Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

>Not much real advice on the behavioral side, to the point that people often take trainings for behavioral interviews and memorize “leadership principles” and other nonsense.

This is what FAANG interview generally look for so why is it a surprise that potential hires focus on it? Amazon literally says that you need to highlight all the leadership principles in the stories you tell when answering behavioral questions. Granted, FAANG barely asks behavioral questions for senior engineers (and then it's like 90% project and bureaucracy management) much less junior engineers.

View on HN

Do you know why Amazon is focusing so much on the Leadership Principles questions, yet there seem to be so many horror stories from people who work there? I am genuinely curious why they don’t manage to filter out the jerks.

As I see it, the Amazon leadership principles are designed to select for jerks. Specifically jerks who make money. Just look at them. One or two out of fourteen indicate to not be a jerk (Earn Trust, maybe Hire and Develop the Best) while multiple other ones rewards you for being a jerk if you succeed (Disagree and Commit, Bias for Action, Insist on the Highest Standards, Are Right A Lot, Ownership, Deliver Results, etc.).

edit: Amazon's goal isn't to be a nice place to work, it's to make a lot of money and everything else is secondary to that. They are so far succeeding splendidly at that goal across multiple verticals so arguably their approach works. I wouldn't want to work there myself but you can't argue with results.

I think that you may be onto something there. I have noted that when I meet (many) ex-Amazon employees, a lot of them (especially on the business side) are not nice people to work with (backstabbing, destructive political games etc).

It's come to a point where I kinda assume that they are likely to screw me/other people if I don't know otherwise.

(Obviously this is a generalisation, I'm sure there are loads of really nice people at Amazon).

You should read the descriptions[1] of those leadership principles, not just the titles. They're not what you think.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit is specifically about NOT being a jerk who digs his heels in, and sabotages projects or decisions that they disagree with. Rather someone who is a team player and embraces the decisions of the group:

Are Right A Lot is about constantly questioning your own understanding and being CAPABLE of changing your mind. We literally interview for it by asking about a time your mind was changed on something important.

Ownership is about not saying "That's not my job". If there is some work to be done, and nobody's doing it, don't have a high and mighty attitude about it being beneath you. Just get it done. (e.g. Developers doing QA, Ops, Documentation, etc)

Bias For Action is about taking calculated risks.

Insist on the Highest Standards is the only one that I know jerks abuse.

[1] https://amazon.jobs/en/internal/principles

Are the names supposed to be ironic? Because what you said isn't the impression I got from reading them.

We have similar leadership principles with nicer names, although we don't use them to the point of bringing them up at meetings.

I recently looked at some of their hiring material, and one of the before after leadership showed a lot of bullshit in the after. The content was nearly the same, but it felt embellished in a way that left me feeling hollow. It was some oncall event, of which I’ve experienced dozens, and the second version just felt oddly misguided for the sake of saying the magic words the interviewer wanted to hear. The leadership principles seems to be reinforcing bullshit. We’ll tell you what we want to hear, and you’ll tell us what we want to hear. Do our principles line up? ‘Who cares? You told us what we wanted to hear.’ It’s effectively a jerk pass filter at that point.

Mind you, there’s some of this in all interviewing, but from some people I’ve talked to, Amazon seems to really love these leadership stories.

Amazon asks senior engineers MORE leadership/behavioural questions.

But no, you don't need to memorize the leadership principles themselves, and your individual stories can't highlight ALL the leadership principles. Some of them are deliberately in conflict with another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com