Status: New grad, MS Computer Science, US
Position: SDE-New Grad at Amazon
Years of Experience: 0
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: December,2020

Timeline

Bloomberg [Reject]

Bloomberg Phone Interview - 45 mins(Aug-2020)

Just started applying for jobs. I saw that there were a lot of Bloomberg Offers on the Leetcode Discussion page. Applied for the posting. Got a mail after 3 days to schedule a phone interview.
Had the interview next week.

The interviewer was on-time. Had a small talk about my background and the company. After spending about 10 mins ,we went into the coding platform on Hackerrank.

The first question was a variation of
Leetcode - 155 ,Min Stack
https://leetcode.com/problems/min-stack/
Solved it really fast.
Discussed the complexities. The interviewer was more interested in the thought process,before we went into coding. Bloomberg really does focus on how well we are able to communicate and explain the approach in detail.

The second question was on binary search and was similar to
Leetcode - 33 ,Search in Rotated Sorted Array
https://leetcode.com/problems/search-in-rotated-sorted-array/
I was also able to solve this quickly.

Had a really awesome interview experience. This was my first ever interview and it went really well.

Bloomberg Virtual Onsite (September-2020)

The very next day after my phone interview ,I got a mail to schedule my virtual onsite. I scheduled the interview after 10 days. By this time , I had done about 370 Leetcode questions.
Took the entire week to go through Bloomberg Tagged questions on leetcode. I also went through the interview discussion section to see what type of questions they were asking.

Round-1

Finally the day had arrived. The first round had two interviewers and we talked about 5-6mins on my resume . We went into coding after the discussion. The first question was simple and I got the straight off the tagged questions on Leetcode
Leetcode - 56 , Merge Interval
https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/

Was able to solve this very easily. Again the interviewers were really interested in how well I conveyed my ideas. The second question was :
Leetcode 694, Number of distinct island
https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-distinct-islands/
Solved this after a bit of thinking. The interviewers seemed really satisfied.

Round-2
Design NYC Subway System
This was a really interesting question and I had a nice time talking with the interviewers while solving this. After spending about 25 mins, we moved on to the next question:

Leetcode 236 ,Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree
https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-tree/
Was also able to solve this question really fast and the interviewer seemed really happy.
For the next 20 mins we went into a deep discussion on data structures, how a heap and a BST works

After Round 2 , I was informed that I will be having 2 more rounds.
Earlier I read that this was a positive sign.

Round 3 was a HR round and involved basic questions
Round 4 was with a Manager, where I was asked some basic System Design concepts.

This interview went perfect. I was really happy with my performance.
After a week I got a rejection mail. I still do not know where I screwed up. Till date this was my best Interview.

After the rejection, I felt really low. Had lost the will to code and do anything. But after a week I got up and started coding again with more determination.

Lucid [Reject]

Online Assessment involved a coding challenge where I had to solve a question within a time frame of 10 days.

First Round (September-2020)
Involved a coding challenge where I had to solve 3 questions which were given in an hour.
All 3 were short and concise codes. The third one was designing the Othello game.
The interviewer was nice and polite. This round went pretty well and I could solve all 3.

Virtual Onsite (September-2020)
Had 2 rounds of interviews.

Round 1

First question was based on linked list and arrays.
Second question was similar to Leetcode 207 Course Schedule:
https://leetcode.com/problems/course-schedule/

I solved this but the interviewer wanted a different approach , not the topological sort which I had used to solve. Tried solving it, but couldn't come up with what the interviewer wanted in the given time frame.

Round 2 was mainly OOD Design and Resume based questions.
The interviewer felt my resume was more of ML oriented.

Round 1 didn't go exactly perfect and in Round 2 the HR felt my resume wouldn't be a great fit for the company, So I didn't have high expectations here.
Rejected after 2 weeks.

Amazon New Grad (September-2020) [Offer]
Finally the Amazon Online Assessment arrived after 1.5 months from the day I applied.
I had really high expectations for this one.

OA-1
Was able to solve all the debugging questions.

OA-2
Solved the first question within 10 mins. For the next 60 mins I tried solving the second question.
I was pretty confident about my approach but I kept on getting "Unhandled Exception".
I wasn't able to solve this.

Felt really bad after this round, all the months of coding felt useless.

