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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

#41

Post by DannyBee »

ignoramous wrote: post #20
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…

Bar Raisers do go through a round of training every year or so. Regular interviewers themselves are encouraged to attend a program called 'Making Great Hiring Decisions' every once a year or so. 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 th…

"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."

This is probably completely wrong , unless all of your B candidates are being hired at very low levels only, and none of them ever get to participate in the promotion process.

Additionally, most tech companies are really bad at dealing with low performers in general (they tend to stay around too long).

In any case, my sources are completely empirical, having managed large numbers of people at a number of tech companies (and thus watching things like what happens to B candidates during cross-organization score calibrations, etc), as well as mentoring and helping managers with some of these issues.

I'd love to be wrong, but I have yet to see a company where the hiring of B candidates did not have significantly more impact that was expected.

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

#42

Post by mjt0229 »

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…

I worked for 5 years at Amazon, and bar raisers were carefully selected for their ability to ask questions that probed much more deeply than this. I'm shocked that such a trivial detail would be used to disqualify someone by a bar raiser, and guess that it's more the result of faulty reporting than faulty interviewing. Not that mistakes aren't made (what interview process is perfect?), but this is hardly typical.

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

#43

Post by jeffbarr »

yapcguy wrote: post #16
trentmb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pull the ladder up after you climbed it.

Exactly. Why hire someone into the company who might end up competing against you? The veto is a gift for Machiavellians lurking in the officefor

It doesn't work that way. The whole idea of the Bar Raiser (this should be evident from the name) is that we want to raise the expectations for a particular level or job position over time. The goal is to keep improving the quality of our hires at a given level over time.

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

#44

Post by kevinmchugh »

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…

It's possibly more than trivia. I expect a candidate to be able to have a conversation about whatever language they know best and have used the most. They should be able to speak about that language's strengths and limitations and mitigation strategies. If a candidate couldn't talk about languages they claimed to use, that would be a huge red flag for me.

If the interviewer is just throwing out questions about keywords and language implementation that are irrelevant to the candidate and the position, that counts as trivia. It's hard to say from the quote whether or not it was a trivial question.

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

#45

Post by midko »

Somewhat offtopic but I think there's a chance someone here might be able to help.

I had applied through Amazon's website for a graduate position nearly 2 months ago and according to the dashboard, my application is still under review but I have never heard from anyone. I think my application has been stuck in some limbo and is now invisible to HR. I tried looking for a relevant email so that I can follow-up but this has been impossible. Granted, I found a graduate email I had written down 1 year ago but so far haven't had any reply and the email seems deprecated because its not advertised on the website anymore. Even on on-campus events, Amazon recruiters would give only the website address, no emails.

Could anyone perhaps point me to someone I could ask to have a look?

edit: To clarify, I am certain the application has not been rejected. I also do believe I am at least worth looking into hehe ;)

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

#46

Post by jessaustin »

Jun8 wrote: post #11

"To become a bar raiser, a worker generally must have conducted dozens or hundreds of interviews, and gained a reputation for asking tough questions and identifying candidates who go on to be stars." Typical interviewing scenario where P(FA)>10^10 and P(Miss)=0. Such schemes create groupthink problems later on.

...dozens or hundreds of interviews...

When does a "bar raiser", like, work? I've never been part of an org large enough to afford this sort of distraction.

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

#47

Post by walshemj »

ignoramous wrote: post #32
walshemj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any experienced HR person woudl be having nightmares god only knows what discriminatory hiring practices are going on here.

It is not that Bar Raisers get away with just the Veto. Usually the process involves discussion between every one involved in the interview loop, including the manager, BR, other engineers, and the HR. A final "hire" or "no hire" call is made based on "data-points" collected over the course of the interview / interactions had with the candidates by the people present in the interview loop. As evident, BRs clearly hav…

Perception is everything

This sounds like the sandwidge chain in the UK which had staff make input into hiring and it turns out that they favored nudge nudge their country men and women from eastern Europe and funnily no local kids from say tottenham seemed to get hired.

Boris Johnson noticed that something was wrong Boris Johnson!!

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

#48

Post by walshemj »

yapcguy wrote: post #16
trentmb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pull the ladder up after you climbed it.

Exactly. Why hire someone into the company who might end up competing against you? The veto is a gift for Machiavellians lurking in the officefor

Or hiring people who you know will get stacked ranked out to protect your position.

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

#49

Post by mratzloff »

In my younger days I interviewed with them twice, but every aspect of the hiring process was so protracted that I ended up accepting jobs with other companies instead. Inevitably, several days after I had started at the new company I would get a phone call from Amazon to schedule the next round of interviews.

This was before they were as desperate as they are today, but even then the questions were hardly brutal.

Here in Seattle the reputation most often associated with them is "sweatshop". This isn't universally true, of course--some teams are better than others--but just about everyone I know who works there always tells me, "Thankfully I work on a good team. I wouldn't want to be one of the guys working on XYZ, though. Those guys are chained to their desks." The people who had negative feedback about their own team didn't work for them anymore, of course.

Anyway, churn and burn. Bring on the H-1Bs!

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

#50

Post by vladimirralev »

jeffbarr wrote: post #43
yapcguy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Why hire someone into the company who might end up competing against you? The veto is a gift for Machiavellians lurking in the officefor

It doesn't work that way. The whole idea of the Bar Raiser (this should be evident from the name) is that we want to raise the expectations for a particular level or job position over time. The goal is to keep improving the quality of our hires at a given level over time.

The goal is clear, but how do you motivate "bar raisers" to work against themselves? If they hire smarter people than themselves they will be made obsolete. If you are not smart enough to see that you will be replaced by someone who will and the next iteration will correct the problem. It's a system that always converges to a "shrinking, but reasonable and politically correct cap on the performance".
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