Memoirs of an Amazon Bar Raiser
Demystifying the Amazon interview
“Hey Carlos, what are you doing this Friday?” I quickly glanced at my calendar. “Not much, what do you need?” The recruiter paused. “Got a current passport? Can you fly to Tel Aviv? We got a 5-star hotel on the waterfront for the whole week. And we’ll visit Jerusalem one day. Gig’s yours if you can be there in 48 hours.” I smiled, as I frantically searched for last-minute flights to Israel. Being a Bar Raiser at Amazon did have some perks.
If you’ve interviewed at Amazon, you’ve had a Bar Raiser. A Bar Raiser (“BR”) is a special interviewer in an Amazon loop. Over the course of my 11 years at Amazon (2009–2020), I conducted 813 interviews. Before Amazon, I conducted a couple hundred interviews at Microsoft. And after Amazon, I’ve conducted about thirty at Google (where I am now). So all in all, I’ve done more than a thousand interviews. I strongly believe that interviewing is part of your job at a software company.
BRs are a unique part of the Amazon culture. Before the interview, you are responsible for ensuring the loop is appropriately set (audit interviewer experience and level as well as competencies to cover). You interview, like everybody else. And after the interview, you lead the debrief (which includes all the interviewers in the same room debating their data points) and make the final hire/no hire decision. You have veto power over all hiring decisions (a hire cannot happen without your thumbs up). You are trusted to be a calibrated interviewer with high judgement. And if any of the interviewers was uncalibrated or provided inadequate feedback, it is your job to educate them.
There’s an incorrect perception that the BR interview is the hardest. It is not. In fact many times I challenged interviewers that had unrealistic expectations of a coding question. Most of the interviews I focused on leadership principles. When I think about all the people that I personally know that did not do well at Amazon, Microsoft or Google, it always came down to a gap in leadership, not lack of technical skills. Yet we always over-index on coding questions for our technical interviews!
You are the final decider on whether a candidate gets an offer or not, and this is a huge responsibility both to the candidate and to Amazon. Sometimes people are selling their homes and relocating their families to Seattle, their little kids changing schools and moving away from all their friends. Sometimes even from other countries. If you make the wrong decision you can literally ruin somebody’s life. Having to fire somebody is a traumatic experience for the individual, and a significant resource drain for the hiring manager and the company. But be too conservative in your hiring decisions, and you’re missing out on amazing individuals that could make your company a better place, and worked extremely hard prepping for this moment.
This is why becoming a BR is a long, painful (but rewarding) process.
In order to enter the BR training program, you need to have completed a certain number of interviews, and you need to have shown high judgement during those interviews and meet some accuracy metrics. You’re generally invited into the program by other BRs.
BR training is rigorous and intensive. I shadowed a bunch of BRs first, observing their style and how they drove debriefs, and absorbing a little bit of each one as I flushed out my own style. Then, it was my turn to be shadowed by other BRs. This was brutal. The more experienced BRs bluntly critiqued every minute of my interview. “Hey I noticed you spent 2 minutes on question X, exactly what concrete data did you get from these 2 minutes?” I learned to be deliberate about time-management, and how precious each one of those 45 minutes actually was. At any given moment in time, I needed to be extracting a piece of concrete data that was valuable to the decision process.
BR training, and being a BR, taught me lots of valuable life skills outside the interview process itself.
I learned how to own an outcome. The final hire/no hire decision was mine and only mine, and I owed it to the company and to the candidate to make the right call, even if it was hard or unclear, or if I didn’t like it. There were many times when after debating a hairy case for a while, I wished I could punt the decision to somebody else, but the buck stopped with me. Own it. I became more comfortable with being a decision maker. The company placed a huge amount of trust on me to make the right call.
I learned how to facilitate a meeting with strong dissenting opinions. One of the requirements for BR graduation is having shown the ability to deal with contentious debriefs. The debrief is a 30-minute meeting. You have 5+ interviewers that show up there after having conducted their own interview, generally with strong opinions about whether somebody is a hire or not. Often you’ll end up with a couple of hire votes, a no-hire vote, and some borderline people. Some debriefs could get significantly heated. My demeanor, and choice of words, could significantly raise or lower the temperature in a room. Candidates can legitimately perform very differently for different interviewers, but some of my interviewers that had had a negative experience had an extremely difficult time believing that candidate could have had great interviews with others (and vice versa). Getting a bunch of highly opinionated people to reach consensus in a very small timeframe in a high stakes situation is hard! While BR had veto power, using it highlighted a failure of leadership — I never once did, and I focused on partnering with the hiring manager and the interviewers on reaching a shared decision we stood by even if we didn’t all love it.
I learned how to command a room. This was MY meeting. It was my job to run it and often I had to deal with backseat drivers that attempted to monopolize the conversation or rambled. I had to be in the driver seat, keep people focused, and time-manage a very tight process. The pressure of reaching a decision in 30 minutes forced me to be ruthless about (respectfully) cutting people off when they weren’t contributing to the outcome, or to extract actionable data from verbose statements.
I became comfortable challenging and being challenged. Interviewers will sometimes talk about their feelings, and one of my jobs was to bring them back to data. That they loved the candidate was irrelevant to me (and to the process, really), I wanted a healthy and respectful debate on the factual merits of the candidate. “What data do you have to backup that assertion?” I asked multiple times throughout a debrief. Interviewers were sometimes uncalibrated, having unrealistic expectations of where the bar should be. Sometimes their questions were too hard for the level of the candidate. Sometimes the answer they had extracted was not great but they were too lenient. Ultimately we all understood by challenging we weren’t attacking each other, we were just trying to make the right decision for the candidate and for the company, so it was never personal.
