[vivekl]

I am an SDE with Amazon having worked across AWS and the retail side. I have done over a hundred interviews in the past 2 years for SDE loops. Each of these involved a debrief led by bar raisers. I have yet to experience a "veto" by a bar raiser as outlined in this article. As far as I have experienced, the bar raisers' questions are not typically any more complicated or harsher than other interviewers. The main role of the bar raiser is in fact during the debrief, i.e. after the interviewee has completed the interviews.

At Amazon candidates are evaluated on an array of competencies. In addition to technical competencies, particular attention is paid to Amazon's leadership principles (the fact that these are displayed right at the careers page: http://www.amazon.com/b?node=239365011 should highlight how important these are in the culture). I love that culture-fit and leadership qualities play as big a part as technical abilities in Amazon's decision making process unlike what I have seen in some of the other companies people mention in the same breath as Amazon. In my experience a good bar raiser acts as an unbiased advocate for the greater good of the company. As a result, they are NOT from the same team with the open position (this doesn't mean that an accountant is judging an engineering candidate or vice-versa mind you, they just happen to be from a different org) which allows them to look-past the immediate need the team might have which could blind them to some of the obvious flaws in the candidate. In some ways they are also acting on behalf of the candidate by ensuring the match works both ways. I have seen several situations where the bar raiser determined that the "team" or the "role" were poorer fit for the candidate than the other way around and went out of their way to facilitate a correction.

That said, there is no question that good bar raisers are just as, if not harder to come by than good employees! It is a thankless, demanding assignment to take. I have met some absolutely amazing bar raisers and some others that are just darn right atrocious. Considering how quickly Amazon is growing, they definitely need more of them but that risks damage through poorer ones entering the system.