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.
I never interviewed for the AWS side of the house since I knew I wanted free time, and a life.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Pretty sure a lot of older parents would take a deal with lethal injection + $1M for their kids to inherit.
That always works out well.
The 'FA.N.' part of it maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
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.