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Why Phone Screens Matter
AI Notes
The essay is built as a dare: Steve pastes in his actual feedback write-up from a live Amazon loop, names withheld and the submission date swapped for a joke (9:00am, October 23rd, 4004 B.C. — Bishop Ussher's date for the creation of the world), then asks, twice, whether you would have passed this candidate through your own phone screen. What's disarming is where the blame doesn't land. The candidate gets no roasting, and the second screener is "an absolutely outstanding engineer, possibly even world-class" whose mistake Steve names precisely: he let the candidate do most of the talking, and asked only about past project work. The real alarm is the base rate. By Steve's count this was at least the thirtieth loop like it in a single year, and in the quarter before he wrote it up, most of his loops had ended the same way.
It reads now as a document of big-tech hiring before anyone had systematized it, written from inside while the process was still improvised, wasted airfare and all. The eleven-count indictment splits with age: big-O and tree traversal carry as much weight in 2026 as they did then, while "he has no experience with XML" sits on the same charge sheet and is now pure 2005. And one confession that didn't make the excerpts above: a commenter admits he brought in a similar candidate with this very blog post open on his laptop during the phone screen. Reciting the checklist and running one live turn out to be different skills, and no amount of blog-reading substituted for the interviewer training the commenters keep asking Amazon for.
Related listings
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2005
Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
The companion methodology piece. Why Phone Screens Matter is the diagnosis; the Five Essential Questions are the prescription. The two are usually read together.
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2005
The Miracle Interview
Same loop shape — fail every question for twenty straight minutes — but with a reversal that this candidate doesn't get to make. The two essays sit together as the unhappy and happy versions of the same setup.
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2008
Get That Job at Google
Three years and one employer later, Steve writes the same advice from the other side of the table. The Amazon version is about what to screen for; the Google version is about how to walk into the screen.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 2 more
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Now I'm curious to see what the phone screen feedback was like.
But you've hit on a strong point here: SDE training needs to include training on how to identify and select quality SDEs.
We have a limited amount of recruiting training and process documentation. But it's all very high level, and none of it is geared towards technical interviewing.
Combined with our disposition for one-on-one interviews, and our systemic lack of pre-interview strategizing, and you end up with engineers being plopped down in rooms, or on phones, with no clue about how to run an interview, good kinds of questions to ask, or even what they're looking for.
We carp on people for not doing adequate phone screening, but I'd maintain that phone screens are the hardest part of the interview process, and that it's hard to run one well unless you've got extensive in-person interviewing experience. Phone screens flow differently, and you have to work harder to corral the candidate.
What we really need is a strong progression of interviewing skills training:
Lecture/training materials to introduce the interview process, guide engineers on technical skills assessment, and set in their minds what our bars are for the various SDE positions.
Pair in-person interviewing, with an experienced interviewer (bar raiser?).
Solo in-person interviewing (although my personal opinion is that we should abolish this entirely).
Pair/team phone screens (more of a leader/monitor type situation, though).
Solo phone screens.
I guess my point is that we shouldn't be having green SDEs be doing phone screens here.
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I just recently brought in a candidate like this... (it was my 2nd phone screen so I think I deserve some slack :) )...
I was trying hard to do the right thing in the phone screen, I even had this particular blog open on my laptop at the time! I'd like like to echo that I think there needs to be some training associated with this process... The last two times I've phone screened I felt like I'm made major mistakes... The first one didn't go well, and I'm confident not bringing him in was the right move, it was stressful... And the second one bombed the loop.
I'd stress that, for anyone new to phone screens to really carefully prepare for it, and read all the material on the intranet and in this blog really carefully...
My first reaction reading this is that the person on the phone screen isn't the same as the one who flew in. Any guesses on what the rate of this happening is?
— Albert W · January 19, 2005 10:55 PM
I'm amazed at how many questions he managed to bomb in only 20 minutes. My experience is that after a candidate bombs several questions in a row, I find it very hard to cut a line off to ask something new without sounding like I've made up my mind. Any key phrases to keep things moving along (and avoiding letting the candidate waste both our time digging a hole)?
— Ami F · January 18, 2005 04:59 AM
Doesn't seem surprising. Don't most people just suck at most things?
I've seen cases here where a hiring manager will bring in a sub-par candidate just because the manager thought the team needed that body that badly.
I'm not sure I want to work at a company that does that kind of thing.
— Andrew W · January 19, 2005 11:39 PM