Saw a few companies (Bloomberg, Amazon) doing this. Wondering if this is company specific or if this is catching on?
I had the same experience with Amazon and Indeed. One of them clearly said they were there as an observer, sounded like the person asking the question was in training
Goldman does 2-1 interviews for onsites as well where both are experienced interviewers
CMV: if they’re not being a shadow, it sounds like a bs practice in this market. Too easy to be adversarial. Maybe if software engineers were begging for jobs they would bend over to this
microsoft recently published a blog that some teams are doing this there. thanks to that blog it is probably catching on
It causes more uncertainty for candidates and often turns out to be bad. He has to make 2 people happy instead of one. In my case shadow interviewer was raising the bar and asking for more optimization. He had lc/hacker rank opened in front of him to get like multiple answers. Bad experience indeed. If shadow interviewer wasn’t there, I would have gotten through. It happened on Uber onsite. Also main interviewer and shadow interviewer had differences in opinion and telling me different things. Shadow interviewer gave me suggestion to sort list when it was not needed
At Amazon, only one interviewer is supposed to talk with the candidate, other is just observing and taking notes.
Twitter does it. I loved it when I interviewed, the second person was pretty much a note taker which freed up the primary to real be involved in the conversation.
We do it for training purpose. One person is just shadowing to learn.
Got it at Facebook. Terribly screwed that one. Primary reason was it was his first interview and he was 3 months out of college. Shadower was more experienced guy helping the interviewer.
I recently had a 4 on 1 interview during an onsite, with one of the interviewers attending over the phone on speaker. Horrible experience, 4 different agendas, no flow to the questions, pivoting after each person asked their question and I couldn't get a read on anyone. To add more pressure, there was only 30 min for all 4 people.
Shadow, reverse shadow
Oh are they supposed to be shadows for Amazon? My schedule has a couple of rounds with 2 SWEs.
Yup it is a thing. Though normally we would restrict the number of shadows for a given loop.