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> You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making

> You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl? > A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations Well first there is a huge difference between what Amazon says in public and what actually happens (like the Bullshit leadership principles especially the one about being the best employer). I can tell you from personal experience from actually working at Amazon that there were a lot of PowerPoint slides in internal meetings and especially when dealing with customers. I did my share of them. Second, instead of using an analogy, we can actually talk about resumes at Amazon and how the hiring process works. No one ever submits 8 page resumes, nor does anyone in the hiring loop bemoan the fact that we only got 2 page resumes. I was on both sides of the hiring process there. Never did they mention a word in the “Make Great Hiring Decisions” training program that they really like candidates to give them 8 page resumes. Do you really want to keep bringing Amazon up as an example to someone who actually worked there?

rramadass 2y ago
First see my other comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42885210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42885210 > So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl? Yes, if only to confirm veracity. The mantra is "Trust but Verify". The point of bringing up the Amazon example was to show a specific technique which works and has been adopted/validated by others. Amazon is a giant company and you were just one small cog in the wheel so pointing to your Amazon experience is not very convincing. This was not something imposed on every trivial meeting but for important strategic ones. There is good logic behind such a practice viz. helps to get the entire team on the same page w.r.t. some subject. Finally, i did not say that Amazon did the above for recruitment but suggested that recruiting in general would be far better if they (and everybody else) adopted such a logic.

rramadass 2y ago

First see my other comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42885210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42885210 > So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl? Yes, if only to confirm veracity. The mantra is "Trust but Verify". The point of bringing up the Amazon example was to show a specific technique which works and has been adopted/validated by others. Amazon is a giant company and you were just one small cog in the wheel so pointing to your Amazon experience is not very convincing. This was not something imposed on every trivial meeting but for important strategic ones. There is good logic behind such a practice viz. helps to get the entire team on the same page w.r.t. some subject. Finally, i did not say that Amazon did the above for recruitment but suggested that recruiting in general would be far better if they (and everybody else) adopted such a logic.