9 ms·

I'm not certain what policies exist within Amazon or what the expected URA rate is. But I can say that as a tech interviewer at Amazon, it is not possible for a

by mabbo 5y ago

I'm not certain what policies exist within Amazon or what the expected URA rate is. But I can say that as a tech interviewer at Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs. In any interview loop, there are 4-6 interviewers. One is the hiring manager or a substitute for them. One is the Bar Raiser, an experienced interviewer with extra training. And the rest are guys like me who took training on how to interview. When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision. > Amazon managers are hiring people they otherwise wouldn't, or shouldn't, just so they can later fire them to hit their goal How? It's not their choice. An HM can voice their opinion that a given candidate is great, they love them, they want them, etc, but they can't overrule the BR, who is trained to watch for bad calls by HMs. If the author wanted to criticize the concept of URA, I'm with them. I don't think it's a good way to operate at all. But when you double down your criticism with untrue things in order to get better press, you undermine the original valid point.

rattray 5y ago
Thanks for sharing that context, it's helpful. Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?
- sib 5y ago
  In my org, we did a lot of hiring (I was in hundreds of interview debriefs) and we saw mostly the same set of ~10 bar raisers for the debriefs, with occasional fill-ins to make scheduling easier.
treesrule 5y ago
Is this how it works in the non-tech parts of amazon?
zamadatix 5y ago
Assuming it is done that way throughout the company are you really sure the hiring manager has extremely little to none net influence on getting someone new hired? Seems odd to have a "hiring" manager at that point then... If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?
- ttam 5y ago
  You are right that HM have little influence, you "hire for Amazon", not for any specific team. And with the process changes in the US (and EU), candidates are now given the option of picking the team they want to join (which can be different from the interview-HM's team).
sparrc 5y ago
one big caveat here is there is much less scrutiny put on hiring interns from internship to full-time, and Amazon hires a LOT of interns every year.
joshstrange 5y ago
I mean, this assumes the BR is always acting in good faith and/or isn't in on the whole thing. Honest question, maybe I've misunderstood, but is it beyond the pale that a HM would ask the BR (or not even have to verbalize since the BR knowns how this game works) to sign off because they want to protect other people on their team (as in hiring someone they know will probably rank low and thus be the person fired)?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aerosmile 5y ago
  Sure, it's possible. But which is more likely: 1) Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate. The fact that they didn't even try is telling. The cost of publishing a lie is exactly 0, and the potential benefit is going viral and making a lot of $$$ with associated advertising impressions and new subscribers. 2) There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people, who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other. The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives. And again, not one BR, but since this is systemic behavior, it's the majority of BRs across all teams and locations.
  - joshstrange 5y ago
    Thank you for the response, that clears it up a lot more. I think I was misunderstanding exactly what the relationship between the HM and BR is, I was assuming they worked together regularly and were team-specific instead of a shared resource between teams and not tied to the team that was hiring.
  - thereare5lights 5y ago
    > Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate. Why would any HM even speak to them? > The fact that they didn't even try is telling. How do you even know that? > There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people This sounds like a gross overestimate. This is not an organized conspiracy. Individual HM would come to the same conclusion, which is it is to their own benefit to act perversely when it comes to hiring/firing. This isn't even restricted to Amazon. Time and time again, at companies with poorly thought out policies, managers end up doing really shitty things in order to meet goals. > who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other. And because it's not an organized conspiracy, how would they tell on each other. It's not like they're gonna go around tell each other that they're doing corrupt things. And even if they were, that usually ends up creating a code of omerta. You see it all the time in organizations where they do terrible things. These places end up creating a us vs them mentality. Police is one example. Another example is how China runs things. They spread out the bad actions across everyone, making everyone complicit. This makes people less likely to rat each other out because now they're the ones doing it and internally, people justify their own decisions. > The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives. This is the only thing I agree with. It is unlikely that a BR would collude. They have no reason to.
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
I don’t understand how being in an interview loop would tell you whether hire-to-fire is occurring. If a manager wanted to hire someone on their team with the intent of firing them, they would hire someone who passed the ordinary interview process. They wouldn’t attach a note to the candidate’s file saying “we don’t really need to interview this one, we’re just going to fire them.” There would be a normal paper trail and nobody other than the manager would know that about the plan.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  The source article actually provides no evidence of "hire-to-fire" practices. It simply states that there is a target URA of 6% and that's it. The article posted here is pure speculation. ...and having worked for other large companies, I've seen similar metrics being tracked. It doesn't mean any of them are hiring just to fire people. Frankly, I've noticed a LOT of poorly written anti-Amazon articles around, and I'm not clear if there's some effort to undermine the company. Is Amazon a political organization?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    I was personally told by a former manager who used to work at Amazon that he hired to fire. He hated that the company forced him to fire good people and left.
