Many software engineers dream of working for one of the elite FAANG companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. But interview processes are rigorous across the board, ensuring only the most qualified candidates are hired.
And at Amazon, the bar is even higher—literally. The e-commerce giant has had a unique hiring practice in place since the late 1990s called “bar raisers,” where an interviewer who typically sits on another team serves as an objective third-party adviser during the hiring process. There were a whopping 3,600 bar raisers at Amazon as of October 2019, but they had been removed from the interview process for entry-level software engineers in recent years during a pandemic hiring boom.
