Overall Takeaway: AMAZON IS TOXIC

This summer I was contacted by an amazon recruiter and straight up given an online assessment which. I completed the online assessment the very same night and was then invited for the virtual onsite rounds. 4 rounds of 1 hour each with 15mins break in between.

Here are the two questions I was asked in the online assessment.

https://gist.github.com/Rutvik17/5deae0bc1e63425113f34ca33a28bf39

https://gist.github.com/Rutvik17/07a7b56a1011547d3257e171f82732b1

For practice

https://gist.github.com/Rutvik17/a0a1f83a780d166277e2d9cd2ab5ece5

https://gist.github.com/Rutvik17/d64a85b77a2532dcfffc42657561790a

I passed all the test cases and I was invited for the final virtual onsite rounds. My recruiter was really nice and she shared with me all the necessary information to practice for the interview.

I practiced LeetCode everyday till the day of my final rounds and understood all the data structures and how they are implemented. I learned about LinkedLists, Graphs, Binary Trees, HashMaps and solved problems on leetcode.

My first interview was with a senior engineer, it looked like he had just woken up and was still scratching his body ( very unprofessional for a company looking for 100% from their candidates and who heavily emphasize on their 14 principles ) He asked me about 2-3 leadership principle questions and then we moved onto the coding challenge. The coding challenge was a Cat Café. Where a customer enters the café and plays with cats and I have to calculate fees for the customer based on the time he spent in the café. I absolutely nailed this question using HashMap and then he modified the question to have VIP customers and regular customers which I nailed it as well and he was pretty happy.

My second interview was with the bar raiser (Senior hiring Manager) He asked me some leadership principle questions and then we moved on to the coding challenge. The coding question was straight from LeetCode https://leetcode.com/problems/add-two-numbers-ii/description/ I started off good with this question and then midway through I realized that I understood the problem wrong and had to use recursion, so I explained it to the interviewer but I could already tell that I am rejected from his face, at end I still had 10 mins left but he did not let me finish the question and rushed me into concluding and if I had any questions.

My 3rd interview was with a SDE 2 who had been at amazon for 2 years, very hard to talk with dint even greet properly. He asked an excel sheet problem. I was given A1 with value 5 and then A2 with value 10 and A3 would be A1 + A2 and I through of using HashMap here as well because I dint know the length if I would use a 2d array to initialize. After doing that the interviewer added if the value of A2 was updated to 10 then what would A3 be. I added operations to my map keys stored for keys like A3 which has to do an addition operation. I did good overall but interviewer him self looked confused and did not even know JavaScript looked like.

This was a system design and the final interview. The interviewer was hard to talk with and he started with LPs and then I was told to design a push notification service for demo devices in stores. When a demo device in a store registers an exception, it should send a push notification to a internal react native app used by amazon employees.

Overall I believe I did a good job with the interviews and I had really prepared for it but I did not get the offer. I believe I did not impress the senior hiring manager in the second Interview.

From the look of it they are looking for people who get 100% in the interviews, and I got 2 positive feedbacks from the interviewers 1 and 3 so I believe they did vote for me but it was the senior hiring manager that cut me off.

From the experience it feels very toxic and they introduced a new performance plan which all engineers should meet otherwise they are just kicked out and from an inside employee ( I know very well ) you are on call all the time no matter your position, basically you have no life.

I did feel sad I did not get in because I HAD GIVEN 100% IN MY PREPARATIONS but now I would never work for amazon. They don't deserve me.