4 ms·

> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview proce

> If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.

steveBK123 3y ago
Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?
- mrbgty 3y ago
  Yes. Difficult doesn't mean good.
- astura 3y ago
  Sure, I've seen plenty of very capable people put very little to no effort into their work.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    If Amazon's only management stick is to mark 30% underperforms & cull 6% every year, then they need to send their managers to manager school.
    - marcus0x62 3y ago
      Their stated goal is for each person they hire on a team to be better than 50% of their peers. For a company that professes to think a lot about the long term, I'd suggest they need to go to math school before they go to manager school.
      - geodel 3y ago
        Well you are right. But reality here is company is printing boat load of money with their cloud infra monopoly. So what to do? Blabber non sensical bullshit that no one will question because again everyone is making money and if they are so smart to challenge leadership dictates why wouldn't they just leave and apply their ideas some place else that needs them.
    - groby_b 3y ago
      This is not on the managers. This is HR gone wild. Most managers close to the frontline understand perfectly well what an incredibly stupid idea this is.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Do you realize how relatively easy it is for a CS grad with time and motivation to “grind leetCode” enough to pass an interview at Amazon? I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    The problem is that forced attrition doesn't create a dynamic, competitive environment full of go-getters. It creates an environment full of treacherous bums who work as little as possible, and spend all of their efforts making sure they look good and don't take the blame for any failures. You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lose ground to Microsoft in cloud computing. It's pathetic.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      When you have the scale of Amazon, you don’t need a lot of go getters. Just a relatively few and a lot of grunts. One CS leetCode grinder at the L5 level is replaceable with another.
      - geodel 3y ago
        I think this is really important point. Somehow lot of folks are missing it. As if each engineer is responsible for launching a new Amazon service every year. I have heard and met many current Amazon software engineer. Most of their job description sound rather crappy routine work even for me earning 1/3rd salary of Amazon. I surmise large number of engineers there are just collecting bounty on Amazon monopoly on cloud infra. Their skill and work is not more challenging or interesting than hundreds of thousand engineers at 20-30% income of Amazon in boring enterprise IT shop.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        That’s not just true of engineers. It took years for a friend who worked there as an L6 in the finance department for Amazon Retail to match his compensation after he left and it took him becoming a director at a manufacturing company. Another former coworker who was a project manager (engagement manager) got maybe 60% of their compensation and is doing more work. Myself personally, I was an L5 at AWS and now I’m doing at least L6 level work and I’m still making 15% less than I was making at Amazon. It’s going to take a couple of years at the company I’m at now and building out an entire specialty practice - L7 level work - to get to my L5 compensation. I have a roadmap I designed with my manager to do it and it’s a straightforward process, it’s just going to take time. I’m excited about doing it. It’s the scope/impact level of work I did to get into AWS on a much smaller scale at a startup.
- IKantRead 3y ago
  Of all the ex-FAANG people I've worked with, I've found the ex-Amazon ones to be, by a wide margin, the least impressive group. I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've worked with have tended to be great engineers and very sharp people. So, at least from that anecdote, there does seem to be a difference in each of these hiring filters.
- leetcode5ucks07 3y ago
