Amazon Lab126 interview questions

I had a phone interview for a management position and it was one of the strangest I've experienced. The interviewer was some senior guy in charge of software on a big project, who repeatedly mentioned that he'd worked in the industry for decades and had seen it all. He didn't want to talk about my technical background at all, only management style, and was primarily interested in whether I was willing to fire people. His approach to a creative engineer who is underperforming is to tell them to shape up or ship out, rather than to look for why they might not be motivated and see if there is a "carrot" rather than a "stick" solution (usually there is). This all set off huge red flags about how this company may treat its employees. He also asked if I'd done agile development specifically, and didn't seem interested in my experience running a project using other means. My company uses formal project management because our projects are way too big for agile, and I got the impression he was wedded to agile rather than valuing general experience running projects. Another red flag is he seemed to expect running agile to take a big chunk of a manager's time. It sounded like they expected an awful lot of people management overhead for 5-10 reports. Another red flag was that if another interview had happened, it would have been dinner with the other managers to see if they liked me. I would never conduct an interview like that - if the management team likes the candidate, they've become invested in hiring them before they've actually gone through a technical grilling. Summary - my one hour phone interview lines up with comments on this site about "Darth Vader" management style.