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At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people bett
by alien_ 7y ago
At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team.
To ensure this, someone experienced with interviewing from outside the team/organization, so called bar raiser, is always added to the interviewing team. This person is there to ensure high quality hires and has hiring veto power.
The rest of the interviewers are from within the team, likely under pressure to compromise on quality when they're desperate enough to hire someone, but they can't do it unless the bar raiser agreed.
- halflings 7y agoFWIW this wasn't my experience when interviewing with Amazon; I felt the bar was much lower than other companies I interviewed with, even when I wasn't that good at algorithmic problems. That's just one data point, and maybe what you're describing is for more senior hires?
- kudokatz 7y agoI've found a generally higher bar than places like Microsoft but definitely a much lower bar than other FAANG companies, unicorns, and even tiny-but-potentially-elite startups run by people who know what they're doing.
- halflings 7y agoAgreed, Microsoft was an even lower bar... but in a good way: I felt they just wanted someone with basic CS knowledge, whereas the Amazon interviewers seemed to think they were some sort of elite group of engineers.
- kudokatz 7y ago> At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team. At this point it's Kool-aid. In practice bar raisers have so much more interview experience that you can very easily pick them out, but so much of their behavior results in simply weeding out the bad. I have received LOTS of offers from Amazon over more than a decade (only one accepted at one point), and my friend used to be a bar raiser. In his first interview at a new company he was both rude to an interviewee and flat-out wrong technically on multiple points along with it. You can't raise the bar if you can't pick the bar raisers.
- bitwize 7y agoAmazon phone screens you by saying: "Get out a notebook and a pencil. Write down the code in C to flatten a binary tree into a sorted list, and then read it back to me over the phone." If this is raising the bar, no fucking thank you.
- wnmurphy 7y agoSeriously.