Not the grandparent, but I'm encountering this particular part of the AWS interview structure right now, and trying to decide whether to bother continuing.
The ask, AFAICT, seems to be for me to prepare a collection of glib little short stories I can recite on demand in response to a "tell me about a time when..." question from a small list of possibilities.
Certainly I can do this; however, I am applying for a role as an engineer, not an actor or a storyteller. It is unclear what useful information this kind of prepared storytelling could possibly convey, and it is unclear whether, if this kind of activity is what the position actually entails to any great extent, I would want the position.
I feel cynicism in your answer. I can still give you an honest answer to your question.
Behavioral questions are far from new and not unique to Amazon. They serve two purposes: first, as a cultural match, and second, as a performance predictor.
The thing about Leadership Principles in Amazon is that they are not just slogans on the wall. They play a role in your day to day work. Things like your performance review and promotion consider how you apply these LPs to an extent.
Does it sound terrible? I can relate. But what is the alternative? I believe culture is a property of organizations. If you don't explicitly set a culture, one will emerge on its own. I have worked for several companies, and I appreciate the LPs. At least I explicitly know what "rules" to operate under.
So what if you think LPs are dumb or you hate them? that's fine. That means you wouldn't like it here, so it saves both from a bad match.
Back to your point about the interview. What useful information does this convey? quite a lot actually.
First they act as a sanity check. If we ask about Earns Trust, actually we are doing sort of the Asshole Test from OP. We are trying to determine if you are a pain to work with, or if you can establish good relationships with people. With Learn and be Curious we are trying to determine if you are open to learn new things. If you actively refuse to learn and just want to do your thing, you will probably struggle here. Things change fast and most everyone needs to adapt to keep up.
Second, they act as a calibration for role and leveling. Say you are hiring for a senior engineer position, and interview a candidate with +10 years of experience. However all of the candidate's examples are very simple, such as implementing a small feature. Will this candidate thrive as a senior engineer in Amazon where they will have to lead several engineers in multi-team efforts? At the very least we can say we don't have enough evidence to judge.
Third, it turns out some of them are actually good on-the-job performance indicators. Amazon has an internal science team that runs experiments on hiring. One of their experiments determined that high scores in certain LPs correlate with good performance after hire.
So there you go. You might personally dislike behavioral questions, and that is fair. However there is plenty of evidence to back up their usefulness in making hiring decisions. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to work here or not.
The ask, AFAICT, seems to be for me to prepare a collection of glib little short stories I can recite on demand in response to a "tell me about a time when..." question from a small list of possibilities.
Certainly I can do this; however, I am applying for a role as an engineer, not an actor or a storyteller. It is unclear what useful information this kind of prepared storytelling could possibly convey, and it is unclear whether, if this kind of activity is what the position actually entails to any great extent, I would want the position.