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5+ hours every day? That's astonishing! Were you interviewing for your own team, or for the company? Why did you put up with it? Were you the hiring manager? If

5+ hours every day? That's astonishing! Were you interviewing for your own team, or for the company? Why did you put up with it? Were you the hiring manager? If not, surely you could have insisted on a reduced interview load?

potatolicious 11y ago
I was only interviewing for open position on my own team, it was pretty insane - and I didn't end up putting up with it, it was the thing that finally convinced me to leave Amazon, though there were of course other reasons. To summarize the situation - we were a pretty scrappy team of 3 engineers that gradually took on more and more work as the scope of our work increased. There was an org-wide hiring freeze put in place because of the general doom-and-gloom right after 2008, so our demands to hire more people to cope with the increasing workload were repeatedly refused. Come ~2011, the company starts breathing again and finally lifts the hiring freeze, at which point 7 engineering positions suddenly opened on my team, and the 3 of us became nearly full-time interviewers. I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company. I'm not sure what the salient lesson is here - don't try to hire for 7 positions simultaneously with only 3 interviewers? Don't put a hiring freeze in place when there's obviously more work to be done? Something. There were also lots of problems with the recruitment and hiring process itself: - the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Our phone screen fail rate was easily >90%, and this not only was disappointing for the candidates but also kills your interviewers' productivity and morale. - Amazon has the "bar raiser" system. The standard on-site interview at Amazon was a full-day (6-8 hours) of back-to-back interviews, including lunch. One of these interviewers is a designated "bar raiser", who is usually a more senior, particularly trusted (or just political) person. This person can veto even an entire room full of "yes" decisions - and this happened with some regularity. It is absolutely devastating for team morale when an arbitrarily appointed person - who usually isn't even on your own team - vetoes a candidate that everyone on the team liked. This naturally resulted in us interviewing even more people, and more frustrated because we knew even if the candidate passed with flying colors there's still a chance they'll be caught by the bar-raiser's decimation and arbitrarily be rejected. That last part is the situation I'm in at my current place - I'm at a smaller company where one of the original high-level engineers insists on interviewing everyone. He's also a fan of gotcha brain teaser problems - so even well-qualified candidates who interview well with the rest of the team will get into a room with him and he'll veto the candidate when they fail his teaser-of-the-day.
- tjradcliffe 11y ago
  > I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company. Translation: Amazon suffered almost 100% knowledge loss on the systems your team were the exclusive owners of. The cost of this kind of thing is staggering and yet I've seen companies discount it again and again, over decades. It's insane. And as to your current gig: run. You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge. Get out, if you can. Nothing but good teams build good products, and if you can't hire a good team because you've got an idiot with a veto you'll be stuck building mediocre (at best) products. It's a pity there is no actual demand for quality software developers. If there was, this kind of nonsense would be abraded away by market forces with incredible speed. The fact that it persists demonstrates that hardly anyone really cares whether they get good developers or not.
  - keithpeter 11y ago
    "You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge." Perhaps the gentleman concerned is simply someone who helped start the company and hasn't quite understood the need for routine staff turnover in what is now a much larger organisation?
    - joesmo 11y ago
      That doesn't excuse his idiocy or the fact that he's sabotaging the hiring process. The original advice is spot on. You can't fix stupid people.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > - the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Adding my own personal anecdote to this: about 75% of the time, when I get contacted by recruiters for major West Coast companies[1] the positions they are scouting me for are inappropriate to my skill set, background, and interests. Sometimes wildly so. [1] Which is probably once every two months or so.

potatolicious 11y ago

I was only interviewing for open position on my own team, it was pretty insane - and I didn't end up putting up with it, it was the thing that finally convinced me to leave Amazon, though there were of course other reasons. To summarize the situation - we were a pretty scrappy team of 3 engineers that gradually took on more and more work as the scope of our work increased. There was an org-wide hiring freeze put in place because of the general doom-and-gloom right after 2008, so our demands to hire more people to cope with the increasing workload were repeatedly refused. Come ~2011, the company starts breathing again and finally lifts the hiring freeze, at which point 7 engineering positions suddenly opened on my team, and the 3 of us became nearly full-time interviewers. I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company. I'm not sure what the salient lesson is here - don't try to hire for 7 positions simultaneously with only 3 interviewers? Don't put a hiring freeze in place when there's obviously more work to be done? Something. There were also lots of problems with the recruitment and hiring process itself: - the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Our phone screen fail rate was easily >90%, and this not only was disappointing for the candidates but also kills your interviewers' productivity and morale. - Amazon has the "bar raiser" system. The standard on-site interview at Amazon was a full-day (6-8 hours) of back-to-back interviews, including lunch. One of these interviewers is a designated "bar raiser", who is usually a more senior, particularly trusted (or just political) person. This person can veto even an entire room full of "yes" decisions - and this happened with some regularity. It is absolutely devastating for team morale when an arbitrarily appointed person - who usually isn't even on your own team - vetoes a candidate that everyone on the team liked. This naturally resulted in us interviewing even more people, and more frustrated because we knew even if the candidate passed with flying colors there's still a chance they'll be caught by the bar-raiser's decimation and arbitrarily be rejected. That last part is the situation I'm in at my current place - I'm at a smaller company where one of the original high-level engineers insists on interviewing everyone. He's also a fan of gotcha brain teaser problems - so even well-qualified candidates who interview well with the rest of the team will get into a room with him and he'll veto the candidate when they fail his teaser-of-the-day.

tjradcliffe 11y ago
> I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company. Translation: Amazon suffered almost 100% knowledge loss on the systems your team were the exclusive owners of. The cost of this kind of thing is staggering and yet I've seen companies discount it again and again, over decades. It's insane. And as to your current gig: run. You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge. Get out, if you can. Nothing but good teams build good products, and if you can't hire a good team because you've got an idiot with a veto you'll be stuck building mediocre (at best) products. It's a pity there is no actual demand for quality software developers. If there was, this kind of nonsense would be abraded away by market forces with incredible speed. The fact that it persists demonstrates that hardly anyone really cares whether they get good developers or not.
- keithpeter 11y ago
  "You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge." Perhaps the gentleman concerned is simply someone who helped start the company and hasn't quite understood the need for routine staff turnover in what is now a much larger organisation?
  - joesmo 11y ago
    That doesn't excuse his idiocy or the fact that he's sabotaging the hiring process. The original advice is spot on. You can't fix stupid people.
vonmoltke 11y ago
> - the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Adding my own personal anecdote to this: about 75% of the time, when I get contacted by recruiters for major West Coast companies[1] the positions they are scouting me for are inappropriate to my skill set, background, and interests. Sometimes wildly so. [1] Which is probably once every two months or so.