Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles Reading Notes

Reference: Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles
这里面有好多大义凛然的话我们可以去说。基本上句句经典。

In summary, what the company from you, is the way to solve any problems. so that means, you have to thinking throughly all the time, like we should always thinking about: our colleagues, our manager, even the entire company and our customer…

Customer obsession: always think about the customer: what do they need.

Ownership:
a bad example:
when you were asked by questions like this:
Interviewer: when that happened and your whole application went down for a day, how’d you get it back up in the end?
me: well…we have an ops team which runs the website, so they eventually figured it out.
interviewer: did your developers help them figure out what had broken?
me: No, that’s not our jobs.

Simplify/Invent things:
there are always new solutions for the same problem.
and you can always provide your customer with the simple but effective solution.
a bad example:
interviewer: so you use wishlists, if you were in charge, how would you improve the wishlists feature on Amazon?
me: em…I’d fix the drop down to sort the lists in most recently used order.
interviewer: okay, good, what else then?
me: um…that;s all I can get for now
就是说你要有发散性思维，当然这发散性思维也不是说很散而是说要针对这件事。
所以提取关键词根据关键词联想并提出解决方法就很重要。

Leader are always right
because my instinct told me that the reason he become a tech leader/manager is because he got an amazing judgement.

Learn and be curious
What we do need is for you to be open and interested in learning new things. Our leaders need to be open to new things, because that’s always the path forward.

Insist on the highest standards:
like: we should never be satisfied with what we have. and the owner should be like: i know we can do better than this.
interviewer: how did you know what you had delivered was that the customer wanted?
me: the product team accepted the feature, which meant we delivered their requirements.
interviewer: but was it the right features? was it the quality you wanted.
me: well, it was good enough to be accepted, that was our goal.

Think big:
Inter: if you owned marketing for our kids tablets, what new things would you look into>
me: we;;, i’d look at our creatives and A/B test which images work best.
inter: sure, but what other ways do you think you could market our product?
me: using ads? like buy facebook ads?
inter: anything else?
me: ummmm, no, that’s all I got for now.

We’re always looking for bold vision (perhaps grounded in a small amount of reality), and need to know that our leaders are open to the idea of thinking bigger than the thing in front of their face.

The good example:
what other ideas do you have to improve the product detail pages on Amazon’s retail website?
me: okay, going a bit more experimental, what if we eliminated detail pages? You could just input your requirements to Amazon somehow(using Alexa, maybe) — like you want a TV by Tuesday that’s at least 60” with some certain resolution and a certain maximum price, and then Amazon would pick it out for you and just ship it. Maybe we can eliminate customers picking out items completely.

Bias for action:
Speed matters, so we have to do some kind of trade off between speed and quality.
inter: since the site was down and you thought it was the cache, did you try to clearing it?
me: Well, I guess I could have, but I didn’t want to risk being blamed for breaking something. It was much safer to wait for my manager to make the decision, it was above my pay grade.

Inter: how did you decide between two technologies?
me: The other engineer and I discussed it for a couple hours, figured out what we disagreed on, and I suggested that neither answer was necessarily better. She agreed. I said that unless she had any new info, I’d rather we just pick mine, and we could always come back to the decision later if we learned something new.

Frugality:
achieve something with less, self-sufficiency:
how did you fix the lead generation tool?
Actually, we really didn’t have the time to maintain it or rebuild it, but they really needed a tool to track their work. I realized that our bug tracking system had most of the features they needed/ Certainly wasn’t perfect. but I explained how they could use it, and it worked out fine. One less system to maintain.

Earn trust:
when you did something wrongly, how did you correct it.
Inter: Tell me how that project you were leading failed.
“Well, the product manager had given us the wrong requirements, and then one of my engineers screwed up the metrics gathering. Then when we launched, marketing didn’t notice it was under-performing, and kept advertising the broken product.”
Inter: How did the marketing team send the emails to the wrong people?
“Well, first we didn’t give them the necessary tools, so they were forced to rely on manual mail merges. It wasn’t fair to expect them to avoid errors. My team should have warned them about the risks, and we could have built better tools… in fact, we’re in the process of building them now.”

