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0 pointsmabbo5y ago0 comments

You must not have spent long at Amazon.

My original comment was 100% based on my experience as a developer at Amazon.

0 comments

I did, across different roles in two well known teams. As I said, there are exceptions, and the hiring bar has been dropping a lot in the recent years.

Aeolun5y ago

Well, they haven’t hired me yet, so either I’m terrible, or the hiring bar is just completely arbitrary.

ex_amazon_sde5y ago

In all large companies the people involved in an interview are a tiny fraction of the whole workforce.

Most of the time it's people from the team that is hiring and one or two "guests" from other teams (but usually working in the same building).

Managers also have plenty of power to influence the decision, therefore keeping a very uniform hiring bar is really difficult. (But no, it's not "completely arbitrary")

Also, I wrote that the bar dropped a lot, to the point of shifting all employees level up by one, but this does not mean that the company hires 90% of the candidates.

If a team was hiring 1 candidate every 1000 screened resumes and now it's 1 in 100 it's a whopping 10x change... but that doesn't make you a terrible engineer!

Aeolun5y ago

Sorry, I was just trying to comment on how interviewing itself is an arbitrary crapshoot.

Say one slightly dubious thing and you torpedo your chances of the job. Write one slightly dubious thing on your CV, and it will be rejected without a second look.

While I’m confident that most of the people rejected for those reasons would be at least adequate at their job.

collyw5y ago

Lets face it hiring is just a shambles in this industry. 20 years in the industry I know how to write a reliable system that is easy to maintain. Getting kind of crap at the tests they give in interviews.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

ex_amazon_sde5y ago

I did, across different roles in two well known teams. As I said, there are exceptions, and the hiring bar has been dropping a lot in the recent years.

Aeolun5y ago

Well, they haven’t hired me yet, so either I’m terrible, or the hiring bar is just completely arbitrary.

ex_amazon_sde5y ago

In all large companies the people involved in an interview are a tiny fraction of the whole workforce.

Most of the time it's people from the team that is hiring and one or two "guests" from other teams (but usually working in the same building).

Managers also have plenty of power to influence the decision, therefore keeping a very uniform hiring bar is really difficult. (But no, it's not "completely arbitrary")

Also, I wrote that the bar dropped a lot, to the point of shifting all employees level up by one, but this does not mean that the company hires 90% of the candidates.

If a team was hiring 1 candidate every 1000 screened resumes and now it's 1 in 100 it's a whopping 10x change... but that doesn't make you a terrible engineer!

Aeolun5y ago

Sorry, I was just trying to comment on how interviewing itself is an arbitrary crapshoot.

Say one slightly dubious thing and you torpedo your chances of the job. Write one slightly dubious thing on your CV, and it will be rejected without a second look.

While I’m confident that most of the people rejected for those reasons would be at least adequate at their job.

collyw5y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse