc. When pressed, they said that we could ask follow up questions to their set of questions, and that we should be able to determine technical proficiency by inquiring about past exper…

Not being allowed to ask technical questions sounds like a big problem.

Asking everyone exactly the questions at least seems like an attempt to ensure a level playing field for all candidates and eliminate bias that interviewers might not even realize is occurring.

Before starting my development career, I studied quite a bit of HR as part of my business degree. There was a fair amount of emphasis on a uniform, structured interview process largely to help eliminate interviewer bias.

The tech industry, and software companies in particular, are often accused of discriminating on the basis of age and gender. And I think that it does happen more than people want to admit, but I don't think it happens intentionally. People are terrible at recognizing their own biases. It's often not even conscious.

If we, as an industry, want to do something about it, we might consider listening more to what good HR professionals have to say. Yes, there are some HR people who are narrow minded and care more about rigidly adhering to process than about getting the best results. There are plenty of developers who meet that description, too.

I've heard so many developers dismiss all HR people as "HR drones" which is ridiculously unfair. If we actually care about eliminating bias from the hiring process, there's a lot we can learn by talking to good HR professionals. And yes, there are plenty of good ones. Some of them care just as much about a technically (and ethically) sound hiring process just as we care about good development process.

This article, though it is short and only scratches the surface, gives some idea of what I'm talking about: https://www.recruiter.com/i/4-types-of-interviewer-bias-and-...

Technical questions are fine, and I'd argue that asking all candidates the same questions is one way to help eliminate bias. In combination with this, we could ask interviewers to rate the candidate based on their answers to the technical questions. If we wanted to go further, we could also ask people who didn't meet the candidate personally to rate the candidate based on their technical answers, without revealing any of the candidate's personal information (age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) and then compare these ratings. The comparison might help us see if our interview process is as fair as we think it is.

None of us want to believe we're biased interviewers, but from what I've seen of many technical interview processes, there are many tech companies who strongly believe their interview process is unbiased, but don't have much (or any) data upon which to base that belief.

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