By the way, Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, which published this particular fluff piece.
Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#52By the way, Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, which published this particular fluff piece.
WSJ is owned by Dow Jones & Co. Bezos has nothing to do with them.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#53In context, Amazon is also one of the worst performing companies in the Fortune 500 for employee retention. An average employee lasts 1 year: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turno...
I would take that report with a huge grain of salt.
First - it's based on dubious sources "_Payscale's report recorded data collected from 250,000 people working at Fortune 500 companies in the past year (July 1, 2012 to July 1, 2013)_" It's not from official company data. There is little to no information about how they collected the data.
More importantly, median tenure says little about retention or employee loyalty in company that is doing a lot of hiring - e.g. if a company hired 50% of it's total work-force in the past year, the media tenure will be around one year.
Another potential source of skew would be if the data included contractors, which are often limited to one year of tenure.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#54I'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?
I've also worked in university research group settings, as well as a few startups in SV. I'd say there is a much stronger sense of the "whole" in these smaller groups, where everybody feels personally responsible for the success of projects. The smaller groups also take on the dynamics of the members, and the more eccentric personalities shape the culture and make the group a more fun and interesting place. You think of coworkers as friends first, coworkers second.
At Amazon, you don't get any of that. It is a very dry culture. It's clear that everybody is a coworker first. Eccentricity is largely looked down on (after all you need to worry about reviews and promotions, etc). Instead you get a sort of blah corporate culture, everything is grey, you talk about frugality as if somehow that's great. Rarely do you find super motivated engineers. Most people are fairly jaded, and aren't that committed to the success of projects. It's just a 9 to 5.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#55"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 am an SDE with Amazon having worked across AWS and the retail side. I have done over a hundred interviews in the past 2 years for SDE loops. Each of these involved a debrief led by bar raisers. I have yet to experience a "veto" by a bar raiser as outlined in this article. As far as I have experienced, the bar raisers' questions are not typically any more complicated or harsher than other interviewers. The main role of the bar raiser is in fact during the debrief, i.e. after the interviewee has completed the interviews.
At Amazon candidates are evaluated on an array of competencies. In addition to technical competencies, particular attention is paid to Amazon's leadership principles (the fact that these are displayed right at the careers page: http://www.amazon.com/b?node=239365011 should highlight how important these are in the culture). I love that culture-fit and leadership qualities play as big a part as technical abilities in Amazon's decision making process unlike what I have seen in some of the other companies people mention in the same breath as Amazon. In my experience a good bar raiser acts as an unbiased advocate for the greater good of the company. As a result, they are NOT from the same team with the open position (this doesn't mean that an accountant is judging an engineering candidate or vice-versa mind you, they just happen to be from a different org) which allows them to look-past the immediate need the team might have which could blind them to some of the obvious flaws in the candidate. In some ways they are also acting on behalf of the candidate by ensuring the match works both ways. I have seen several situations where the bar raiser determined that the "team" or the "role" were poorer fit for the candidate than the other way around and went out of their way to facilitate a correction.
That said, there is no question that good bar raisers are just as, if not harder to come by than good employees! It is a thankless, demanding assignment to take. I have met some absolutely amazing bar raisers and some others that are just darn right atrocious. Considering how quickly Amazon is growing, they definitely need more of them but that risks damage through poorer ones entering the system.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#56"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.
Rung Raisers?
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#57By the way, Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, which published this particular fluff piece.
Bezos owns the Washington Post, not the Wall Street Journal.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
To address that, as the article mentions - Bar raisers interview in another part of the company. They can't bar raise for their own team.
And in a 110k employee company, to think one extra hire will obsolete you is extreme paranoia. You would rather hire smart folks and increase the company value.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure there's context missing in that quote. Bar Raisers would not veto someone just because they didn't know specific things about a programming language ... unless they claim to be masters of a certain language.
I was about to say the same thing. The only reason that a bar raiser would ask the question would be if the applicant claimed to have the knowledge. If your resume claims a certain number of years of experience with a language, and you are asked how well you know it, you'd better be very confident before you say that you are an expert.
One of my favorite red flags. If you put it on the resume and I ask about it, and you've never used it, gong time. Personally I redact my resume every year from stuff I've done long ago. If you're not proficient, don't advertise it.
Re: Amazon's Current Employees Raise the Bar for New Hires
#60By the way, Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Wall Street Journal, which published this particular fluff piece.
You are thinking of the Washington Post