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      A guy supposedly tells another guy that some highly weird thing that makes no sense at all is common at their company. This is how we learned about Enron, so sure, let's admit the evidence. But also, this is how 99% of BS spreads across the internet, so whenever possible let's please use more than just anecdotal evidence from an anonymous account. If your friend has a story to tell, please direct them appropriately - we all know that the NYT would love to tear Amazon a new one. But please recognize just how weak your argument sounds as of right now.
      - 5y ago
bestcoder69 5y ago
Don’t see how any of it’s untrue. You just interpreted this in a way that would be untrue. Rather than “lower the bar” an HM can just request 1 more headcount for SDE1 than they truly need.
aerosmile 5y ago
So the core thesis of the article is fundamentally flawed, since the decision maker for hiring is not the same person who decides on firing. In other words, Inc. is perpetrating a lie, along with all the other publishers who jumped on this bandwagon. That's fine, we all make mistakes. But here's the interesting part: Inc. has a perverse incentive not to be too diligent in their reporting, because if they look too deep underneath the carpet, they could come across the truth that the OP shared. Once you learn how things really work, you can't spread your BS anymore because you can be sued for libel. But if you just pick up someone else's lie and expand on it without bothering to verify the fundamental thesis, you're 100% covered. Inc. was careful to start their reporting with: 1) hey look, we're linking to someone else who said this before us 2) and please note, there's the obligatory "appears--at least on the surface" statement, so if this comes back to bite us, we told you you shouldn't have believed us in the first place. Here's your startup idea: find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism, which is becoming prevalent and will only continue to grow in intensity and harmfulness. PS: I get it, you hate Amazon. So do I. Try to think for yourself for a minute and let's engage in this conversation as if we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra pageviews.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zdragnar 5y ago
  > find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism Step one: treat any article that quotes anonymous sources with deep skepticism. The sheer number of retractions and stories that turn out to be blatantly false (especially in the realm of politics) has become absurd in the past few years. No startup needed, just some (un)common sense.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    That works great in theory. But look at all the comments here. Hundreds of people posted comments, and thousands read them within a few hours. A few months from now, SEO will ensure that this page will have been visited by a few million people googling "Amazon hire to fire." The majority of comments doesn't start with "hey guys, this is obviously all just fake BS," and instead you see a lot of hatred being pointed at Amazon. And this is just HN, which is going to have smarter people than any other place reporting on this topic. So, no, the suggestion you made is not a workable solution and we need a better one.
mghd23145 5y ago
> Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs. Speakig as someone who is an interviewer, your point means nothing. The interview process is tailored to get people in, but it's totally independent of the decisions to decimate teams. Where managers step in is in the company's yearly performance review process, and those tend to be brutal. unlike the hiring process, that has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations. > How? It's not their choice. The choice of who gets in is irrelevant. It's the choice of who gets out that matters. The hiring process gets bodies on desks, and afterwards managers decimate them. Getting the orange badge is a feat, and I've been to meetings where orange badges were quite blunt in stating new hires they were in the company when blue badges get in, and they will stay in the company when said blue badges get out. This is not new to anyone working in the company. What's the average tenure at Amazon? Less than two years?
- erehweb 5y ago
  What's an orange / blue badge?
  - libria 5y ago
    I think he's referring to tenure, blue -> 0-5 yrs FTE, orange 5-10 yrs FTE
  - tyuqfromhere 5y ago
    In this context, it refers to the tenure of the Amazonian. Full time employees that are <5 years tenure have a badge with a blue border, those with 5-10 years tenure have an orangeish border, 10-15 have a red border, etc... Orange/red badges are typically a big deal because it is very rare for people to last at Amazon past even 2-3 years, nevermind 5 years.
    - johnqpub 5y ago
      People need to get out of these terrible orgs. In mine, I'd estimate >50% get to 5. The average tenure is a lot lower because the org has grown from ~15 to ~70 people in the past 5 years.
slumdev 5y ago
Your interview process is a wreck, anyway. It optimizes for people who spend a month or two grinding leetcode and rehearsing their Leadership Principle stories. If you think that this effort is demonstrative of their ability to translate needs into working code and then deliver it, I have a bridge to sell you. I don't think it would be difficult for an experienced hiring manager to identify someone who's well-rehearsed but otherwise incapable and then hire that person specifically in order to fire him later.
bestcoder69 5y ago
Primary target of PIPs are college hires, and Amazon hires them via online assessment and a phone call verification.
trunnell 5y ago
Wow. The hiring manager doesn't get to make the final decision? I make sure that managers reporting to me always make the final decision on hiring (and firing) for their teams. That makes it more fair to hold them accountable for their team, because it's the team they chose. Moving the final decision to someone else, like a "bar raiser," seems fraught with misaligned incentives. Are bar raisers somehow held accountable for their hiring decisions?
- ajb 5y ago
  I would assume that the Bar Raiser can say 'No' when the HM says 'yes', but not vice versa. So the HM would choose their own team. But it would be true that the Bar Raiser can't be held to account, since you will rarely if ever find out that they made a bad call.
- sib 5y ago
