[nikofeyn]

what is a bar raiser?

and when has amazon ever been an engineering force? i have always felt the website and service experience is a relic of the 2000s. more often than not, i get the answer “our system can’t do that” from customer service.

[throwaway289355]

>https://www.socialtalent.com/blog/recruitment/raising-the-ba...

I think Amazon has taken on an outsized image to many people that just isn't true. We have good engineers in many organizations, but we don't pay enough, have the right strategy, or take care of individuals well enough to lure the kind of great folks you find at other big tech companies. In many ways, Amazon is a retailer that does technology because it found a way to make money from it. The DNA is still MBAs/finance and retail.

[vadym909]

A bar raiser is typically someone in the interview loop for a candidate that is not from the same team and therefore more objective about whether the candidate is truly 'better' than most people on the team (raises the bar). Although good in theory- its not actually practical to find every single new person better than the current employees but it helps keep things in perspective and is a deterrent to bringing in weak buddies.

Its true Amazon has some great engineers but is not a very engineering centric. I remember a senior engineer in Retail once comparing it to a plumbing system kept together with bandages.

[deskamess]

How much do you think the on-call contributes to engineers leaving? You would think support tools and support personnel could help to retain engineers.

[jhall1468]

No, bad design and refusal to manage technical debt is the issue. Oncall only matters in some orgs and even then only matters where the tech debt is totally out of control.

Bottom line is Amazon is a product culture not an engineering culture and that makes it really easy to leave for Google or unicorns that really appreciate tech debt tradeoffs.

[chronid]

Who cares about retaining those support/ops engineers you shit on because you don't want to own the crap you write, right? :)

[kk_cz]

From the site:

In simple terms, bar raisers are current Amazon employees that come in during the interview process to analyse candidates. They do this alongside their own full-time job, assessing as many as 10 candidates a week and spending 2-3 hours on each one.

In other words 20-30 hours per week on top of the full-time job? That doesn't sound quite right.

[patch_cable]

Another bar raiser here. That site is wrong. The expectation is 2 candidates a week. And it would be more proper to say that it is part of your full-time job, not on top of it.

10 candidates in a week may happen at some kind of event, but then it isn’t 2-3 hours per candidate, and in that case you’d effectively be taking a couple of days off from your normal job.

[xigency]

This bar raiser thing sounds like normal hiring practice in my work experience.

[nojvek]

The thing that baffles me is the industry perception is that Amazon has subpar engineering but Amazon right now is 2nd after Apple for Marketcap, so they must be doing something right.

I love the Amazon customer service. They’ve managed to crack a difficult problem and execute enough that other Giants haven’t come close to it yet.

GCP and Azure tail AWS by quite a bit. Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now.

So Amazon can do a lot of things wrong, but I’d have to say they get the important parts right.

[Godel_unicode]

> Amazon online retail is a Google search engine level monopoly now.

Not even particularly close. Amazon doesn't even have a majority of online sales, although it's getting close. They seem like a much bigger force than they are because of growth.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...

[pas]

They are big, because they invested every penny they made into getting big. And those pennies are converted through human misery in "fulfillment centers". (And AWS on-call is not that fancy either for engineers, though the two are almost incomparable.)

They got some parts right, some parts awfully wrong, and some are just irrelevant now. They make money, they are cheap + convenient, and that usually what people focus on. They are not sophisticated, they are not great designers, etc.

[BryantD]

This doesn't completely answer the question, but I would distinguish UI and UX from the ability to build systems that run successfully at Amazon scale.

[cma]

Corporate meme thing like six sigma. Each new employee is supposed to raise the bar, or the whole organization gets worse on average. Jeff Bezos as #1 is supposedly the least qualified employee in the company as each new hire raised the bar.

[booleandilemma]

what is a bar raiser?

A PM who has never opened an IDE in his or her life and who is only familiar with “coding” concepts through Wikipedia. They read books by Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, and Nassim Taleb and majored in one of the humanities. When they’re shown the webpage that the geeks created which loads in 2 seconds, they tell the lead developer that they want the loading time cut down to 1 second and the font to be changed.

[overkalix]

Hey hey hey. What's wrong with Kahneman?