[east2west]

I have heard repeatedly that potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles. I wouldn't call that "taken with a grain of salt." Anecdotally their turnover rate is high and a larger proportion of tech workers have to be on call than other large tech companies-- this could be due to the nature of tech, clouds and probably the largest web portable on earth. Different divisions are going to be different, and the article focuses on more extreme cases, true, but Amazon is a "tough" place to work, no question about that, at least compared to Google or Netflix.

If Amazon is not a nice place to work, honest people writing good journalistic reporting on it are going to write negative stories, no way around that. As negative stories, this particular article isn't bad. At least it puts a leadership-principle spin on it.

[rdtsc]

> potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles.

Interviewed for AWS. Got asked "behavioral" and "leadership principle questions". There were very few technical questions except for some stupid whiteboard "sort this thing..." questions. (Read more about my experience in a top-level comment) But it was all "tell me about your worst failure". "Tell me about a time...". Basically you are supposed to learn their leadership principles than parrot those back to them using your own experiences.

[east2west]

That sounds like standard affairs. I read your interview experience, it is almost funny. Amazon has a body-shop quality to it. Once someone told me he failed an interview, then changed his email address and phone number and got another interview and failed again, and on his third try he finally got an offer. I don't remember whether he accepted the job, probably did. He is a foreigner needing visa sponsorship, so he would be gone after a couple of years.

[pinewurst]

That's exactly how my own AWS interview loop went. The individuals were pleasant and professional but it was all about asking the canned questions to see if I parroted back the leadership principles correctly. A big yuck.

[henrikschroder]

> "tell me about your worst failure".

What a fantastic way to trigger self-esteem issues in the middle of a high-pressure environment! It sure weeds out the people to weak to work there! /s

[rdtsc]

Yeah I was asked that question. I answered honestly and it wasn't a happy or pleasant memory, but I guess they wanted me to somehow integrate it into their "leadership principles" and show how I applied those principles learned something or "risen above" or other such bullshit.

[amazonthrowaway]

Yes, it's true that as part of the interview process they ask behavioral questions to try to use the leadership principles to evaluate a candidate. An example might be, "can you tell me about a time when you had to build something but you had very vague requirements". So I think the leadership principles are taken seriously, but I don't think they're treated as gospel. Bezos usually says something in the all-hands meeting like "these are our leadership principles unless you know better ones". People usually roll their eyes at the "frugality" leadership principle - the term "frupid" is used pretty frequently.

The high on-call load is a pretty frequently complaint.

I haven't worked at Google or Netflix, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.

In general, I think Amazon is a pretty demanding environment, but I think if the environment was as Streitfeld describes it, I wouldn't do well. I don't think I have that great a work ethic and I don't think I handle stress or workplace conflict particularly well, yet I've managed to be successful at Amazon.

[srean]

> but I don't think they are treated as gospel

Sorry, untrue. Literally several examples of offers turned down because of this even when apart from this 'raise the bar' person everyone were strongly in favor of hiring. This happens all the time and employed engineers are none to happy about this. BTW from the number of your posts here, would that be an unofficial job requirement ?

[amzn_thrwy_158]

Calling them behavioral questions makes it sound like a psychology experiment. What it actually is is a way to get candidates to talk about specific situations they've encountered in their careers and how they handled them. Different interviewers have different principles to focus on, so it prevents them from covering the same territory.

Amazon has its problems, but the interview process has always felt pretty fair to me, and I've been on both sides of it.

That said: I would never, ever, ask a candidate to tell me about their biggest failure. Jesus fuck that's a landmine. What happens when you expect them to say "I championed the use of TCL as our primary systems language", but they actually say "I got drunk, crashed the car, and killed my fiancee". Yikes.

[eitally]

It's formally called "Targeted Selection" and is a superset of behavioral interviewing, with some additional structure wrapping it. It works well and is much better than what most companies do.

[cthalupa]

That's why you ask for "Biggest /career/ failure"

[jmspring]

Interviewed twice with Amazon, had an offer the first time decided to not continue the second. I don't recall any particularly blatant behavioral questions. The one I do recall (and was part of a writing sample) was writing about one of the hardest challenges career-wise and how I handled/approached/etc. the problem. It could have been technical, but I went with a non-technical issue (delivering for a customer when it was out of scope). It was actually one of the better parts of the interview -- in terms of back and forth.

Both times I've decided no on Amazon was due to commute and flexibility first, narrowness of the role in the first occasion was the other issue.

[david-given]

raises hand

What's a behavioural question?

[jldugger]

Typical interview questions often take the form of 'imagine the following hypothetical situation X. what would you do?' Candidates tell people what they want to hear, and all the question does is establish that the candidate knows what the interviewer wants to hear. Psychology research shows us that people assign themselves better positive traits than their behavior would indicate.

Behavioural interview questions have the interviewer ask a question of the form 'Tell me about a time when X happened, and what you did.' By asking for a personal anecdote, people are less likely to bring that positive trait assumption with them to the interview, and interviewers get a more honest appraisal of future behavior.

Of course, psychology also fundamental overattribution bias, which says we attribute behavior far too much to the person than the situation. For example, somewhere in this thread is an interview question asking about doing something for the customer that wasn't planned, and that the interviewee worked in hardware design, where unplanned features results in unplanned testing, unplanned Bill of Materials and ultimately an unplanned cost to your customer. When we learn that the candidate never did anything unplanned, we learn more about the situation -- customers bear all costs of design and production -- than the candidate.

[amazonthrowaway]

I would define it as a question about how you handled a particular type of situation or how you would handle a particular situation.

I think it's primarily used in contrast to a coding question.