interviewer

13 lat temudiscuss

Steve Yegge is usually a talented and entertaining writer. Having said that, his strengths lie in writing about computer science and far less in actually creating real systems. These predictions aren't very good (as time as shown) and are on par with the poor judgment he exercised in bashing his former employer in a 'private' post.

interviewer

13 lat temudiscuss

A "history"? Does your history consist of a single patent lawsuit 13 years ago? Also subsequent to the lawsuit Jeff Bezos went on public record as identifying that as a mistake. http://oreilly.com/news/amazon_patents.html. After which he spoke to congress about how to change the US patent law to fix it.

As an author on 25+ Amazon patents (not the one referenced by the post) I will tell you three things:

1/ The US patent system is broken. Everyone knows this. 2/ Every company has to protect itself by filing patents. This is just a reality of the system that we have. 3/ A company that turns its focus away from its customers and instead focuses on other companies is either a parasite (hello patent trolls!) or has lost its way.

My 0.02.

interviewer

14 lat temudiscuss

There are some pretty simple solutions to the problems that you mention. For example, Amazon's bar raiser program was introduced specifically as a check to the power wielded by managers and to ensure a consistent hiring bar across the entire company. A bar raiser has veto power over the candidate which cannot be overruled by anyone.

interviewer

14 lat temudiscuss

I'm also a "well-calibrated interviewer" at Amazon. I'm an engineer and a 'bar raiser' with 700+ interviews. My thoughts are:

1. Interviewing and evaluating a candidate has very, very little to do with engineering. Yes, you have to be able to evaluate code but this just scratches the surface of what needs to happen during an interview.

2. As a corollary to #1 - just because you are a good engineer doesn't mean that you will be a good interviewer. Never mind whether or not you want to interview. It is just a different skill set.

3. Interviewing can take a lot of time. But it also has high value for the company. If you are passionate about the people that work with and really want to shape the company, then get involved in interviewing. There are very few activities that will influence things more.

4. A lot of the time that I spend in 'interviewing' is actually time that I spend with co-workers to make them better interviewers. For in-house interviews the breakdown is 15 minutes preparing, 45 minutes interview, 30 minutes writing debrief feedback, 30 minutes attending the debrief, and then 60 or more minutes working with the other interviewers on the loop or helping the hiring manager understand what they should be looking for.

5. In some ways the interviewing process is no different than any other process employed by a company. In particular there is almost always room for improvement. As an employee of a company you can spend time complaining about the process ('it is broken', 'it is unfair', 'it is too heavy weight', etc) or you can spend time fixing it. If you are working at a company where you are not empowered to fix things like this then you should consider working for a new company.

6. I like lists!

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