IBM's Asshole Test

Behavioral questions are far from new and not unique to Amazon. They serve two purposes: first, as a cultural match, and second, as a performance predictor.

The thing about Leadership Principles in Amazon is that they are not just slogans on the wall. They play a role in your day to day work. Things like your performance review and promotion consider how you apply these LPs to an extent.

Does it sound terrible? I can relate. But what is the alternative? I believe culture is a property of organizations. If you don't explicitly set a culture, one will emerge on its own. I have worked for several companies, and I appreciate the LPs. At least I explicitly know what "rules" to operate under.

So what if you think LPs are dumb or you hate them? that's fine. That means you wouldn't like it here, so it saves both from a bad match.

Back to your point about the interview. What useful information does this convey? quite a lot actually.

First they act as a sanity check. If we ask about Earns Trust, actually we are doing sort of the Asshole Test from OP. We are trying to determine if you are a pain to work with, or if you can establish good relationships with people. With Learn and be Curious we are trying to determine if you are open to learn new things. If you actively refuse to learn and just want to do your thing, you will probably struggle here. Things change fast and most everyone needs to adapt to keep up.

Second, they act as a calibration for role and leveling. Say you are hiring for a senior engineer position, and interview a candidate with +10 years of experience. However all of the candidate's examples are very simple, such as implementing a small feature. Will this candidate thrive as a senior engineer in Amazon where they will have to lead several engineers in multi-team efforts? At the very least we can say we don't have enough evidence to judge.

Third, it turns out some of them are actually good on-the-job performance indicators. Amazon has an internal science team that runs experiments on hiring. One of their experiments determined that high scores in certain LPs correlate with good performance after hire.

So there you go. You might personally dislike behavioral questions, and that is fair. However there is plenty of evidence to back up their usefulness in making hiring decisions. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to work here or not.

Sure. Everyone should be sad about that. There are plenty of people out there who don't have any willingness to treat people in service jobs like driving a taxi with any sort of humanity. Too many people will just ignore the fact that these people are living, breathing human beings with feelings of their own, and treat them as if either they don't exist, or that they exist to serve them. It's quite appalling.

Treating someone like a human being means having kindness, respect, and empathy for them. It means not expecting them to demean themselves just because you're paying them to do something. It's treating them well even without knowing them.

It's quite a high bar apparently, and a lot of people out there don't manage it.

As for managers of software developers, that feels like an entirely different beast to me. Managers have to be ready to be exposed to arbitrary and unlimited stressors, up to and including existential threats to the company or to their position, and they not only have to manage their own reactions to those stressors, they have to be mindful of their reports' stress at the same time. A manager needs to be able, on their own, to put events at work or in an interview into perspective and not turn toxic. I've helped interview managers, but I have never helped plan the interview as a whole, so I don't know what reasonable limits are.

It's not a high bar. There's just a surprising number of people that are really good at playing limbo.