  Well... I'm not sure that it's exactly like that, at least when I was there. The bar raiser can say "no" even if the HM says "yes," but I never heard of it going the other way (where hypothetically the HM would say "no" and the bar raiser "overrule" the HM.) And in hundreds of interviews there, I never experienced a situation in which it was as black and white as the above would make it seem. There were times, of course, when there was a difference of opinion, but it's on the people in the room to debate and convince each other based on logic and data - a bar raiser is not simply going to walk in and put his/her foot down and say "no" to a team that is otherwise saying "yes" without pretty detailed discussion and reasoning.
  - trunnell 5y ago
    That makes more sense. So the bar raiser is there to nudge people toward better hires, but generally isn't overruling the HM?
    - sib 5y ago
      Right. (When push comes to shove, the bar raiser could overrule, but everyone would rather it not have to get to that point...)
walkedaway 5y ago
> the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision To be pedantic, the HM makes the hire-or-not decision, the BR can veto a hire decision. BR cannot make a hire decision.
- variaga 5y ago
  I'd describe it as "they both have a veto" - BR and HM must both say "yes" for the hire to happen.
tyuqfromhere 5y ago
You're speaking from a position of how the process is supposed to work, but not from how it actually does work. I think you seriously underestimate how much power an HM can have in the process if they have a little bit of experience. In practice, the HM absolutely does make the decision. If the candidate is seriously "below the bar", then the BR might strongly assert that they will not be hired. But in reality, most BRs do not actually uphold a very high bar. The BR's main function is to act as a facilitator during the debriefs, but if the HR feels strongly one way or another, the BR will almost always back up the HM. If an HM wants to hire someone just so they can fire them, all they have to do is find a mediocre candidate that a BR will not feel strongly about, and then during the debrief they just say that they know the needs of their team better than the BR does, and the BR will say "ok, I'll go along with your decision". It's as easy as that. This is especially so on teams that use the same BR over and over - hiring teams can actually influence which BR they use for loops, so if they find one that consistently disagrees with the HM, they can simply just find a new BR that is more agreeable.
grumple 5y ago
Let's say you're perfectly happy with your team of 9, but you have to fire 10% of people every year. It doesn't matter who you hire for that 10th spot. It doesn't matter who makes the decision. You're getting a 10th person, of any caliber, to get rid of them. You'll make open recs and add more people to the team when you don't need more people, just so you can keep your staff. As a hiring engineer, this is exactly the sort of optimization I would make if I were compelled to terminate a portion of my team regularly (really, as a principal, I'd just tell whoever was making the rule to go to hell). We'd constantly be overstaffed so I can let someone go without it hurting my team.
vikiomega9 5y ago
I work for AWS and the concept of Bar Raisers sits in a weird grey area. There are plenty of decent candidates who pass the bar but we do stack ranking for the year end review. So they can hire at headcount and end up having to fire anyway. If you end up with two hires that are roughly the same the stack rank takes care of it.
mcguire 5y ago
One question: who makes the decision of how many to hire? You are a manager. You need five people on your team. You hire eight, because you are expected to lose three in the next two years. If three of them leave, fine. If three of them are incompetent, great! (You get your URA and you have evidence your Bar Raiser is an idiot.) If the interview loop worked perfectly, all eight are great. But you still have to boot three of them.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
I don't think they meant hiring managers, but rather division or project managers, ones who decide that this division or project needs to hire more people (possibly with attrition goal at mind).
vl 5y ago
Oh, please. Softer version of this practice is well-known in tech industry since 2000s: when company demands perf curve from the manager, managers hire and keep low-performers on the team to satisfy the curve demand. Everyone who worked at Microsoft, Amazon or Walmart has seen this happening. Hire-to-fire is just logical extension of this practice. It doesn’t really matter if it’s internal transfer or new hire.
thereare5lights 5y ago
All this means is that they cannot hire shitty people. It doesn't mean that they can't hire people to fire them. They could very well still be hiring people just to fire them because they care more about the people they already have or just to give themselves more choices to fire.
northern-lights 5y ago
> When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision. Either you haven't been part of the panel in a while or you haven't worked for Amazon. BR's responsibility is not to make the sole decision but help the panel achieve consensus. This is very clear in the interview training.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ctvo 5y ago
I can only speak for software engineering: Hiring is extremely difficult and time intensive. I have a ~10% hire rate in over 500 industry interviews conducted. These were at large tech companies so they included 5+ people spending 3+ hours each. It’s not worth the time to fabricate head count to begin hiring, then fire a qualified person. We assume Amazon is cutthroat and grades on delivery. Imagine doing this sham while doing your normal job.
cryptische 5y ago
Managers generally overrule other's opinions by giving promise of personally coaching the new hire to make them meet the bar. In most cases such people are put on coaching plan, and thereafter fired. URA quota is an open secret at Amazon, and some employee appreciate the practice of hire to fire, as it saves their own employment. That in turn ensures that objection to bad hire is non existent.
hiyer 5y ago
It's possible for the hiring manager to also be the bar-raiser, especially at senior levels like SDE3 and above. I have personally seen this happen. Having said that, I doubt that specific people are hired to be fired. I would consider it more likely that if a manager needs X people, he would try to keep the team strength at X + delta, so someone can be fired when required. Edit: formatting

