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Comment by armon | Hacker News Reader

I've worked at Amazon, both in the warehouse management division as well as AWS, and the whole "bar raiser" phenomenon is mostly just marketing fluff. There are a handful of engineers who don't mind interviewing (or at least hate it less than most), and they get picked often to be part of the interview circuit. After some number of interviews, you are considered one of the mystical "bar raisers". However, in my experience, they are not any different from other interviewers. More experienced sure, but the difficulty of questions is highly variable, and honestly there isn't much culture at Amazon to worry about culture fit.

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Bar Raisers do go through a round of training every year or so. Regular interviewers themselves are encouraged to attend a program called 'Making Great Hiring Decisions' every once a year or so.

AFA engg roles are concerned... because the interview process is distributed, and because Amazon is growing too big too fast, there is a high chance that a lot of 'B' candidates get hired, but the general consensus is that those 'B' candidates can't survive the break-neck pace of innovation and that they'd generally not be able to match up, let alone keep up with other performers and do the work that's expected of them exceptionally well. Since promotions are merit-based, and due to the stack-ranking employed by Amazon to rank the enggs, things only get diff for 'B' candidates.

> ... the general consensus is that those 'B' candidates can't survive the break-neck pace of innovation ...

Judging by the stream of Kindle regressions, Amazon could use a bunch of slow, reliable engineers grinding out the innovations of the 80s.

"but the general consensus is that those 'B' candidates can't survive the break-neck pace of innovation and that they'd generally not be able to match up, let alone keep up with other performers and do the work that's expected of them exceptionally well. Since promotions are merit-based, and due to the stack-ranking employed by Amazon to rank the enggs, things only get diff for 'B' candidates."

This is probably completely wrong , unless all of your B candidates are being hired at very low levels only, and none of them ever get to participate in the promotion process.

Additionally, most tech companies are really bad at dealing with low performers in general (they tend to stay around too long).

In any case, my sources are completely empirical, having managed large numbers of people at a number of tech companies (and thus watching things like what happens to B candidates during cross-organization score calibrations, etc), as well as mentoring and helping managers with some of these issues.

I'd love to be wrong, but I have yet to see a company where the hiring of B candidates did not have significantly more impact that was expected.

Can you compare it to any of the other places you've worked to give some perspective to your comparison? Like "isn't much culture" compared to working at IBM or "isn't much culture" compared to Google/Zappos/RedGate?

I found there was a culture of constant overtime and firefighting. I also found they made a point of letting people know they were replaceable when they came onboard.

It's a big company though - my experience at other large corporations was that this sort of thing varies wildly from team to team.

The only other "culture" at Amazon was the constant cult-like references to a set of principles - people would actually talk about "bias for action", "frugality" and whatever in their normal daily conversations. It was kind of strange.

Happy to be working elsewhere now.

Amazon has a certain body of engineers that get into the official culture, get involved in broomball and wing-eating competitions and the like, but there are far more engineers who pretty much ignore the whole thing. As far as I could tell, the biggest piece of their culture is now a bunch of bitter engineers on internal mailing lists slowly working up the courage to leave for more enjoyable companies.

That said, different teams at Amazon were SUPER different. Some teams went out drinking together twice a week, some teams were super extraverted and into video games, but many other teams were a bunch of quiet, serious introverts. TEAM fit was super important. This of course absolutely sucks for you if you get roped into interviewing for one team and you're a much better culture fit for a different team. Too bad. Rejected.

IBM has a culture, it's just a boring culture. Pretty much a bad IBM culture fit is a person who's passionate about something in life. I'm sure there are parts of IBM that are different (it's huge), but I was just glad that I didn't have to wear a suit.

Google-like companies are pretty much the opposite of IBM. If you don't have some weird interest you're passionate about, you kind of stick out.

"Pretty much a bad IBM culture fit is a person who's passionate about something in life."

I had to pick out this quote because it's hilarious. :)

I've also worked in university research group settings, as well as a few startups in SV. I'd say there is a much stronger sense of the "whole" in these smaller groups, where everybody feels personally responsible for the success of projects. The smaller groups also take on the dynamics of the members, and the more eccentric personalities shape the culture and make the group a more fun and interesting place. You think of coworkers as friends first, coworkers second.

At Amazon, you don't get any of that. It is a very dry culture. It's clear that everybody is a coworker first. Eccentricity is largely looked down on (after all you need to worry about reviews and promotions, etc). Instead you get a sort of blah corporate culture, everything is grey, you talk about frugality as if somehow that's great. Rarely do you find super motivated engineers. Most people are fairly jaded, and aren't that committed to the success of projects. It's just a 9 to 5.

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