Hacker News Reader

Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

When I interviewed with AWS, half the loop interviews were with remote staff. I was shown to a videoconferencing room and asked to wait. There was a pile of VC equipment but it wasn't connected. With five minutes before we were due to start, I decided this was part of the interview and plugged stuff in myself, powered it on, and clicked through some boot-time screens, guessing at the right inputs. A few minutes later a call came in and the interviews themselves proceeded normally.

To this day I still don't know if it was a test.

View on HN

No it wasn't.

Source: I conducted +400 interviews for Amazon. We don't do weird or obscure tests. Your recruiter will explicitly tell you what to expect.

It sounds like a mistake.

The second part of the story is I got hired, but not for the job I was going for. Instead, they asked me to manage the whole team.

Note that this was in 2014 and outside of the US, so our experiences may vary.

As a hiring manager at AWS I conducted similarly many interviews, and can speak to a few things. Firstly, there was plenty of latitude for me to include additional factors in the process, as long as the core elements were present (screening + loop + bar raiser). Recruiters weren't always wonderful at candidate communication, especially when going beyond that baseline. Other HMs certainly included variations and additional steps, so this would not have been without precedent. Finally, this particular team were largely former CTOs and tech CEOs/founders, so there was a relatively high degree of eccentricity and wilfulness present; several of my loop interviews were with these particularly unruly ICs†.

So I could not so confidently rule it a mistake.

——

† Rather memorably, after a solid meeting of minds over the topic of establishing robust SRE practices within public-sector institutions, one such interviewer ran out of the meeting room to fetch me a copy of his favourite book on the topic. This is the only time I received a book for free from Amazon.

If it was a while ago things might have been different. Not sure if you are around anymore but there is a continuous push for standardization. There is also a big emphasis on candidate experience lately.

I also believe in adding a personal touch to the interview process, but I don't believe in mind games. To me this would fall in the same bucket as "let me mispronounce your name on purpose and see how you react" or "let's give the candidate the wrong directions and let them figure out the way". You could frame it the other way around, what if it goes wrong? at best you lose some valuable interview time and annoy the candidate, and doesn't tell you much about how good they will be at the job.

> weird or obscure tests.

I'm a bit relieved to hear this: one of the weirdest professional experiences I have ever had was at an AWS interview. I've often wondered which parts of that day were a psych test or simply human error.

Timing of the interview was shortly before the HQ2 announcement (2017 I think), and the interview was in the outskirts of DC. I was told specifically not to bring a phone, which I thought was odd, but I didn't think I'd need one for the day since I'd be on site. So, per the instructions, I left it in the hotel, walked to the site, and checked in at the front desk. Unfortunately, they texted me 15 minutes before the start time that the schedule had shifted 2h later. The front desk did not get the message. So I sat in the lobby, repeatedly checked in every so often, had polite conversations with a random assortment of people, drank some coffee, and waited. That was the best part of the day. Each part of the remainder of the actual interview process had a similar "this seems a bit off" feature.

That's unfortunate. The fact of the matter is that Amazon interviews thousands of engineers each month, so statistically there will be pretty bad experiences every now and then. I personally like to read candidates feedback every now and then and you can find some horror stories in there. Also unfortunately not everyone is a good interviewer and this can also impact your personal experience.

If you'd like to share what those "this seems off" situations where I'd love to hear that.

This is distant past for me, but I'll clarify two things: everyone that I encountered seemed quite sharp - it was a strong and interesting group. Next, my experience was personally unpleasant and parts of it still stick with me, but it was not horror-level. I also recognize it's a gigantic company, and chalk my day up to a bad match and statistical flukes.

When I left the building that day, due to the late start and shifted schedule, the office was basically empty. I made it a few blocks on my walk back to the hotel when a thunderstorm rolled in. Lacking a phone and the option to return to the building to find a person, I ran. Didn't make it. I actually had forgotten about this part until I reflected back on it this morning. It was a fitting end.

> We don't do weird or obscure tests.

I beg to differ. The one and only time I've interviewed for an engineering role at AWS, I was told to be successful I would need to memorise a list of "management principles" handed down by none other than Bezos himself, all of which were meaningless generic platitudes that could have easily been copy pasted from anywhere. And sure enough, they quizzed me on them quite thoroughly during the interview process.

Between that, the "Bar Raiser", the extremely long hiring process, and the people who interviewed me, I'd seen enough red flags to bail out before they'd sent me an offer.

I suppose you mean the leadership principles. Yes, that feels cult-ish, but is part of the company culture. I personally like part of them, but that's a topic of its own.

