11–20 of 72 posts
Typical interviewing scenario where P(FA)>10^10 and P(Miss)=0. Such schemes create groupthink problems later on.
"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…
"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…
IMHO the hiring process will change a lot in the next few years.
Some HR goon wants to tout their new revolutionary system. The only way they actually look like they get work done.
"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 p…
But yes, generally, AFA technical roles are concerned, Amazon doesn't place emphasis on language-specific skill-set.
"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.
Why hire someone into the company who might end up competing against you?
The veto is a gift for Machiavellians lurking in the officefor
A high-pressure interview, to work at a high-pressure, slightly-better-than-averagely paid job, that is then touted in the Wall Street Journal as being "bar-raising"?
No thanks. I guess Amazon is yet another company that failed my interview process.
(see notes at the end before flaming)
Amazon interviewers typically go through a long "shadowing" process where they calibrate their questions and evaluation criteria. You can't just go on to interviewing candidates on your first week. Also, interviwers interview for their own "job families", so e.g. SDEs and SDMs will typically interview technical roles and likewise for non-technical roles. All interviewers are also required to enter detailed "feedbacks" (if you've been put-off by the interviewer furiously typing away, please pardon them - they're not emailing, just taking detailed notes).
Amazon bar-raisers go through additional rigorous shadowing process that typically lasts many dozen of interviews and calibrations. An Amazon BR is more like a "moderator" in the interview loop than an all-powerful veto-machine. Veto is a very powerful tool, to be wielded extremely sparingly. BR on a loop is an "external" third-party who makes sure no self-interests are in play while hiring a candidate - i.e. no team is compromising on quality just to fill open positions.
Also, it's patently false that BRs ask extremely hard questions. Infact, most questions of BR focus on soft-skills and Amazon's leadership principles (Google them, we take them very seriously!). Also, BR's do loop within their job families and anything otherwise may happen only under extraordinary circumstances.
Notes: Amazon being as large it is, is comprised of thousands of autonomous groups and hence some candidate's experience may be sub-par and might have been contrary to what I've written. If you had a bad experience while interviewing at Amazon, please reach out to your recruiter who'll then forward your feedback to BRs. We take instances of bad candidate experience very seriously and will try to fix deficiencies if any. While recruiting, we consider the candidate as our customer and strive to make their interviewing experience delightful.
NB: Yes, I'm an Amazon BR. Posting using a throw-away account.
I'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?
It's a big company though - my experience at other large corporations was that this sort of thing varies wildly from team to team.
The only other "culture" at Amazon was the constant cult-like references to a set of principles - people would actually talk about "bias for action", "frugality" and whatever in their normal daily conversations. It was kind of strange.
Happy to be working elsewhere now.
I'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…
AFA engg roles are concerned... because the interview process is distributed, and because Amazon is growing too big too fast, there is a high chance that a lot of 'B' candidates get hired, but the general consensus is that those 'B' candidates can't survive the break-neck pace of innovation and that they'd generally not be able to match up, let alone keep up with other performers and do the work that's expected of them exceptionally well. Since promotions are merit-based, and due to the stack-ranking employed by Amazon to rank the enggs, things only get diff for 'B' candidates.