OA-3
Finished the OA-3 the next day.
By now I was a living zombie. All my dreams of working in a big-tech company were ruined.
All the money my parents spent on my education , everything felt useless.

Was Rejected within 3 days.

But wait the Amazon Story doesn't end here.
As I mentioned , I felt that I wasn't doing anything wrong in OA2. Turns out there were a lot of students who faced the same problem with that particular question. I mailed Amazon after 2 weeks.

After about a week from my mail, Amazon again sent out OA2 and OA3.
This time I was able to solve all the questions without any difficulty.

Amazon Virtual Onsite (November - 2020)
Had the 30 min round. The interviewer was awesome. We had a nice time chatting. The interview was mainly OA2 review.

After a week , I got a mail that I was waitlisted.

By this time I was extremely frustrated. The one interview I could clear, I got waitlisted for that.
Cursing my luck , I started coding even more aggressively and after a few weeks, I finished about 500 Leetcode questions.

Apple [Reject]

This was Apple. I knew this wouldn't be like any ordinary interview like I had done earlier.

Apple Virtual Onsite - Round 1(October 2020)
The interviewer seemed not so friendly. He wasn't really impressed with my resume.
We started coding, I was able to solve the given question. The question was not on leetcode, but I was able to successfully code and execute the given question. It was a graph question which used backtracking (DFS).

Got rejected after 3 days

The holiday season was fast approaching and I still didn't have a job. By now I got used to rejections, but each time although I felt broken down after the rejection, I tried getting up and coming back stronger.

KLA [Ghosted]
Just before thanksgiving week, I tried reaching out to a recruiter and she scheduled an interview after thanksgiving.

Round-1 (November 2020)
This round was with a Manager. The company was looking for a Full Stack-SDE, although I had no work experience, the manager seemed really interested in my coding skills.

The only downside was the language. They wanted me to do the coding in Java, but it had been like 3-4 years that I used Java.
Except for that fact everything went smooth
The following question was discussed with various approaches
https://leetcode.com/problems/intersection-of-two-linked-lists/

Round-2 (December 2020)
I was given to Design a BST from scratch. Had to write all the insert, delete and search functions.
The code took me about 25mins. But I was able to run and execute it.
The second question was another design question, similar to
Leetcode 146: LRU
https://leetcode.com/problems/lru-cache/

The interview went smooth and I was really happy with my performance. But the recruiter ghosted me after round 2. I wrote a follow-up mail but she didn't reach back.

TikTok [Reject]

TikTok Online Assessment (November 2020)
Got 4 questions on a hackerrank platform. The questions seemed quite difficult. I was able to solve 2 questions full and the other two partially.
In the first week of December, I got the interview invitation.

TikTok Virtual Onsite (December 2020)

By now I had done a lot of interviews, but this interview experience was HORRIBLE.
There was a communication barrier. The interviewer couldn't explain the question properly and was always reframing the question. I tried asking clarifying questions, but the interviewer pretended like he couldn't hear anything. He even wasn't able to understand what I was coding.
After a lot of struggle I was able to figure out what he wanted. Then he told me to execute it. My program did not execute in the first go, but after 2-3 mins I solved the bugs and executed the code.

The interview was supposed to be in ENGLISH, but it felt like they didn't care about the language.
I really felt disappointed. TikTok being such a big -tech giant, I expected better.

AWS

In November 2020, I reached out to a recruiter.
He sent me the OA. It was smooth and I got all the questions from the below list
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/344650/Amazon-Online-Assessment-Questions

The recruiter was supposed to schedule my interview in January.

Amazon New Grad Offer

Finally in December I was able to get off the waitlist and had the OFFER !

Final Say
Yeah, it was a hell of a journey with little ups and mostly downs. When I started doing leetcode in March, I wasn't that great. But by November, I was helping all my friends with their OA and practicing leetcode.
There was a time, I felt like I was going crazy, coding all day without talking to anyone or eating anything. And after the rejections one by one, I felt like I was good for nothing.
Everyone reading this , I know it's difficult going through the process especially if you don't have any work experience. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel and when you reach there, it's all happiness. Practice coding and don't forget about your friends and family. Everything will seem sorted out. It's just a part of life.
At the end, when that one interview clicks, it will all be WORTH IT !
As in the words of Steven Tyler, "Dream On, Dream until the dream comes true".

Goodluck Everyone!!!!