Current Role: 3.1 years Experienced Full Stack Developer building awesome stuff for the developers community, But under pressure of society, seeing people getting crazy pay these days.
1st attempt (Early 2021): This was very sudden and I attempted it with little preparation (Had not touched Coding from the time Graduated :(, as Recruiter was continuously following up. Was a good Learning experience. Rejected after Onsite. (Screwed up on Coding questions and bad communication in HLD)
This was my second attempt for a SDE-2 role, After first attempt, I had realized that Technical Interviews are Broken and companies don’t care of how good of a developer you are ( even if you might be very good at your actual job ) and you are judged based on your ability to grind leetcode questions.
Started Grinding Leetcode + Preparing for Standard Design Questions (HLD + LLD) + Preparing Stories for LP questions.
Multiple Recruiters Kept on Reaching out to me, in between, but I kept delaying saying I am not ready yet. Amazon is hiring like Crazy this time, Everyone I know off, was being reached out by Amazon Recruiters. Don’t know what is going on in Amazon.
Online Assessment (90 mins + 20 mins)
I was given a test link and a week's time
Online Assessment was pretty straightforward. Both of them were LC medium and I finished the test pretty quickly.
90 mins to solve the below two questions and then 20 mins to describe the approach and time & space complexity.
Don’t remember the exact questions as it was pretty straight forward - Solved with all test case passed
Virtual Onsite DSA Round - Day 1 (week after OA )
Onsite DSA Round was okay. (Coding - 40 mins + LP questions + My Current Work - )
Was asked just One LC medium hard question (Not Sure why, as I heard 2 are asked), Interviewer was a person with almost same Experience as mine (Strange). Even though I came up with and Optimal Solution , He asked me to keep adding test cases and do a dry Run for all of them - Not Sure What he was looking for as I didn’t get any hint, I was able to execute the same code in leetcode post interview with AC .
Virtual Onsite HLD + LP Round (50 mins + 10 mins) - Day-1 (week after OA)
This Round Went okay- Good
This Round I was Expecting a LLD as the person who had scheduled the Interview told me It will be a LLD ( Amazon is having Interviews in massive Quantity these days - So these confusions can happen by recruiter ) , but that’s okay as I was prepared for both LLD + HLD .
Very Popular System Design Question , Can be Found in ed****.io :)
Two Interviewers were on Video Call and interrupting each other many times :( - This was very awkward. I kept Calm and tried to address them both one by one.
Started with FR, NFR , then they asked me to come up with End to End Flow ( this part was liitle frustrating as both of them kept on interrupting me Even before I speak and get to that Part, got Confused in some parts ), Followed by Schema Followed By API Contracts - Interviewers were Convinced finally and seemed happy
I was sure that the flow and HLD was correct as I had practiced the same question and watched many YouTube Video. But on defining the API Contracts I accidently missed on some important Ones, then corrected after hinted.
Virtual Onsite HLD Round + LP - Hiring Manager (50 mins + 10 mins) - Day-2 ( Four Days after previous )
This round went awesome.
I had rescheduled this twice as my preferred time was not available. Recruiter did this happily, Thanks to them.
Very Popular System Design Question , Can be Found in ed****.io :) with a small Follow up Question to monetize this product.
I felt I had impressed interviewer on LP questions, so gained some confidence before proceeding to HLD question
I nailed this Round as I had practiced this question several times with time bound and did cover all aspects - FR, NFR, Estimates, Flow, DB schema, API contracts, Concurrency handling, Monitoring, Fault Tolerance, follow up Questions
Finished it about 10 mins earlier (Interviewer told me he did not have anything else to ask and I had Covered all aspects he could think off) then asked me to how would I monetize this and optimize ads visibility - Good Conversation on this.
After 2 days recruiter reached out to me saying that I willl be having another Technical Round ( Didnt Say If it was Bar Raiser, though it was )
Bar Raiser- LP ( 25 mins )+ Project Questions ( 15 mins )+ Coding ( 20 mins )
This is where I felt, I screwed up in coding Question. ( I had practiced a lot of LC question , but if its not your day, its not your day )
He started with a Lot of LP questions - this went well as I had practiced it in STAR format with many stories.
Followed with Language specific Questions + Project Discussion for around 10 mins - Went okay, One Language Question I answered wrong, hadn’t prepared for this as I heard Amazon doesn’t ask Language internal questions :(
Then comes a Question in last 30 mins ( 20+10) , ( he added 10 mins beyond an hour seeing me struggle maybe ) - A HARD DP question, which is very rarely asked in interviews, and from looking at past leetcode discuss + top questions, I had not prepared much DP questions ( I regret this ) for Amazon.
It took me a while to understand it properly in first place, then I tried to do it in a way that worked with test cases he provided, with a decent optimization, then he added few more test cases, at this point I realized that, my base case was wrong, So I took a pause for 2 mis and thought of a way to handle it, with some more test cases - Seemed to work., He told He was okay with this for those test case and understand my approach and Since we were beyond time , Ended the interview.
On Checking post Interview I realized, there were multiple ways to solve this question in different websites, my approach taken was one of the uncommon one.
I am still awaiting Results. Please rate my chances :)
Biggest Learning : """ Interviews can be very unpredictable, Be prepared for everything """