For the purpose of the interview, Leadership Principles are dressing for behavioral questions. Actually I think this reinforces my point: rather than generic behavioral rounds, you know which areas you'll be asked about. Also you shouldn't memorize them, but think about examples from your experience that match those.

I'm curious about your last sentence though. Long hiring process are exhausting and I understand a bad experience, but why were the Bar Raiser and the interviewers a red flag?

Not the grandparent, but I'm encountering this particular part of the AWS interview structure right now, and trying to decide whether to bother continuing.

The ask, AFAICT, seems to be for me to prepare a collection of glib little short stories I can recite on demand in response to a "tell me about a time when..." question from a small list of possibilities.

Certainly I can do this; however, I am applying for a role as an engineer, not an actor or a storyteller. It is unclear what useful information this kind of prepared storytelling could possibly convey, and it is unclear whether, if this kind of activity is what the position actually entails to any great extent, I would want the position.

I feel cynicism in your answer. I can still give you an honest answer to your question.

Behavioral questions are far from new and not unique to Amazon. They serve two purposes: first, as a cultural match, and second, as a performance predictor.

The thing about Leadership Principles in Amazon is that they are not just slogans on the wall. They play a role in your day to day work. Things like your performance review and promotion consider how you apply these LPs to an extent.

Does it sound terrible? I can relate. But what is the alternative? I believe culture is a property of organizations. If you don't explicitly set a culture, one will emerge on its own. I have worked for several companies, and I appreciate the LPs. At least I explicitly know what "rules" to operate under.

So what if you think LPs are dumb or you hate them? that's fine. That means you wouldn't like it here, so it saves both from a bad match.

Back to your point about the interview. What useful information does this convey? quite a lot actually.

First they act as a sanity check. If we ask about Earns Trust, actually we are doing sort of the Asshole Test from OP. We are trying to determine if you are a pain to work with, or if you can establish good relationships with people. With Learn and be Curious we are trying to determine if you are open to learn new things. If you actively refuse to learn and just want to do your thing, you will probably struggle here. Things change fast and most everyone needs to adapt to keep up.

Second, they act as a calibration for role and leveling. Say you are hiring for a senior engineer position, and interview a candidate with +10 years of experience. However all of the candidate's examples are very simple, such as implementing a small feature. Will this candidate thrive as a senior engineer in Amazon where they will have to lead several engineers in multi-team efforts? At the very least we can say we don't have enough evidence to judge.

Third, it turns out some of them are actually good on-the-job performance indicators. Amazon has an internal science team that runs experiments on hiring. One of their experiments determined that high scores in certain LPs correlate with good performance after hire.

So there you go. You might personally dislike behavioral questions, and that is fair. However there is plenty of evidence to back up their usefulness in making hiring decisions. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to work here or not.

I was explicitly told to memorise the principles and the recruiter quizzed me on them during the first screening interview. Good to know that's not the norm I guess, seems like a bizarre thing to do especially for a technical role.

Regarding bar raisers, I don't see why an unrelated and unqualified person from an unrelated team that the candidate isn't interviewing for should have any say, let alone the ability veto their entire application. There's no way to spin that to make it seem like a good idea - at best you're unnecessarily empowering someone who can't properly assess a candidate, and at worst you're saying to the other interviewers that they can't be trusted and need to be supervised. I can understand the need to ensure the quality/integrity of the hiring process, but that doesn't check-out as a motive when the bar raiser isn't typically someone who's qualified to assess the integrity of process.

Also the name itself is a red flag; "bar raising" sounds like it's going to be one of those jobs where just doing your job isn't enough and you're expected to "put in 110%" - which normally translates to unreasonable workloads, unreasonable expectations, and high levels of internal competition. Whether or not that's the case, I can't say but it's the impression that the name gives me.

On the interviewers; the recruiter was slow to respond, disinterested, and rude. The person who I believe was the hiring manager was on his phone during the interview and didn't really engage, and one of the other people involved would cut me off mid-sentence repeatedly. Overall with that + "bar raising" I left with the impression that this would be a toxic environment, and pulled my application (to which the recruiter never responded). FWIW this was all for a role in Sydney, I understand Amazon is very large and experiences will differ between regions.

It is impossible to know this for sure, especially at such a large company. It doesn't even have to actually be part of the official interview, it could have been something one of the interviewers decided to do unilaterally. OP will never really know.

Didn’t there used to be stories on HN about a particular VC backed company where first day at work you’d be met with all the parts of a desktop computer and you had to assemble it yourself.

Would be a good way (mua haa haa!) to ensure fewer candidates are interviewed after you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com