I beg to differ. The one and only time I've interviewed for an engineering role at AWS, I was told to be successful I would need to memorise a list of "management principles" handed down by none other than Bezos himself, all of which were meaningless generic platitudes that could have easily been copy pasted from anywhere. And sure enough, they quizzed me on them quite thoroughly during the interview process.
Between that, the "Bar Raiser", the extremely long hiring process, and the people who interviewed me, I'd seen enough red flags to bail out before they'd sent me an offer.
For the purpose of the interview, Leadership Principles are dressing for behavioral questions. Actually I think this reinforces my point: rather than generic behavioral rounds, you know which areas you'll be asked about. Also you shouldn't memorize them, but think about examples from your experience that match those.
I'm curious about your last sentence though. Long hiring process are exhausting and I understand a bad experience, but why were the Bar Raiser and the interviewers a red flag?
The ask, AFAICT, seems to be for me to prepare a collection of glib little short stories I can recite on demand in response to a "tell me about a time when..." question from a small list of possibilities.
Certainly I can do this; however, I am applying for a role as an engineer, not an actor or a storyteller. It is unclear what useful information this kind of prepared storytelling could possibly convey, and it is unclear whether, if this kind of activity is what the position actually entails to any great extent, I would want the position.
Behavioral questions are far from new and not unique to Amazon. They serve two purposes: first, as a cultural match, and second, as a performance predictor.
The thing about Leadership Principles in Amazon is that they are not just slogans on the wall. They play a role in your day to day work. Things like your performance review and promotion consider how you apply these LPs to an extent.
Does it sound terrible? I can relate. But what is the alternative? I believe culture is a property of organizations. If you don't explicitly set a culture, one will emerge on its own. I have worked for several companies, and I appreciate the LPs. At least I explicitly know what "rules" to operate under.
So what if you think LPs are dumb or you hate them? that's fine. That means you wouldn't like it here, so it saves both from a bad match.
Back to your point about the interview. What useful information does this convey? quite a lot actually.
First they act as a sanity check. If we ask about Earns Trust, actually we are doing sort of the Asshole Test from OP. We are trying to determine if you are a pain to work with, or if you can establish good relationships with people. With Learn and be Curious we are trying to determine if you are open to learn new things. If you actively refuse to learn and just want to do your thing, you will probably struggle here. Things change fast and most everyone needs to adapt to keep up.
Second, they act as a calibration for role and leveling. Say you are hiring for a senior engineer position, and interview a candidate with +10 years of experience. However all of the candidate's examples are very simple, such as implementing a small feature. Will this candidate thrive as a senior engineer in Amazon where they will have to lead several engineers in multi-team efforts? At the very least we can say we don't have enough evidence to judge.
Third, it turns out some of them are actually good on-the-job performance indicators. Amazon has an internal science team that runs experiments on hiring. One of their experiments determined that high scores in certain LPs correlate with good performance after hire.
So there you go. You might personally dislike behavioral questions, and that is fair. However there is plenty of evidence to back up their usefulness in making hiring decisions. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to work here or not.
Regarding bar raisers, I don't see why an unrelated and unqualified person from an unrelated team that the candidate isn't interviewing for should have any say, let alone the ability veto their entire application. There's no way to spin that to make it seem like a good idea - at best you're unnecessarily empowering someone who can't properly assess a candidate, and at worst you're saying to the other interviewers that they can't be trusted and need to be supervised. I can understand the need to ensure the quality/integrity of the hiring process, but that doesn't check-out as a motive when the bar raiser isn't typically someone who's qualified to assess the integrity of process.
Also the name itself is a red flag; "bar raising" sounds like it's going to be one of those jobs where just doing your job isn't enough and you're expected to "put in 110%" - which normally translates to unreasonable workloads, unreasonable expectations, and high levels of internal competition. Whether or not that's the case, I can't say but it's the impression that the name gives me.
On the interviewers; the recruiter was slow to respond, disinterested, and rude. The person who I believe was the hiring manager was on his phone during the interview and didn't really engage, and one of the other people involved would cut me off mid-sentence repeatedly. Overall with that + "bar raising" I left with the impression that this would be a toxic environment, and pulled my application (to which the recruiter never responded). FWIW this was all for a role in Sydney, I understand Amazon is very large and experiences will differ between regions.
