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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

Lowers/raises the bar. As part of interview feedback an interviewer is supposed to rate the interviewee as raises/meets/lowers.

Typically, just one lowers in an a loop of 6 interviews is sufficient to reject. On the other hand, a loop with all "meets" isn't a sufficient either. It needs about 3-4 "raises" to overcome just one "lowers". With two "lowers" the candidate won't even make it to the debrief or worse the loop will be cut-short.

The bar-raiser (it's their job) are expected to specifically look for candidates who raise the bar. Raising the bar == better than 50% of "employees" (not job seekers) at their level. The rationale, when the bar-raiser program was created, was that the collective competency in a corporation should increase as more employees are inducted.

Source: I was a bar-raiser at Amazon; 400+ interviews, 300+ as bar-raiser, conducted hiring boot camp, bar-raiser trainings, trained bar-raisers.

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How does the organization gauge its success in bar-raising? Did you guys just progressively hire less people over time?

Companies tend to keep track of the onsite success to failure ratio and then if it's too low examine if the bar raising is too aggressive.

Which ends up going in the direction of meetings like "Should we standardize on what questions we are asking in interviews?" or "Should we standardize what pass means or fail means for a particular problem?"

Bar-raiser program didn't have a feedback loop to track its effectiveness. Bar raisers periodically met to discuss topics related to hiring and increasing interview bandwidth but we didn't evaluate the process as such.

That said, the program (like any such program I guess) didn't scale well with the immense pressure on increasing the head-count which in itself was a result of delivering more. Hiring managers and recruiters (who are incentivised to hire more) would rig up interview loops in a way to get their candidates through.

The program itself came under increasing scrutiny (I guess for the right reasons) as being too restrictive. I distinctly remember period between 2008-2012 they hired at a blistering pace, all over the world. In fact in Seattle when they moved into SLU campus the buildings went from empty to nearly 100% occupancy in a matter of year or so. You could even see it based on the number of product launches from 2012 onwards (AWS, the hardware products, new country launches etc.,).

And now Amazon is such a behemoth that it doesn't even make sense to speak about it or analyse it as a single entity anymore. My prediction is in 5-8 years it'll be broken up into at least three companies under Amazon as a holding corporation --- cloud, retail, and consumer devices.

My judgment of Amazon is tainted badly by a bad apple we couldn't fire soon enough - I had the unsavory role to collect evidence for failing the PIP that would inevitably happen. Week after person was let go, he was at Amazon in a pretty good division.

I keep wondering how they hired this person - never in a million years would they have passed a regular hiring chain even with fizzbuzz type questions. Wonder if they had someone stand in for the interviews.

It's often been mentioned that interviewing skills is different from actual work skills. Could be that he's an interviewing wiz but a poor day to day engineer?

Netflix is well known for firing people that don't pull their weight with far more ease than most companies. But a friend who works there tells me there's still people there that perform poorly but somehow managed to get both hired and stay on.

Not unusual at all. Interviews are team specific and people cheat them all the time if they know people on the team. Bar raiser system doesn't work.

> Bar-raiser program didn't have a feedback loop to track its effectiveness

Which itself is a Bar-lowerer.

What about diversity candidates, is the "bar" lower for them? Genuinely curious.

The general approach to dealing with low diversity in a team seems to be to increase the percentage of phone screens being allotted to diversity candidates (which on the other hand reduces the number of non-diversity applicants that get a phone screen).

And not actually lowering the bar during an interview / hiring committee meeting.

If you select for something irrelevant lika race you ofcourse automatically lower the bar on average (and raise the bar for the discriminated race)

While I was there, increasing diversity wasn't a priority for them. Now that I think about it, I don't remember diversity even as a discussion topic let alone efforts to address it.

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