by mabbo 5y ago

rattray 5y ago

Thanks for sharing that context, it's helpful. Do you happen to know how frequently a given Bar Raiser will be on the same interview loop as a given manager? Are they load-balanced across the whole company, or siloed to their home division?

sib 5y ago
In my org, we did a lot of hiring (I was in hundreds of interview debriefs) and we saw mostly the same set of ~10 bar raisers for the debriefs, with occasional fill-ins to make scheduling easier.

treesrule 5y ago

Is this how it works in the non-tech parts of amazon?

zamadatix 5y ago

Assuming it is done that way throughout the company are you really sure the hiring manager has extremely little to none net influence on getting someone new hired? Seems odd to have a "hiring" manager at that point then... If on the other hand they have a meaningful influence then does it really matter if it's someone else that gives the "official" okay instead of straight out of their mouth?

ttam 5y ago
You are right that HM have little influence, you "hire for Amazon", not for any specific team. And with the process changes in the US (and EU), candidates are now given the option of picking the team they want to join (which can be different from the interview-HM's team).

sparrc 5y ago

one big caveat here is there is much less scrutiny put on hiring interns from internship to full-time, and Amazon hires a LOT of interns every year.

joshstrange 5y ago

I mean, this assumes the BR is always acting in good faith and/or isn't in on the whole thing. Honest question, maybe I've misunderstood, but is it beyond the pale that a HM would ask the BR (or not even have to verbalize since the BR knowns how this game works) to sign off because they want to protect other people on their team (as in hiring someone they know will probably rank low and thus be the person fired)?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aerosmile 5y ago
Sure, it's possible. But which is more likely: 1) Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate. The fact that they didn't even try is telling. The cost of publishing a lie is exactly 0, and the potential benefit is going viral and making a lot of $$$ with associated advertising impressions and new subscribers. 2) There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people, who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other. The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives. And again, not one BR, but since this is systemic behavior, it's the majority of BRs across all teams and locations.
- joshstrange 5y ago
  Thank you for the response, that clears it up a lot more. I think I was misunderstanding exactly what the relationship between the HM and BR is, I was assuming they worked together regularly and were team-specific instead of a shared resource between teams and not tied to the team that was hiring.
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  > Inc. just published a bunch of BS, which would have taken no more than a quick call to a hiring manager to validate or invalidate. Why would any HM even speak to them? > The fact that they didn't even try is telling. How do you even know that? > There's a conspiracy happening at a scale of a few hundred thousand people This sounds like a gross overestimate. This is not an organized conspiracy. Individual HM would come to the same conclusion, which is it is to their own benefit to act perversely when it comes to hiring/firing. This isn't even restricted to Amazon. Time and time again, at companies with poorly thought out policies, managers end up doing really shitty things in order to meet goals. > who all do highly immoral things but nobody is telling on each other. And because it's not an organized conspiracy, how would they tell on each other. It's not like they're gonna go around tell each other that they're doing corrupt things. And even if they were, that usually ends up creating a code of omerta. You see it all the time in organizations where they do terrible things. These places end up creating a us vs them mentality. Police is one example. Another example is how China runs things. They spread out the bad actions across everyone, making everyone complicit. This makes people less likely to rat each other out because now they're the ones doing it and internally, people justify their own decisions. > The BR has no incentive to partake in the conspiracy, because their track record will show a high attrition rate which is against their goals, but they still decide to violate their specific job directives. This is the only thing I agree with. It is unlikely that a BR would collude. They have no reason to.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago

