Bar Raiser Interviews, OKRs, the Spotify Model and Agile: Companies Are Full of It

Kumar, an AI engineer at IBM in Berlin, argues that bar raiser interviews, OKRs, the Spotify model and agile ceremonies are mostly process copied from bigger companies without checking whether it worked there. His own story runs through it: in 2015 he failed every interview he took (no degree, no polished stories) until a small Berlin startup hired him on a technical test and the initiative he had shown. Six years later he was a staff engineer at Spotify.

On hiring, he leans on Google’s own numbers. Laszlo Bock said in 2013 that Google found no relationship between interview scores and job performance, and Google later found that four interviews were enough to predict a hire decision with 86% confidence. The 2022 re-analysis by Paul Sackett and colleagues puts the structured interview at the top of the list (a correlation of 0.42 with job performance). He then borrows Gautam Mukunda’s leader filtration theory: a vetting process produces the predictable middle, and the outliers (best and worst) come in through the side door.

On process, he says the Spotify model was more aspiration than practice, that Marty Cagan stopped recommending OKRs to most companies he meets in 2020, and that “agile” lost its meaning by 2014, when Agile Manifesto co-author Dave Thomas said so himself. AI is what makes it urgent. Every one of these rituals selects for following orders in the expected format, which is what a language model does well. He points to Stanford’s payroll research, which puts employment of 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed jobs about 19% below their peers by June 2026.

His alternative has three parts: ask every candidate the same questions about the actual job and save the gut rating for last (Kahneman’s method in the Israeli army); swap the whiteboard for a work sample done in private (an NC State study found people watched at a whiteboard performed about half as well); and pay for a short trial on a real problem (Automattic pays $25 an hour for up to 20 hours). He would add one structured question to every interview: what did you build that nobody asked you for?

A few details are looser than his sources. The random-interview study he credits to Robyn Dawes is led by Jason Dana. The Spotify line about the model being “part ambition, part approximation” comes, in Jeremiah Lee’s account, from agile coach Joakim Sundén rather than a whitepaper author, and Lee says the model was never fully implemented. Amazon’s 10,000 bar raisers include trainees. The Columbia student’s $15 million was an a16z Series A for a later company. The 99.97% significance figure for Mukunda’s result could not be traced.