Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
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Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
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Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#2I've worked at Amazon, both in the warehouse management division as well as AWS, and the whole "bar raiser" phenomenon is mostly just marketing fluff. There are a handful of engineers who don't mind interviewing (or at least hate it less than most), and they get picked often to be part of the interview circuit. After some number of interviews, you are considered one of the mystical "bar raisers". However, in my experience, they are not any different from other interviewers. More experienced sure, but the difficulty of questions is highly variable, and honestly there isn't much culture at Amazon to worry about culture fit.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#3I've worked at Amazon, both in the warehouse management division as well as AWS, and the whole "bar raiser" phenomenon is mostly just marketing fluff. There are a handful of engineers who don't mind interviewing (or at least hate it less than most), and they get picked often to be part of the interview circuit. After some number of interviews, you are considered one of the mystical "bar raisers". However, in my exper…
Can you compare it to any of the other places you've worked to give some perspective to your comparison? Like "isn't much culture" compared to working at IBM or "isn't much culture" compared to Google/Zappos/RedGate?
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#4"With a word, they can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the prospective employee's."
Ah good, giving some extreme power to someone otherwise completely un-involved in the hiring process. Why should Rachel in accounting get to veto Sara as an engineer?
"Sailesh Rachabathuni, who developed software for Kindle devices before leaving Amazon in 2012, says he once vetoed a candidate for a programming job because the candidate didn't know much about a specific programming language, a detail others missed."
Great! A game of software trivia! Could be relevant, could just be this person being a douche, hard to say.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#5Some HR goon wants to tout their new revolutionary system. The only way they actually look like they get work done.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#6"With a word, they can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the prospective employee's." Ah good, giving some extreme power to someone otherwise completely un-involved in the hiring process. Why should Rachel in accounting get to veto Sara as an engineer? "Sailesh Rachabathuni, who developed software for Kindle devices before leaving Amazon in 2012, says he once vetoed…
Pull the ladder up after you climbed it.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#7I imagine using a bar raiser increases the randomness of the interview process at Amazon, as it effectively reduces the number of interviewers down to one in the veto case. Thus, more noise. However, reducing the false negative rate isn't a high priority in most organizations, and Amazon is so desperate for employees that you often see the same person interview multiple times until they get in, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#8"With a word, they can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the prospective employee's." Ah good, giving some extreme power to someone otherwise completely un-involved in the hiring process. Why should Rachel in accounting get to veto Sara as an engineer? "Sailesh Rachabathuni, who developed software for Kindle devices before leaving Amazon in 2012, says he once vetoed…
I came here to make that point.
I once worked where a startup where almost everyone in the 15 person tech side of the company would interview every candidate.
On the rare occasions that all of us thought a candidate was a hire (1 in 30 candidates maybe) then the owner of the company could and often would still veto them if he wasn't happy.
Once pretty much all of us agreed that a candidate was useless, but the owner overruled us and bought him in anyway.
I have to say that guy actually ended up being quite successful at the company, so maybe the owner was better at spotting talent and we should have just skipped the whole charade.
Alas, it was a very frustrating and arbitrary system to work under, both for us employees and the candidates.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#9"he once vetoed a candidate for a programming job because the candidate didn't know much about a specific programming language, a detail others missed"
He appears to be pretty proud of this. Most top companies actually care less about knowing specific languages as opposed to having the critical thinking skills they're looking for.
Not sure him vetoing a candidate because of a lack of knowledge in one language was a plus for Amazon.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#10"With a word, they can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the prospective employee's." Ah good, giving some extreme power to someone otherwise completely un-involved in the hiring process. Why should Rachel in accounting get to veto Sara as an engineer? "Sailesh Rachabathuni, who developed software for Kindle devices before leaving Amazon in 2012, says he once vetoed…
I'm a SDE at Amazon, but I don't speak on the behalf of the company...
AFAIK, there are different Bar Raisers for different roles. For instance, a QAE Bar Raiser has no say whatsoever who gets hired for a SDE role, let alone someone from the Accounting Dept. vetoing a Engg. candidate (vice versa is also true).