I don’t understand how being in an interview loop would tell you whether hire-to-fire is occurring. If a manager wanted to hire someone on their team with the intent of firing them, they would hire someone who passed the ordinary interview process. They wouldn’t attach a note to the candidate’s file saying “we don’t really need to interview this one, we’re just going to fire them.” There would be a normal paper trail and nobody other than the manager would know that about the plan.

koheripbal 5y ago
The source article actually provides no evidence of "hire-to-fire" practices. It simply states that there is a target URA of 6% and that's it. The article posted here is pure speculation. ...and having worked for other large companies, I've seen similar metrics being tracked. It doesn't mean any of them are hiring just to fire people. Frankly, I've noticed a LOT of poorly written anti-Amazon articles around, and I'm not clear if there's some effort to undermine the company. Is Amazon a political organization?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  I was personally told by a former manager who used to work at Amazon that he hired to fire. He hated that the company forced him to fire good people and left.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    A guy supposedly tells another guy that some highly weird thing that makes no sense at all is common at their company. This is how we learned about Enron, so sure, let's admit the evidence. But also, this is how 99% of BS spreads across the internet, so whenever possible let's please use more than just anecdotal evidence from an anonymous account. If your friend has a story to tell, please direct them appropriately - we all know that the NYT would love to tear Amazon a new one. But please recognize just how weak your argument sounds as of right now.
    - 5y ago

bestcoder69 5y ago

Don’t see how any of it’s untrue. You just interpreted this in a way that would be untrue. Rather than “lower the bar” an HM can just request 1 more headcount for SDE1 than they truly need.

aerosmile 5y ago

So the core thesis of the article is fundamentally flawed, since the decision maker for hiring is not the same person who decides on firing. In other words, Inc. is perpetrating a lie, along with all the other publishers who jumped on this bandwagon. That's fine, we all make mistakes. But here's the interesting part: Inc. has a perverse incentive not to be too diligent in their reporting, because if they look too deep underneath the carpet, they could come across the truth that the OP shared. Once you learn how things really work, you can't spread your BS anymore because you can be sued for libel. But if you just pick up someone else's lie and expand on it without bothering to verify the fundamental thesis, you're 100% covered. Inc. was careful to start their reporting with: 1) hey look, we're linking to someone else who said this before us 2) and please note, there's the obligatory "appears--at least on the surface" statement, so if this comes back to bite us, we told you you shouldn't have believed us in the first place. Here's your startup idea: find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism, which is becoming prevalent and will only continue to grow in intensity and harmfulness. PS: I get it, you hate Amazon. So do I. Try to think for yourself for a minute and let's engage in this conversation as if we were talking about your favorite high school teacher who just had their career destroyed because some dude needed to get a few extra pageviews.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zdragnar 5y ago
> find a way to hold journalists accountable even when they operate within the legal grey area of journalism Step one: treat any article that quotes anonymous sources with deep skepticism. The sheer number of retractions and stories that turn out to be blatantly false (especially in the realm of politics) has become absurd in the past few years. No startup needed, just some (un)common sense.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  That works great in theory. But look at all the comments here. Hundreds of people posted comments, and thousands read them within a few hours. A few months from now, SEO will ensure that this page will have been visited by a few million people googling "Amazon hire to fire." The majority of comments doesn't start with "hey guys, this is obviously all just fake BS," and instead you see a lot of hatred being pointed at Amazon. And this is just HN, which is going to have smarter people than any other place reporting on this topic. So, no, the suggestion you made is not a workable solution and we need a better one.

