I am speechless. I went to a no name undergrad school, got C in data structures, algorithms, discrete math, and other classes and got into FAANG!! I have been practicing leetcode for few hours everyday for past 3 months and it really works guys as long as you are consistent!

Bio: Grad student at a state school, 1 IT internship experience and 1 SWE internship experience at unknown companies.

Offer Details:

• Salary: $9350 per month
• Rent Stipend: $2450 per month
• Location: NYC

I was not in US during interview process but this is the timeline in eastern time:

• Friday, July 16, 2:16AM - submitted application

• Thursday, July 22, 4:09PM - got invited to 2 part OA (not 3 parts with debugging)

• Monday, July 26, 5:42 AM - finished part 1 and part 2 of OA

• Friday, July 30, 2:52 AM - final interview scheduling invite

• Wednesday, August 4, 2:19 PM - Another final interview scheduling invite lol

• Thursday, August 5, 2:28 PM - final interview time confirmation

• Monday, August 9, 4:00 PM - final interview

• Wednesday, August 11, 3:00 PM - portal update to new location

• Thursday, August 12, 2:38 PM - offer letter!

Part 1 of OA was hacker rank coding assessment. I got full test cases for first problem, and half the test cases for second problem. In part 2 work simulation, I tried to answer every question using leadership principles. For example they repeatedly asked would I push the deadline to fully finish a project or would I finish the core parts by deadline. I always answered finish it by deadline because Amazon has notorious culture of tight deadlines.

I got invited to schedule the interview on 7/30 and I selected the 8/2 monday and 8/3 tuesday timeslots. They didn't even confirm my interview selection and did not reply to me at all. After 8/3 passed, they finally got back to me on 8/4 wednesday and asked me to select new timeslots!

2 years ago I made it to final round of amazon as well and I crammed like 50 most frequent Amazon questions on leetcode. They asked me an objected oriented design question which is so different from a normal leetcode algorithm question, I bombed it lol. Apparently the question they asked me was 70th most frequent amazon tagged question on leetcode so I almost got to it during my cram session 💀

This year for prep I didn't do any Amazon tagged questions because I am also preparing for interviews with other companies. Past 3 months I did around 150 leetcode problems (mostly medium and some hard) in a depth first manner. Meaning I would do 10 two pointer questions, then 10 bfs questions, then 10 topological sort questions, etc. You want your brain to understand each pattern well and only focus on mastering that one pattern. Don't move back and forth between 20 different problem types. As bruce lee said, "I fear a man who practiced one punch 100 times then a man who practiced 100 punches once. "

My tip for doing leetcode: After doing a problem delete the whole code and code it again. Write down what mistake you made and what key thing you learned for each problem in a notebook. When you do a new leetcode problem, code it again from scratch the next day and one week from that day. Reviewing is probably more important than doing a new problem.

My tip for behavioral: Come up with 1-2 example per leadership principle and in your answer use STAR format. Also drop in some leadership principle words without making it obvious for example say "I wanted to satisfy the customer" or "I took ownership of the project."

My tip for coding interview:

• First ask questions to clarify everything like is there a null input, negative numbers, are we returning the length of an array or the actual array?, etc.

• Write down on the board or screen how you would do an example manually using pseudocode or plain english.

• Optimize pseudocode and explain time and space complexity.

• Only at the very end, code your solution and test it using examples.