  I can tell you Indian new graduates interview very well. They grind years on these DSA puzzles. But have very little engineering knowledge or skill in general. It's all about gaming the system here. I have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume, by feeding the job description to ChatGPT and let it come up with a resume. Yet, there's not much influential software coming out of India, where leetcode hards for graduates are the norm, but these graduates don't understand what a virtual machine is. On the other hand I have seen prolific open source contributors in the same age bracket (they contributed not to some web design project, but very much used cloud / system software) struggling to get a job, because they didn't do enough "DSA". I am not saying people of my country are dumb. Quite the contrary. I am saying when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure. That's the case with leetcode problems. It selects for people who can grind through it. Not the people who have other interesting things to do.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume > prolific open source contributors...struggling to get a job The market selects the best, if it's best at lying, who are we to tell the invisible hand that it's wrong? /s I've seen environments where a certain amount of manipulating the truth is expected. Individuals eventually figure out what's expected of them. You know it's not the truth, they know it's not the truth, and you know they know.
- Arainach 3y ago
  Obviously this depends on the company, but after 15 years at multiple FAANG, I'm leaning towards no. It might have been true at 2010-era Microsoft but the painful transition where they fired all the SDETs got rid of most of the people who "made it through" and after that I never felt this to be the case. Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those who made it through were absolutely qualified and great to work with. There certainly wasn't 30% to cull. In my opinion there wasn't even enough people to fill the percentage quota that need to be given ratings lower than satisfactory - before the layoffs. After them, the fact that they're still enforcing these quotas on teams is absurd cruelty that kills morale.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I mean looking at Googles abysmal track record compared to its peers when it comes to creating and sustaining new products and product categories over the last two decades is not exactly an argument for their hiring process.
    - Arainach 3y ago
      The decision to sustain products is at the executive level, not the ground level.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        It’s also part of the promotion culture where no one shows “impact” by sustaining an existing project.
        Arainach 3y ago
        Sure, but is hiring people smart enough to identify and follow incentives a flaw in hiring or ground level employee capability or a management flaw?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  That's an interesting question camouflaged as a boring question. The assumption is that though interview processes are acknowledged as imperfect, they're largely considered to measure something like productivity or worker value. Under that assumption, then it should be exceedingly difficult to "cheat" the interviews such that a person could do great at an interview, and be of low "worker value". Not impossible, but difficult. And I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass here, but if we were to do a survey here on HN, the most likely consensus on how difficult that is would be something like "it's actually more difficult to fake it in the interview than to just be good enough at what you say you're good at". Imagine if you were one of the fastest sprinters in the world, but to be "hired on" to the Olympic team they decided to interview you for it. Sure, they'd probably ask in the interview what your latest 100M times were, stuff like that, but after the interview they'd all talk privately about whether or not you were a good "culture fit", and whether your smile was sincere or fake, whether you were too nervous or smooth and a "real go-getter". In such an environment, the Olympic team might well have 30% of its members that could be safely culled. The only jobs interviewing is even a good process for are those jobs where the actual work itself resembles interviewing... sales positions, PR, being the "public face" of an organization (news anchors, I dunno). The reason we use interviewing for technology jobs is because that's what the big bosses know works for their jobs, a CEO is the public face of the organization.

