IBM Engineer Slams Bar Raiser Interviews: Tech Hiring Is Copying Rituals That Never Worked
TejasKumar_ · x · 2026-10-15
Key points
- IBM AI engineer Tejas Kumar published a long-form critique arguing that bar raiser loops, OKRs, the Spotify model and agile standups are mostly complexity copied from bigger companies without checking whether it ever worked there.
- Bar raiser interviews, invented by Amazon in 1999, use cross-team interviewers scoring candidates on 16 Leadership Principles; Amazon has 10,000+ of them, and Revolut, Mastercard and others have copied the practice.
- Candidates spend afternoons telling STAR-format stories scored against rubrics — rituals the author argues didn't even make Amazon big.
- He checks the data behind these practices, argues AI makes the slow hiring status quo untenable, and ends with the alternative hiring approach that got him hired at IBM.
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