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Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

"With a word, they can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the prospective employee's."

Ah good, giving some extreme power to someone otherwise completely un-involved in the hiring process. Why should Rachel in accounting get to veto Sara as an engineer?

"Sailesh Rachabathuni, who developed software for Kindle devices before leaving Amazon in 2012, says he once vetoed a candidate for a programming job because the candidate didn't know much about a specific programming language, a detail others missed."

Great! A game of software trivia! Could be relevant, could just be this person being a douche, hard to say.

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I came here to make that point.

I once worked where a startup where almost everyone in the 15 person tech side of the company would interview every candidate.

On the rare occasions that all of us thought a candidate was a hire (1 in 30 candidates maybe) then the owner of the company could and often would still veto them if he wasn't happy.

Once pretty much all of us agreed that a candidate was useless, but the owner overruled us and bought him in anyway.

I have to say that guy actually ended up being quite successful at the company, so maybe the owner was better at spotting talent and we should have just skipped the whole charade.

Alas, it was a very frustrating and arbitrary system to work under, both for us employees and the candidates.

I'm a SDE at Amazon, but I don't speak on the behalf of the company...

AFAIK, there are different Bar Raisers for different roles. For instance, a QAE Bar Raiser has no say whatsoever who gets hired for a SDE role, let alone someone from the Accounting Dept. vetoing a Engg. candidate (vice versa is also true).

I worked for 5 years at Amazon, and bar raisers were carefully selected for their ability to ask questions that probed much more deeply than this. I'm shocked that such a trivial detail would be used to disqualify someone by a bar raiser, and guess that it's more the result of faulty reporting than faulty interviewing. Not that mistakes aren't made (what interview process is perfect?), but this is hardly typical.

Pull the ladder up after you climbed it.

Exactly.

Why hire someone into the company who might end up competing against you?

The veto is a gift for Machiavellians lurking in the officefor

It doesn't work that way. The whole idea of the Bar Raiser (this should be evident from the name) is that we want to raise the expectations for a particular level or job position over time. The goal is to keep improving the quality of our hires at a given level over time.

The goal is clear, but how do you motivate "bar raisers" to work against themselves? If they hire smarter people than themselves they will be made obsolete. If you are not smart enough to see that you will be replaced by someone who will and the next iteration will correct the problem. It's a system that always converges to a "shrinking, but reasonable and politically correct cap on the performance".

To address that, as the article mentions - Bar raisers interview in another part of the company. They can't bar raise for their own team.

And in a 110k employee company, to think one extra hire will obsolete you is extreme paranoia. You would rather hire smart folks and increase the company value.

The negative selection rule applies transitively. It's not just one extra hire, these bar raisers hire 100s of people. Increasing the company value matters only if you own a stake in it that is big enough to offset the risk. And last but not least, in the context of software engineering and monekysphere(location) the population drops to less than a 1-2K people, not 110K.

It's a double-edged sword, if you hire smart people but demand them to act stupid, they will implode the company.

The goal of No Child Left Behind was to raise the standards of schools over time.

What ended up happening (some might say "as intended") was unrealistic expectations used to cut funding for schools that didn't kowtow to the state/federal rules and politicians.

The concept of a constantly increased expectations needs to be tethered to reality or it becomes a ripe condition for abuse (see stacked ranking).

Or hiring people who you know will get stacked ranked out to protect your position.

Rung Raisers?

That's what it is like already. Except instead of trivia, it is the same recycled data structures and algorithms questions, with some specific questions about topics on one's resume.

IMHO the hiring process will change a lot in the next few years.

I'm sure there's context missing in that quote. Bar Raisers would not veto someone just because they didn't know specific things about a programming language ... unless they claim to be masters of a certain language.

I was about to say the same thing. The only reason that a bar raiser would ask the question would be if the applicant claimed to have the knowledge. If your resume claims a certain number of years of experience with a language, and you are asked how well you know it, you'd better be very confident before you say that you are an expert.

One of my favorite red flags. If you put it on the resume and I ask about it, and you've never used it, gong time. Personally I redact my resume every year from stuff I've done long ago. If you're not proficient, don't advertise it.

Bar raisers have a reputation bringing on super stars at the company. They track everything. I worked for Amazon for awhile.

It depends on which part of the Amazon organisation.

The ones in Amazon Instant Video in London are useless. Particularly in identifying suitable candidates for the AIV Retail Website stack. They've burned out their hiring credibility in London to the point that the three hires to London in 2013 have been from East Europe. Plus churning and burning through university interns. It's been a desperate mess for a good two years now.

I hear positive things about the AWS hiring process.

It's possibly more than trivia. I expect a candidate to be able to have a conversation about whatever language they know best and have used the most. They should be able to speak about that language's strengths and limitations and mitigation strategies. If a candidate couldn't talk about languages they claimed to use, that would be a huge red flag for me.

If the interviewer is just throwing out questions about keywords and language implementation that are irrelevant to the candidate and the position, that counts as trivia. It's hard to say from the quote whether or not it was a trivial question.

I am an SDE with Amazon having worked across AWS and the retail side. I have done over a hundred interviews in the past 2 years for SDE loops. Each of these involved a debrief led by bar raisers. I have yet to experience a "veto" by a bar raiser as outlined in this article. As far as I have experienced, the bar raisers' questions are not typically any more complicated or harsher than other interviewers. The main role of the bar raiser is in fact during the debrief, i.e. after the interviewee has completed the interviews.

At Amazon candidates are evaluated on an array of competencies. In addition to technical competencies, particular attention is paid to Amazon's leadership principles (the fact that these are displayed right at the careers page: http://www.amazon.com/b?node=239365011 should highlight how important these are in the culture). I love that culture-fit and leadership qualities play as big a part as technical abilities in Amazon's decision making process unlike what I have seen in some of the other companies people mention in the same breath as Amazon. In my experience a good bar raiser acts as an unbiased advocate for the greater good of the company. As a result, they are NOT from the same team with the open position (this doesn't mean that an accountant is judging an engineering candidate or vice-versa mind you, they just happen to be from a different org) which allows them to look-past the immediate need the team might have which could blind them to some of the obvious flaws in the candidate. In some ways they are also acting on behalf of the candidate by ensuring the match works both ways. I have seen several situations where the bar raiser determined that the "team" or the "role" were poorer fit for the candidate than the other way around and went out of their way to facilitate a correction.

That said, there is no question that good bar raisers are just as, if not harder to come by than good employees! It is a thankless, demanding assignment to take. I have met some absolutely amazing bar raisers and some others that are just darn right atrocious. Considering how quickly Amazon is growing, they definitely need more of them but that risks damage through poorer ones entering the system.

Don't trust reporting to be precise and clear in every detail.

I worked at Amazon. They don't put accountants as bar raisers on engineering loops. There is a bit more specificity than that.

Regarding “didn't know much about a specific programming language”, I would guess that the candidate represented himself as fluent in that language, or had worked in it for many years. A good bar raiser doesn't play trivia.

Nah 99% chance Mr Rachabathuni is a douche

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