Hiring

Every engineering team has a brand. Most of them haven’t built it deliberately — it formed on its own, through the experience of people who worked there, the things those people said when they left, the code quality visible in open-source projects or interview processes, and the stories that circulated inside the company about how the team operates. You don’t always choose it; you inherit it, or build it by accident. ...

I’ve spent a significant part of my career as an Amazon Bar Raiser — conducting well over two hundred interviews across my own organisation and teams throughout Amazon. Somewhere along the way I stopped paying much attention to the things that most interview scorecards are designed to evaluate. Not because they’re irrelevant — behavioural anchors and competency frameworks serve a real purpose — but because I’ve found they’re much better at identifying people who are good at interviewing than people who are good at leading. ...