mghd23145 5y ago

> Amazon, it is not possible for a hiring manager to hire people they plan to fire. The choice is not theirs. Speakig as someone who is an interviewer, your point means nothing. The interview process is tailored to get people in, but it's totally independent of the decisions to decimate teams. Where managers step in is in the company's yearly performance review process, and those tend to be brutal. unlike the hiring process, that has higher-ups (L7 and up) involved in deciding who performed according to the manager's expectations. > How? It's not their choice. The choice of who gets in is irrelevant. It's the choice of who gets out that matters. The hiring process gets bodies on desks, and afterwards managers decimate them. Getting the orange badge is a feat, and I've been to meetings where orange badges were quite blunt in stating new hires they were in the company when blue badges get in, and they will stay in the company when said blue badges get out. This is not new to anyone working in the company. What's the average tenure at Amazon? Less than two years?

erehweb 5y ago
What's an orange / blue badge?
- libria 5y ago
  I think he's referring to tenure, blue -> 0-5 yrs FTE, orange 5-10 yrs FTE
- tyuqfromhere 5y ago
  In this context, it refers to the tenure of the Amazonian. Full time employees that are <5 years tenure have a badge with a blue border, those with 5-10 years tenure have an orangeish border, 10-15 have a red border, etc... Orange/red badges are typically a big deal because it is very rare for people to last at Amazon past even 2-3 years, nevermind 5 years.
  - johnqpub 5y ago
    People need to get out of these terrible orgs. In mine, I'd estimate >50% get to 5. The average tenure is a lot lower because the org has grown from ~15 to ~70 people in the past 5 years.

slumdev 5y ago

Your interview process is a wreck, anyway. It optimizes for people who spend a month or two grinding leetcode and rehearsing their Leadership Principle stories. If you think that this effort is demonstrative of their ability to translate needs into working code and then deliver it, I have a bridge to sell you. I don't think it would be difficult for an experienced hiring manager to identify someone who's well-rehearsed but otherwise incapable and then hire that person specifically in order to fire him later.

bestcoder69 5y ago

Primary target of PIPs are college hires, and Amazon hires them via online assessment and a phone call verification.

trunnell 5y ago

Wow. The hiring manager doesn't get to make the final decision? I make sure that managers reporting to me always make the final decision on hiring (and firing) for their teams. That makes it more fair to hold them accountable for their team, because it's the team they chose. Moving the final decision to someone else, like a "bar raiser," seems fraught with misaligned incentives. Are bar raisers somehow held accountable for their hiring decisions?

ajb 5y ago
I would assume that the Bar Raiser can say 'No' when the HM says 'yes', but not vice versa. So the HM would choose their own team. But it would be true that the Bar Raiser can't be held to account, since you will rarely if ever find out that they made a bad call.
sib 5y ago
Well... I'm not sure that it's exactly like that, at least when I was there. The bar raiser can say "no" even if the HM says "yes," but I never heard of it going the other way (where hypothetically the HM would say "no" and the bar raiser "overrule" the HM.) And in hundreds of interviews there, I never experienced a situation in which it was as black and white as the above would make it seem. There were times, of course, when there was a difference of opinion, but it's on the people in the room to debate and convince each other based on logic and data - a bar raiser is not simply going to walk in and put his/her foot down and say "no" to a team that is otherwise saying "yes" without pretty detailed discussion and reasoning.
- trunnell 5y ago
  That makes more sense. So the bar raiser is there to nudge people toward better hires, but generally isn't overruling the HM?
  - sib 5y ago
    Right. (When push comes to shove, the bar raiser could overrule, but everyone would rather it not have to get to that point...)

walkedaway 5y ago

> the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision To be pedantic, the HM makes the hire-or-not decision, the BR can veto a hire decision. BR cannot make a hire decision.

