41–50 of 79 posts
I guess this is the Dilbert principle? Hire a few incompetent people, promote them to middle management so they don't screw up the actual work. It probably does work when you have a constant supply of skilled programmers at the lowest tier with 6-month turnover. (NB: that is just Amazon rumors, no idea what actual turnover is like)
This is hard to take seriously from Amazon. I realize it's a big org with many diverse teams. It's just that the company seems to be rotting from the head down. And it's hard to overlook the stories of how some employees get so exploited.
Amazon prizes attitude? This article reads like counter programming to the articles that said Amazon treats its workers as disposable.
I don't agree - it's about equal A certain level of soft skills and attitude is required to function as a member of a team. A certain level of technical skills is required to do the job. Both have a minimum bar to clear and you shouldn't hire an asshole genius just like you shouldn't inept social butterfly or whatever the genius equivalent is for soft skills. Once the bar is cleared you look at being better than requ…
The author didn’t say the aren’t equal, at least, just technical is overrated. And I’d tend to agree. We historical weigh technical skills at like 95% of the assessment. It probably should be more like 60% and as we’ve moved in that direction we’ve had much better hires.
You have to either have hard minimums on both or multiply them instead of adding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everything you're saying here Also, in reading your post I noticed a normal human tendency that makes me wonder if hiring by interview doesn't inevitably introduce a small but pervasive organizational tendency toward a brittle culture Notice that when describing your notion of alignment, you say you look for candidates who "do things like [you] do." I think that's insightful, true across interviewers, an…
Depends on the org size and mission. Huge? You want diverse approaches. Medium? Diverse is probably better. Small? You probably want strong alignment. Tiny/Ramen-startup/doing hard things? Maybe diverse again. Maybe not.
I hope that more employers start to value other skills in additional to technical skills. It’s absurd to me that you can be a successful software engineer, but will likely be unable to land a new job without dedicating time to brushing up on Leetcode-style programming questions. Investing time on this won’t make you better at your current job and as simply a gatekeeping exercise.
Yeah it’s pretty stupid but everyone is willing to play the game since we all need to eat. I did drop out of Facebooks interview process right after the recruiter told me i need to come up with a better reason why i wanted to work at facebook for the next interview. I told them i thought they were going a little too far and I didn’t want to work at a company that was that full of themselves.
After years of upping the ante by ratcheting up what is expected for a technical interview, only to realize you've merely attracted people who are good at cramming for technical interviews, we're told now all that is overrated. Maybe the whole time, people should have considered what adds value to the company instead of treating it as an entrance examination. A coding problem is appropriate if they're right out of sc…
>A coding problem is appropriate if they're right out of school and you can't get a good feel for them, but usually, holding a conversation for an hour or so is enough to get a feel for whether or not this person can do the job you have in find, or think of a job they could do. Facebook tried to recruit me once. They told me I needed to study Leetcode. I'm a researcher with a pretty good publication record and some b…
It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft skills will just flow like hot butter. This is what I tell my friends: Don’t see interviews as an adversarial thing. At the end of the day, your mindset should be: * The company is looking for someone to do a specific job * You have a unique set of skills and y…
You have to be confident that you have something of value to offer. You have to be confident that if this isn't a good fit there will be another one out there that is.
If you don't have this confidence then you'll have a hard time not treating every job interview as a sales pitch that you desperately hope they'll buy.