Amazon Interview Experience PM
Hiring Manager gave me pre onsite and discussed what skills she is really after and my skills aligned really well. Had an onsite and some went well but one person seemed unsatisfied with every answer I gave. Nothing was deep enough or massive enough scale, and then he asked for mastery of numerous skills outside the job description. Yet if I had mastery of every one of those I likely would be going for higher paying TPM role or to the much higher paying software engineering side, not PM, and most skills he brought up weren't what the Hiring Manager was interested in or in the job description. A) Was that likely the bar raiser? B) How common is that to throw out tons of expectations not in job description or that aligned with HM, and then treat the entire interview like an uphill battle. Is that likely the bar raiser and are BR interviewers normally acting that way? YOE: 10+ Current tc: 100
I would say that that was very likely the bar raiser, and that one of the skills you might have been evaluated on is how well you handle a difficult "stakeholder" -- an important skill for a PM. That interviewer could have been evaluating the "Customer Obsession" or "Have Backbone" LPs.
Much appreciated. It was for an L6 Senior PM in Seattle.
Interviewers aren’t assholes because they are secretly interviewing you on skills. That could be the BR or a non-BR who was having a bad day. At the end of the day, he will capture the entire discussion and all your interviewers will debrief. If you outshone with other interviewers, they will speak for you, irrespective of what 1 thought.
Much appreciated for the insight. I assumed it was on or the other...but those circumstances make it incredibly difficult to gauge how your doing when the whole experience is uphill. My hope is the other experiences overall still turn into a thumbs up.
Of course! And it very well could. If majority of the people thumbs up and the HM feels strongly about hiring you, they could make things happen even if few don’t thumbs up.
10+ yoe but only $100k tc? Is that 10+ yoe in tech?
Just shy of 15 years in analytics and data science. But I've always worked for non profits that pay 20-30% below market. Not in FAANG that pays well above market. Edit: Done significant project management as well during that time as most didnt have a PM. Thus thought the PM right might be nice for experience at a larger scale.
What location and what level?