I have an EE degree but have been doing s/w since college. A few years back I confidently went into a google interview and got destroyed. Out of the blue I got approached by amazon and decided to go through with it. I have about 2.5 yoe.
Overall, before this interview I did approximately 0 Leetcode questions, so that is fun.
Online:
I did not take this seriously at all considering my experience with google. 1 easy, 1 medium. Did it the night I got it, got the easy correct but my medium solution was too slow. The medium question was essentially to analyze performance of a very slow algorithm, but actually running the algorithm itself gave TLE.
Somehow, I moved forward? Honestly not sure how, but I'm fine with it.
Between this interview and the onsite I did approximately 10 Leetcodes, 3 hards and 7 mediums.
Virtual onsite:
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System design. Absolutely bombed, hence the SDE1. Basically needed a distrubuted system that could take inputs from many users and at a later point return a processed value.
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Design a chaching system, with followups that kept adding requirements. Probably about a Leetcode medium, but exceptionally easy if you have experience with real-world programming. Did very well here.
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Merge an arbitrary amount of sorted lists. I got the Onlogn solution, and was able to get the Onlonm (where m is number of lists) solution with a lot of help from the interviewer. Did pretty bad here
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Approximately a more complex version of https://leetcode.com/problems/employee-free-time/submissions/ Did very well, realized I could use a cpp set to store what times we actually cared about, and realized almost immediately we only really cared about the amount of employees off at each point.
I got extremely lucky to get an offer. I have a google interview coming up, and looking at lots of Leetcodes and people's interview experiences makes me realize how lucky I am to have gotten the questions I did. Note that, while I got the last question correct, at the time I could not solve 2sum in O(n). That's how lucky I got.
On another note- It is astounding how much more big tech pays. my old company offered me a senior-level role to stay, and it still would have been a lot less than amazon gave me for entry level. It's pretty silly.