variaga 5y ago
I'd describe it as "they both have a veto" - BR and HM must both say "yes" for the hire to happen.

tyuqfromhere 5y ago

You're speaking from a position of how the process is supposed to work, but not from how it actually does work. I think you seriously underestimate how much power an HM can have in the process if they have a little bit of experience. In practice, the HM absolutely does make the decision. If the candidate is seriously "below the bar", then the BR might strongly assert that they will not be hired. But in reality, most BRs do not actually uphold a very high bar. The BR's main function is to act as a facilitator during the debriefs, but if the HR feels strongly one way or another, the BR will almost always back up the HM. If an HM wants to hire someone just so they can fire them, all they have to do is find a mediocre candidate that a BR will not feel strongly about, and then during the debrief they just say that they know the needs of their team better than the BR does, and the BR will say "ok, I'll go along with your decision". It's as easy as that. This is especially so on teams that use the same BR over and over - hiring teams can actually influence which BR they use for loops, so if they find one that consistently disagrees with the HM, they can simply just find a new BR that is more agreeable.

grumple 5y ago

Let's say you're perfectly happy with your team of 9, but you have to fire 10% of people every year. It doesn't matter who you hire for that 10th spot. It doesn't matter who makes the decision. You're getting a 10th person, of any caliber, to get rid of them. You'll make open recs and add more people to the team when you don't need more people, just so you can keep your staff. As a hiring engineer, this is exactly the sort of optimization I would make if I were compelled to terminate a portion of my team regularly (really, as a principal, I'd just tell whoever was making the rule to go to hell). We'd constantly be overstaffed so I can let someone go without it hurting my team.

vikiomega9 5y ago

I work for AWS and the concept of Bar Raisers sits in a weird grey area. There are plenty of decent candidates who pass the bar but we do stack ranking for the year end review. So they can hire at headcount and end up having to fire anyway. If you end up with two hires that are roughly the same the stack rank takes care of it.

mcguire 5y ago

One question: who makes the decision of how many to hire? You are a manager. You need five people on your team. You hire eight, because you are expected to lose three in the next two years. If three of them leave, fine. If three of them are incompetent, great! (You get your URA and you have evidence your Bar Raiser is an idiot.) If the interview loop worked perfectly, all eight are great. But you still have to boot three of them.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

I don't think they meant hiring managers, but rather division or project managers, ones who decide that this division or project needs to hire more people (possibly with attrition goal at mind).

vl 5y ago

Oh, please. Softer version of this practice is well-known in tech industry since 2000s: when company demands perf curve from the manager, managers hire and keep low-performers on the team to satisfy the curve demand. Everyone who worked at Microsoft, Amazon or Walmart has seen this happening. Hire-to-fire is just logical extension of this practice. It doesn’t really matter if it’s internal transfer or new hire.

thereare5lights 5y ago

All this means is that they cannot hire shitty people. It doesn't mean that they can't hire people to fire them. They could very well still be hiring people just to fire them because they care more about the people they already have or just to give themselves more choices to fire.

northern-lights 5y ago

> When we've all had our time with the candidate, we meet back up to discuss. And at the end, the Bar Raiser- not the HM- makes the decision. Either you haven't been part of the panel in a while or you haven't worked for Amazon. BR's responsibility is not to make the sole decision but help the panel achieve consensus. This is very clear in the interview training.

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ctvo 5y ago

I can only speak for software engineering: Hiring is extremely difficult and time intensive. I have a ~10% hire rate in over 500 industry interviews conducted. These were at large tech companies so they included 5+ people spending 3+ hours each. It’s not worth the time to fabricate head count to begin hiring, then fire a qualified person. We assume Amazon is cutthroat and grades on delivery. Imagine doing this sham while doing your normal job.

cryptische 5y ago

Managers generally overrule other's opinions by giving promise of personally coaching the new hire to make them meet the bar. In most cases such people are put on coaching plan, and thereafter fired. URA quota is an open secret at Amazon, and some employee appreciate the practice of hire to fire, as it saves their own employment. That in turn ensures that objection to bad hire is non existent.

hiyer 5y ago

It's possible for the hiring manager to also be the bar-raiser, especially at senior levels like SDE3 and above. I have personally seen this happen. Having said that, I doubt that specific people are hired to be fired. I would consider it more likely that if a manager needs X people, he would try to keep the team strength at X + delta, so someone can be fired when required. Edit: formatting