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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

#21

Post by jayhuang »

ignoramous wrote: post #15
jayhuang wrote: post #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 p…

Amazon doesn't place emphasis on language-specific skill-set. But there are certain job roles that require specific skill set, for instance, someone interviewing for a Software Development Engg role might get asked a lot of Algorithms, Data Structures, Databases, Operating Systems and so on. Someone interviewing for Web Development Engg role might get asked questions about JavaScript and HTML. Same thing goes for SDE…

Yep, exactly.

I interviewed for a Front-end Development Engineer position with Amazon, and aside from the poor handling by the recruiter, the on-site interviews covered a very well-rounded set of topics that were extremely relevant to the position. One of the better interview experiences I had in terms of topics tested IMO.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#23

Post by jw_ »

One fun benefit of having such a "tough" (low probability of hire, not necessarily difficult-question tough) hiring process is that smart people constantly get weeded out, which makes filling spots extremely tough, which means that your team is constantly understaffed. This of course means your existing staff are overworked and turnover is high, meaning you now get to try to fill even more spots.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#24

Post by hirammcdaniels »

RankingMember wrote: post #3
armon wrote: post #2

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?

Amazon has a certain body of engineers that get into the official culture, get involved in broomball and wing-eating competitions and the like, but there are far more engineers who pretty much ignore the whole thing. As far as I could tell, the biggest piece of their culture is now a bunch of bitter engineers on internal mailing lists slowly working up the courage to leave for more enjoyable companies.

That said, different teams at Amazon were SUPER different. Some teams went out drinking together twice a week, some teams were super extraverted and into video games, but many other teams were a bunch of quiet, serious introverts. TEAM fit was super important. This of course absolutely sucks for you if you get roped into interviewing for one team and you're a much better culture fit for a different team. Too bad. Rejected.

IBM has a culture, it's just a boring culture. Pretty much a bad IBM culture fit is a person who's passionate about something in life. I'm sure there are parts of IBM that are different (it's huge), but I was just glad that I didn't have to wear a suit.

Google-like companies are pretty much the opposite of IBM. If you don't have some weird interest you're passionate about, you kind of stick out.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#25

Post by blazespin »

JonFish85 wrote: post #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…

Bar raisers have a reputation bringing on super stars at the company. They track everything. I worked for Amazon for awhile.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#26

Post by amzbr »

amzbr wrote: post #18

There are a lot of factual mistakes with this article. (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 like…

The above comment is my own and I do not speak for my employer.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#27

Post by ignoramous »

codex wrote: post #7

I 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…

The last part may be true. I have first-hand experience of this... Amazon does tend to "recycle" candidates, and likes to give candidates that came close to a "hire" or candidates that were unlucky and perhaps had a "anti interview loop" (as Steve Yeggie would put it) of sorts a second, or a third, or a fourth chance even.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#29

Post by codex »

amzbr wrote: post #18

There are a lot of factual mistakes with this article. (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 like…

Rather than use a BR to make sure that a group doesn't compromise on quality, why not just have interviewers interview candidates outside of their group, or interview them for a generalist pool which are assigned to groups later, or randomly? That prevents the BR from inserting subjective bias into the process. Everyone has bias, but the best way to cancel it out is to distribute influence, not concentrate it, nor attempt to "fight" the influences of other interviewers.

Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires

#30

Post by rhizome »

codex wrote: post #7

I 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…

Amazon is so desperate for employees that you often see the same person interview multiple times until they get in

This doesn't make sense to me. Wouldn't they hire them first time around if they were truly desperate?

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