steveBK123 3y ago

Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?

mrbgty 3y ago
Yes. Difficult doesn't mean good.
astura 3y ago
Sure, I've seen plenty of very capable people put very little to no effort into their work.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  If Amazon's only management stick is to mark 30% underperforms & cull 6% every year, then they need to send their managers to manager school.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    Their stated goal is for each person they hire on a team to be better than 50% of their peers. For a company that professes to think a lot about the long term, I'd suggest they need to go to math school before they go to manager school.
    - geodel 3y ago
      Well you are right. But reality here is company is printing boat load of money with their cloud infra monopoly. So what to do? Blabber non sensical bullshit that no one will question because again everyone is making money and if they are so smart to challenge leadership dictates why wouldn't they just leave and apply their ideas some place else that needs them.
  - groby_b 3y ago
    This is not on the managers. This is HR gone wild. Most managers close to the frontline understand perfectly well what an incredibly stupid idea this is.
scarface_74 3y ago
Do you realize how relatively easy it is for a CS grad with time and motivation to “grind leetCode” enough to pass an interview at Amazon? I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  The problem is that forced attrition doesn't create a dynamic, competitive environment full of go-getters. It creates an environment full of treacherous bums who work as little as possible, and spend all of their efforts making sure they look good and don't take the blame for any failures. You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lose ground to Microsoft in cloud computing. It's pathetic.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    When you have the scale of Amazon, you don’t need a lot of go getters. Just a relatively few and a lot of grunts. One CS leetCode grinder at the L5 level is replaceable with another.
    - geodel 3y ago
      I think this is really important point. Somehow lot of folks are missing it. As if each engineer is responsible for launching a new Amazon service every year. I have heard and met many current Amazon software engineer. Most of their job description sound rather crappy routine work even for me earning 1/3rd salary of Amazon. I surmise large number of engineers there are just collecting bounty on Amazon monopoly on cloud infra. Their skill and work is not more challenging or interesting than hundreds of thousand engineers at 20-30% income of Amazon in boring enterprise IT shop.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        That’s not just true of engineers. It took years for a friend who worked there as an L6 in the finance department for Amazon Retail to match his compensation after he left and it took him becoming a director at a manufacturing company. Another former coworker who was a project manager (engagement manager) got maybe 60% of their compensation and is doing more work. Myself personally, I was an L5 at AWS and now I’m doing at least L6 level work and I’m still making 15% less than I was making at Amazon. It’s going to take a couple of years at the company I’m at now and building out an entire specialty practice - L7 level work - to get to my L5 compensation. I have a roadmap I designed with my manager to do it and it’s a straightforward process, it’s just going to take time. I’m excited about doing it. It’s the scope/impact level of work I did to get into AWS on a much smaller scale at a startup.
IKantRead 3y ago
Of all the ex-FAANG people I've worked with, I've found the ex-Amazon ones to be, by a wide margin, the least impressive group. I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've worked with have tended to be great engineers and very sharp people. So, at least from that anecdote, there does seem to be a difference in each of these hiring filters.
leetcode5ucks07 3y ago
I can tell you Indian new graduates interview very well. They grind years on these DSA puzzles. But have very little engineering knowledge or skill in general. It's all about gaming the system here. I have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume, by feeding the job description to ChatGPT and let it come up with a resume. Yet, there's not much influential software coming out of India, where leetcode hards for graduates are the norm, but these graduates don't understand what a virtual machine is. On the other hand I have seen prolific open source contributors in the same age bracket (they contributed not to some web design project, but very much used cloud / system software) struggling to get a job, because they didn't do enough "DSA". I am not saying people of my country are dumb. Quite the contrary. I am saying when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure. That's the case with leetcode problems. It selects for people who can grind through it. Not the people who have other interesting things to do.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume > prolific open source contributors...struggling to get a job The market selects the best, if it's best at lying, who are we to tell the invisible hand that it's wrong? /s I've seen environments where a certain amount of manipulating the truth is expected. Individuals eventually figure out what's expected of them. You know it's not the truth, they know it's not the truth, and you know they know.
Arainach 3y ago
Obviously this depends on the company, but after 15 years at multiple FAANG, I'm leaning towards no. It might have been true at 2010-era Microsoft but the painful transition where they fired all the SDETs got rid of most of the people who "made it through" and after that I never felt this to be the case. Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those who made it through were absolutely qualified and great to work with. There certainly wasn't 30% to cull. In my opinion there wasn't even enough people to fill the percentage quota that need to be given ratings lower than satisfactory - before the layoffs. After them, the fact that they're still enforcing these quotas on teams is absurd cruelty that kills morale.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I mean looking at Googles abysmal track record compared to its peers when it comes to creating and sustaining new products and product categories over the last two decades is not exactly an argument for their hiring process.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    The decision to sustain products is at the executive level, not the ground level.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      It’s also part of the promotion culture where no one shows “impact” by sustaining an existing project.
      - Arainach 3y ago
        Sure, but is hiring people smart enough to identify and follow incentives a flaw in hiring or ground level employee capability or a management flaw?
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
That's an interesting question camouflaged as a boring question. The assumption is that though interview processes are acknowledged as imperfect, they're largely considered to measure something like productivity or worker value. Under that assumption, then it should be exceedingly difficult to "cheat" the interviews such that a person could do great at an interview, and be of low "worker value". Not impossible, but difficult. And I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass here, but if we were to do a survey here on HN, the most likely consensus on how difficult that is would be something like "it's actually more difficult to fake it in the interview than to just be good enough at what you say you're good at". Imagine if you were one of the fastest sprinters in the world, but to be "hired on" to the Olympic team they decided to interview you for it. Sure, they'd probably ask in the interview what your latest 100M times were, stuff like that, but after the interview they'd all talk privately about whether or not you were a good "culture fit", and whether your smile was sincere or fake, whether you were too nervous or smooth and a "real go-getter". In such an environment, the Olympic team might well have 30% of its members that could be safely culled. The only jobs interviewing is even a good process for are those jobs where the actual work itself resembles interviewing... sales positions, PR, being the "public face" of an organization (news anchors, I dunno). The reason we use interviewing for technology jobs is because that's what the big bosses know works for their jobs, a CEO is the public face of the organization.