Hacker News Reader

Comment by ab8 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand what is wrong with hiring someone the interviewer likes. I can see there may be racism, misogyny etc at play here. But setting that aside for a second, if people like each other, all other problems can be solved much more easily.

View on HN

Because you end up hiring likeable rather than competent people. And you can’t just “set aside all that for a second”. You’ve made a bad hire, at the expense of hiring someone else who could have actually done the job.

also liking is usually "liking people like me" which is code for a lot of bias

Because liking someone doesn’t mean they can do the job. Just because you’re excited about a problem domain and someone else seems to also be excited doesn’t mean the can or will do the job well. They probe for past examples of you doing a job well because it’s a proxy for you doing a future job well. They acknowledge any interview process is imperfect but they also decided randomly pointing at resumes and saying “tell me about X” either doesn’t correlate or correlates negatively. This is in addition to the bias problem which was the other big reason they gave.

I mean, read between the lines. The company doesn't trust that the interviewers' intuition is good enough to beat their formal process.

(And they're probably right)

Well, you’ve also touched on one of the aspects of life at Amazon that isn’t one of the LPs: Mechanisms are better than intentions.

Good intentions fail at some point, even when people have the best of intentions. Being distracted. Trying to do too much. Whatever. Where possible it’s better to design the environment and system so that the right things occur (or are more likely to occur) irrespective of an individuals good intentions.

So yes, you’re right!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com