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Amazon is a sweatshop, from bottom to top. Source: relative who worked for Amazon and had frequent interactions with Jeff Bezos.
Source: Worked on an Amazon team that did not strike me as a sweatshop. Also these views are my own and I do not speak for Amazon
Amazon is a sweatshop, from bottom to top. Source: relative who worked for Amazon and had frequent interactions with Jeff Bezos.
It's a large company with diverse departments and diverse teams within those departments. You cannot generalize the sweatshop mentality to the whole company. Source: Worked on an Amazon team that did not strike me as a sweatshop. Also these views are my own and I do not speak for Amazon
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Because the interview process is structured to "raise the bar" but is also highly random. As with any tech company, you have to run the gauntlet to get a hire. It's politically easier to have candidates reinterview when they fail rather than get permission from executives to "lower the bar."
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.
What ended up happening (some might say "as intended") was unrealistic expectations used to cut funding for schools that didn't kowtow to the state/federal rules and politicians.
The concept of a constantly increased expectations needs to be tethered to reality or it becomes a ripe condition for abuse (see stacked ranking).
* Bar raisers may be asked to assess as many as 10 candidates a week, for between two and three hours each, including paperwork and meetings—all while doing their regular full-time job, be it in finance, marketing or product development.*
20-30 hours per week for a non-job activity? This can't possibly be correct. Or does Amazon have a workaholic culture that supports this - 20-30 hours for those hungry after their 50-60 hour workweeks?
I heard a story about Google that the employees who were vetoed as candidates but hired anyways actually outperformed, because they had something about them that was so valuable that it was worth trumping the process.
As someone who has hired in the past, I have gotten in trouble by letting too many people have vetos. You wind up having to accommodate so many pet peeves ("They don't have 5 years of specific experience", "I don't like their school"...) that it's impossible to get good candidates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's a double-edged sword, if you hire smart people but demand them to act stupid, they will implode the company.
"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 at Amazon. They don't put accountants as bar raisers on engineering loops. There is a bit more specificity than that.
Regarding “didn't know much about a specific programming language”, I would guess that the candidate represented himself as fluent in that language, or had worked in it for many years. A good bar raiser doesn't play trivia.
In 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...
As a general policy, this seems fantastic. It just doesn't sound like they're scaling the culture carriers fast enough. * Bar raisers may be asked to assess as many as 10 candidates a week, for between two and three hours each, including paperwork and meetings—all while doing their regular full-time job, be it in finance, marketing or product development.* 20-30 hours per week for a non-job activity? This can't possi…