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.

The logical end to that is that you wouldn't hire half your employees again. When put that way it's pretty clearly an unreasonable standard.

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.