I learned how to balance pros and cons, apples and oranges. Maybe the candidate has some technical gaps but has amazing leadership skills, or vice versa, so often it comes down to a complicated formula in your head that compares many gradients to reach a binary yes/no conclusion. A BR objectively aggregates all the data points from all the interviews, looks for patterns, and weaves a balanced narrative about the candidate that everybody can agree with, in 30 minutes or less.
Having the opportunity to exercise these skills, hundreds of times, was invaluable. I didn’t do a great job every single time. But I learned from every single mistake I ever made. And I still use these skills today, even though I’m not at Amazon and I’m not a Bar Raiser. I use them in all kinds of meetings!
I have the dubious honor of actually having been in the BR training program twice. I actually… flunked… my first attempt. I had a BR mentor that was opinionated about the exact style that he wanted to see out of me. I fumbled for a while as I was trying to find my own style. I was slow to incorporate his feedback into my style, and eventually I got kicked out of the training program because my progress was deemed too slow. It was embarrassing and I was mortified, but that adversity gave me more determination to try it again. I reached out to my BR friends and asked them if I could shadow them, even if I wasn’t in the program officially anymore. A year later, I tried it again, and I got through the program and became a certified BR.
As a BR, I interviewed people across a wide variety of roles. If you’re a software engineer, you normally just interview other software engineers or maybe engineering managers. But as a BR I’d frequently interview product managers, IT support desk technicians, graphic designers, sales associates, and other roles I never heard of. Interviews like these really stretch your facilitation skills and also give you a glimpse into other key roles that you wouldn’t normally get.
Being a BR that was willing to travel came with awesome perks. Amazon is extremely Frugal (ehem…cheap …). BUT when Amazon does international industry recruiting, they generally stay in a 5-star hotel (or 4-star at the very least!), because the interviews happen in the hotel, and they must project the image of success and power of a trillion-dollar global corporation. And so I travelled the world, to Tel Aviv, Minsk, Zagreb, Buenos Aires (twice), Santiago (twice), Hangzhou, Sydney, and Mexico City.
These recruiting events were intense. You interviewed 4–5 people in the morning (45min interviews back to back, maybe 5m break), debriefed during lunch, interviewed 4–5 people after noon, debriefed, went out to a fancy dinner, drank copious amounts of alcohol with your co-workers, and went to sleep. You learned to trust your team and to be there for them, 100%. I generally added a few days before or after to do some sightseeing.
The BR trip to Sydney was the most intense, because we failed to take into account the Melbourne Cup was happening. The entire country shut down for an entire day to watch a 5-minute horse race. Not a single candidate was willing to come and interview with us that day! So we had to scramble and condense five days of interviewing into four days of interviewing, which meant 12-hr workdays. It was brutal. Lesson learned: you must take country specific events into account when planning your international recruiting trip!
We often had to adjust the interviews a bit to take into account the culture.
We had a recruiting event to Minsk, Belarus. The country had spent decades behind the Iron Curtain, where expressing dissent publicly had consequences. Just last year, Ryanair flight 4978 between Athens and Lithuania was forced to have an unscheduled stop in Minsk so that the Belarusian authorities could arrest a political activist that was onboard. Yet one of the Leadership Principles that Amazon probes during interviews is Disagree and Commit, which includes “respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.” Asking these sort of questions put some of our Belarusian candidates in an extremely awkward situation, so I pivoted the wording from the more blunt American-style “tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager and you argued your stance” to more subtle ways of probing.
When we were in Buenos Aires, Santiago or Mexico DF, I noticed the Latin candidates tended to have more verbose answers. Having grown up in the culture myself (I was born and raised in Argentina), I knew a thing or two about that — there’s a “Latin flair” expected/encouraged when you communicate. But Amazon-style communication is crisp, precise, factual and to the point so this verbosity was problematic. Pivoting was always a fine line though — I was trying to adjust appropriately for cultural differences but at the end of the day these candidates were going to have to operate in a very specific culture, so I needed to ensure they were going to successfully adapt to the expectations of an amazonian office.
It is customary to kiss on the cheek in the Latin culture as part of greeting. This took some of our interviewers by surprise in Santiago and Buenos Aires, as they introduced themselves to a candidate and the candidate walked right up to them and innocently kissed them!
Some of these interviews were in locations with known malicious hacker activity (Belarus and China), so it was assumed our delegation could get targeted. We were required to take special loaner laptops that had limited access to Amazon’s corporate network (including no access to any of Amazon’s codebase). Coming back, protocol was to shutdown the laptop at the airport in the foreign country, never turn it back on, and return it immediately to Helpdesk for shredding the following day. The risk of these devices being compromised was too high.
Another unexpectedly exciting event was to Hangzhou, in January 2020. Yes, China, just as Covid-19 was starting. And I had taken my 13-yr old to show him some of the country. The situation deteriorated quickly, and the country started literally shutting down on us. We got to the Great Wall as they were closing the doors that morning. During a mandatory health screen at a rail station, my temperature tested high and I got forcefully separated from my kid for a few, scary minutes, in a sea of people, by armed soldiers who did not speak English (nor did I speak any Chinese). When we got to Shanghai, city of 26 million souls, the streets were post-apocalyptically empty. We were on one of the last flights out of Shanghai before the airport shut down.
Occasionally, I would run into somebody in the hallways and they would say “hey you were my Bar Raiser!” I always took a huge amount of pride in the responsibility that was placed upon me, and the quality of the people that I brought into the company, and when I saw they were doing ok it always put a smile on my face. Just recently, I saw one of my hires was promoted to Senior Engineer — I was proud.
All in all, being a BR was an amazing opportunity to learn a lot of great skills, make a difference in some people’s lives, and have some fun with travel as well — truly embodying Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History!
