> At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).
This might actually be part of the retention strategy. If everyone who works at FAANG knows that they're somewhat lucky to get in, regardless of ability, it means they are less likely to jump ship. What's the point in applying for another job when you're already paid well and it's unlikely to end in anything but lost time? You're unlikely to win a 10% lottery twice, given the amount of time you'd bother investing.
I am not looking externally until I'm sure I'm done at AWS. I've done 80+ interviews here, and I'm consistently amazed by what drives people to say "The candidate wasn't up to the coding bar". As far as I can tell, you are almost never up to the coding bar. I think we interview so many people just to remind ourselves that if we leave, we aren't getting back in.
Just to head off the "So why don't I argue for change?" questions, I'd rather work on self improvement than fight tooth and nail to make the hiring process a little bit better. I'll let somebody else add that to their promo doc.
That culture is so foreign to me. Each place I've left in the past 10 years, I'm pretty sure I could go back. I know enough folks or at least have been told by C-Suite that "the door is always open, just give me a call". I went through a few rounds of Amazon interviews in 2020... I don't think I'd ever way to experience that again.
I remember seeing a comment about Amazon once claiming in order to be seriously considered for a role, you have to be better than 50% of the existing team you’d be coming onto.
To be fair, that would mean that your ability level is the median ability of the team you'd be joining, which doesn't sound all that far-fetched to me. If the skill level of new hires is always close to the median, the overall team ability should stay the same in the long run.
This line of thought obviously depends on the assumption that you can measure the exact ability using just a single quantity.
Exactly. Who wants to hire somebody who's dumber than half their teammates? That's a recipe for failure. Assuming inaccurate measurement, you'll actually have some below median, so you need to bias upward or else you'll just end up with a bunch of mediocre eng.
Yep, and that point has been brought up ad-nauseum internally. Also Jeff did comment how he would probably not be hired by his own company. I personally saw the business pushing the scales to the point of 'just get them in the door, oh my god we are growing too fast and don't have time for your bickering'. Depending on the business unit and how hungry the hiring manager is that issue of raises the bar can just be a hand wave and 'get em` in'. For some technical positions you have a 'bar raiser' interview you who is often an IC who was promoted to Management ranks and has to serve penance by being the one to conduct countless BR interviews. 99% of them were pretty chill on the Clark/Fufillment side of the business. Cant speak to the Jassy/AWS side of the house. Their concept of BR may be more concrete. We rarely kept people out just because they did not 'raise the bar' since that is subjective as hell and personally I like qualified metrics.
I never interviewed for the AWS side of the house since I knew I wanted free time, and a life.
On the AWS side of the house, the bar raiser doesn't actually interview the candidate. The bar raiser is there as a neutral party to help facilitate hiring decisions and debriefs.
It's the bar raiser's job to make sure that the hiring manager doesn't just hire people to fill seats. More than once, I've seen bar raisers override hiring managers when there was compelling evidence from the technical interviewers.
At least in my org, you don't get the job if you don't raise the bar. Period.
That is crazy- with us BRs would just sit in on the POD like any other member and have the same voting authority as everyone else. I wonder when things split internally that Team Jassy and Team Clark starting doing things so differently. Thanks for the post man, that is crazy to learn.
That’s true if we assume that ability does not change with time. But if you have a spectrum of experience in the team, it might be unrealistic to expect rookies to match the median.
Inside that is called raising the bar. Often times I would personally aim to find people who were 50% better than the best person I knew in that role. Often times I would still incline on people during their POD. I would just strongly incline with 'raises the bar' on folks who met that rare exception. Honestly I was on the Dave Clark side of the business and we were much more chill about things vs the Jassy/AWS cult. Those dudes might as well be from the moon. So take my statement with a grain of salt. We worked for the same company... but we also didn't, Amazon is just that big.
I had plenty of times where an entire hiring pod would incline on a candidate because they had the soft skills we were looking for in that role and we knew we could sharpen their technical skillset in house. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work at a FAANG... you just have to be interviewed by a team that is hungry and likes you.
Candidates should be better than 50% of the people currently in the role. So if you're interviewing for an SDE1 position, you're expected to be better than half of the current SDE1s.
You're evaluated against people in the same role, not the entire team. But, yeah, the idea is that the hiring standard (the 'bar' in Amazon terms) is always getting higher.
Sometimes I see articles about a wrongfully convicted man being let out of prison. This usually comes with a cash payment of some sort. The whole we took 20 years of your life, oops, here’s a million dollars. Every time I see this though I think ‘no, no way does money replace my time.’ That’s simply not good enough. And not because the payments are usually ludicrously low, but because there is no amount of money that would buy off my life.
Same as there is no amount of money you could give me to end my life, a position which I assume is shared by a vast majority of humans.
Time is not money. It’s not even close as an exchange rate. I would never put myself through these types of interview processes (not to mention that I would assume that sort of thing to be indicative of the job itself and company as a whole) because I value my actual life and dignity far and above what I value as an upper middle class income.
I value my actual life and dignity far and above what I value as an upper middle class income.
I am at least 90% sure that part of these interviews is to filter out people who these sorts of views. These employer would much rather have someone who wants to work 100 hour weeks and be the 'hero' over someone who works exactly 8-4 monday-friday and then goes home.
IDK, if the interview is just a few hours of misery to get a significant financial upside, it's not such a big deal. People always assume the job will be miserable too, but that varies from team to team. Especially because the salary is high enough that you may be able to save enough to buy your life back if you're careful and have time on your side.
Be sure to price in general life risks like accidents, cancer, stress induced hearth attacks etc. The problem with this approach is, that a non zero number of people will not live long enough to buy their life back.
It's very true, and very natural. It's one reason why FAANG salaries have been getting so high.
If I change jobs, and find myself in a good situation, and need more head-count, I'm going to reach out to people I like that I've worked with before, see if they might be interested in a job change. I know I can work with them, know we'll build good stuff.
There's a constant drive in FAANG to hire more people, most teams have open headcounts. To the degree that it's extremely hard to build up that funnel of candidates. If my team has a head-count of 5, that realistically means I've got to find a bare minimum of 30-40 candidates to enter in to the pipeline from somewhere, to maybe get close to that target. That's a slightly optimistic conversion rate. Now scale that up across a company with thousands of teams that are hiring. Getting that pipeline filled on that scale is crazy. It's just one of many reasons why FAANG go all in on college hiring events.
I can almost 100% guarantee to get someone I've worked with in a FAANG co-worker through the interview pipeline and in to a job. They know their shit, they know what they're doing, and they know what the process is like.
It's because the DoJ Antitrust Division came down on them hard in 2010[1], and part of the settlement forbade the companies from engaging in that behavior again.
One can interview without quitting the current job. That allows for multiple attempts over time while retaining the current status. People may do so to see what pay they’d be offered.
This might actually be part of the retention strategy. If everyone who works at FAANG knows that they're somewhat lucky to get in, regardless of ability, it means they are less likely to jump ship. What's the point in applying for another job when you're already paid well and it's unlikely to end in anything but lost time? You're unlikely to win a 10% lottery twice, given the amount of time you'd bother investing.