Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is certainly tempting.

Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?

Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about, it's just extremely rapid growth.

The attrition problem is well known.

Have you tried hiring dev's lately? It's a employee's market. We've made offers to a half dozen people in the last 4mo only to be beaten out by other firms. One guy who turned us down had 12 offers.

Sure, you can compromise and take lower quality people, or pay more than anyone in your city, but if you want great people for top 20% of the market pay, it's a lot of work on the hiring side.

Pay more or work remote. You are likely limiting yourself to a tiny Geo area. No reason in 2016 we all need to sit in traffic to commute to work.

Oh I agree. I think if an engineer has to spend over 2-4h a week interviewing long term you are spending too much time on hiring.

A little break to talk to humans is good. Shouldn't be your main job, unless you work in HR or something...

People already set up pre-filter "tasks" to qualify the competence of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers for their real work. There's probably some good data there that Amazon could use to do this pretty well, if they wanted.