Dive Deep:
我干公司就是想让我们成为完美的人是吧。
但是作者同时也说了：

I’m not suggesting that you claim knowledge over every detail of what you or your teams have worked on, but I will say that you shouldn’t tell a story where you don’t know the most obvious of details. If you increased traffic, you better know what you did. If you dropped error rates, you should know what the errors were. We care that people know details, because it means they cared enough to question things. We need curious and skeptical leaders.

Inter： can you tell me you dive deep once?
me :“It’s funny, we had to restart our system every few months because of a memory leak. I’d just joined the team, and the mystery annoyed me. So I spent a few hours reading very carefully through our memory management code, and realized that we incorrectly double-parsing in one of our helper functions. Not only did it save on memory, but CPU as well. It’d been there for years.”

Have a backbone:
inter: tell me a time you disagree with someone
examples like this:
“My boss had insisted that React Native wasn’t responsive enough for our interface, so I made a quick prototype of our UI and showed him how it was just as responsive as our existing product.”
or something like this:
“I showed my boss the data, explained why option B was better, she pushed back, I suggested that we could try both options, she still disagreed, and asked us to move forward. I told my team we were building option A, and made sure to explain why it was the right choice. Because my team needs to know that we’re all on the same page.”

Deliver the results:
Inter: What’d you do after you realized you couldn’t hit the date?
“I looked at the features, and picked out a few I felt we could cut. The product manager agreed on a couple. Then, as bad as it sounds, I convinced QA to cut a week off the testing schedule. It was risky, but it was so important to hit the holidays. I figured we could test everything important, and it was the only way to get out in time.”

为了防止未来他的博客可能移动位置，因此我们将全文Copy-Paste了下来：

Disclaimer: I’m not representing Amazon in any way with my posts, opinions written here are strictly my own.
As a bar raiser at Amazon (a little googling will answer what that is if you’re not aware), I’ve gotten the opportunity to interview a lot of people. I’ve interviewed both very senior and very junior folks. Bar raisers do interview across all job families, and I’ve interviewed people for some pretty crazy positions. However, most of my interviews are for technical positions. Jobs like technical program managers, software development managers, quality engineers/managers, and of course the highest volume: software development engineers.
There are plenty of web resources regarding how to pass the functional (job skills) part of interviews. In fact, when I have friends and relatives interviewing, I send them to the internet to figure out what types of questions to prepare for rather than spend my time explaining. This type of preparing is pretty straight forward. You need to be good at your job, and make certain that the functional knowledge about your job is pretty fresh in your head. Perhaps how Hashtables work, or a bit about K-means clustering.
On the other hand, there isn’t much on the internet about the other side of the interview process. When we at Amazon interview candidates, we’re looking for a combination of those functional skills (coding, design, program management, 3D modeling… you name it), and leadership skills. This applies to every potential new hire at Amazon, from experienced vice presidents to brand new college graduates. We literally assign specific Amazon leadership principles to each interviewer in the process. Those interviewers attempt to get a picture of how likely you are to be the type of leader we’re looking for.
This article was written for the specific purpose of preparing you (a little bit) for that half of the interview. It’s my version of giving sample questions. I don’t know what you’ll be asked, but I know what we’re looking for. If you can be what we’re looking for, we’d love to have you.
Amazon Leadership Culture
There are quite a few articles out there about what Amazon’s leadership is like, how our leaders act, and what it’s like to work at Amazon. There are mentions of continual innovation, cut-throat competition, and fast paced projects.
As an Amazonian, what I always tell candidates is that there is not much about working at Amazon which is consistent across groups. We don’t do much the “Amazon way”, because very little is centralized. We have the leadership principles which guide how we act. Otherwise, every group acts like a little startup. They establish their own processes and best practices. They build an organization and way of doing things uniquely their own, while still following our leadership principles.
Considering how little we have centralized, we use the bar raiser group as a type of glue across organizations. We select bar raisers from the pool of experienced folk at Amazon, not just those who can interview well, but more importantly — those who deeply understand our leadership principles. As bar raisers, we then try to hire people who can understand and act on our principles. Finally, we set them loose into the chaos which is Amazon, with an assumption and belief that hiring people who follow our leadership principles will lead to long term success.
Understanding the Leadership Principles
When I have friends or relatives (or friends of friends, or friends of friends of relatives) ask how to prepare for an interview, I always suggest they read the description of the Amazon Leadership Principles, and think hard about each of them. More than any company I’ve worked with or heard about, we use those principles on a daily basis.
We obviously hire based on the principles. We give both positive and negative feedback which reference the principles. We are encouraged to be aware of our own successes and failures in relation to the leadership principles. I know I’ve certainly referenced a leadership principle or two while talking about parenting techniques.
I’ve read many thousands of interview transcripts, and it’s often glaringly obvious which candidates have really read and grokked what the leadership principles mean, and those who either neglected to prepare for their interview, or simply didn’t understand.
Note for the below sections. The quotes I’m putting in are actual snippets of interviews I’ve had, with close to literal quotes. Yes, they’re extreme examples. I’m using a blunt instrument to make certain you know what I’m talking about.
Another quick note before getting into specifics. We interviewers are spending our time talking to you — the candidate — in hopes that you’ll be hired. It’s a big investment of our time, we don’t want you to fail. When we say something like “Well, that’s a good start, what else?”, it’s very rare that the right answer is “Um… nope, that’s it”. Please listen carefully to what your interviewer is saying. Again, we’re here to help

Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles Reading Notes相关推荐

【Amazon 必考】Amazon Leadership Principles 亚马逊领导力准则
Leadership Principles,也就是领导力准则,不仅仅是几条用来鼓舞人心的口号,更是成就了Amazon特有公司文化的秘诀.不管是为新项目讨论创意.寻找解决客户问题的方案,还是面试求职者时 ...
Amazon Leadership Principles 亚马逊领导力准则
Leadership Principles,也就是领导力准则,不仅仅是几条用来鼓舞人心的口号,更是成就了Amazon特有公司文化的秘诀.不管是为新项目讨论创意.寻找解决客户问题的方案,还是面试求职者时 ...
Code Style Guidelines for Contributors Reading Notes
Reading Notes: 1.You must handle every Exception in your code in some principled way. (if you are co ...
《深度学习之TensorFlow》reading notes（3）—— MNIST手写数字识别之二
文章目录模型保存模型读取测试模型搭建测试模型使用模型模型可视化本文是在上一篇文章 <深度学习之TensorFlow>reading notes(2)-- MNIST手写数字识 ...
RRAM/ Near Memory Computing (NMC) Survey - Reading Notes 0707
Reading Notes of Resistive Random Access Memory – Day 2 Chapter 3 RRAM Characterization and Modeling ...
reading notes -- Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering
中英译本及下载:http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_586631940100pduh.html 以下是摘要笔记: 算法应当结合用户的习惯,用户特点的分类观影习惯是比较单一 ...
Amazon 14 principles Decode
提取问题的关键词根据关键词去对应回答注意各种反义词 Me-teammates-colleagues-customers-manager Professional-unprofessional qu ...
「MICCAI 2017」Reading Notes
Sina Weibo:东莞小锋子Sexyphone Tencent E-mail:403568338@qq.com http://blog.csdn.net/dgyuanshaofeng/articl ...
Academic English Reading Notes
trade secret: 商业机密 profit margin 净利率 leverage 杠杆作用 alignment 对准结盟校准 deploy 部署 break even 收支平衡 NPV: ...

Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles Reading Notes

Interviewing at Amazon — Leadership Principles Reading Notes相关推荐

最新文章

热门文章