Round 1) Recruiter call...I have a lot of experience so this was a breeze

Round 2) Audio Chime call, with a live coder pad link -half LP/behavioral questions and half technical (write the reduce function in JS, apply different css to a Tabbed component, all Vanilla JS), had a lot of fun really jived with the interviewer.

Round 3) 4 hour virtual onsite...brutal. I studied for weeks (these interviews are much more targeted at new grads or people who live on leet-code)...once you actually work in Software for a while, figuring out how many unique paths a fictional robot has from one corner of a grid to the other doesn't really cross your mind very often...so I did tonnes of leetcode. I'm also not a front end engineer. I have always been full stack, I am very comfortable on the front end, but I am no front end magician.

The interview itself...I'm pretty sure the interviewers were just toying with me. Absolutely got grilled with LP questions (make sure you have exceptional examples...or be a good liar)...the reason I say this is they may ask a question that you think has to do with one topic, and then they will flip it and go bad-cop.

I.e - Tell me about a time you had to go out of your way to urgently help a customer? Ok well this is clearly a question about customer obsession, so I started telling a story of how in one of my first jobs ever out of school, in my first few months, I had to figure out why we had clients with random application hangs and crashes...which I was able to figure out and put a hotix in for while on the phone with a customer...Cool, nice example...WHAT DID YOU DO TO MAKE SURE THAT NEVER HAPPENED AGAIN...well, nothing...I was a kid...in my first job, I do have plenty of examples where I have implemented changes after receiving customer feedback but I didn't know that's where this question was going so I naiively told a tale from a period in my career where my capability to affect change or implement radical new ideas was low.

The interview was more or less a lot of this, good cop-bad cop. As for the technical...first of all the 20 minute brain-teaser is a horrible way to determine if someone is a good developer. But I did flub one of them, despite how easy they were.

Technical:

Read some input from some form elements and transform into JSON object based on the input name (i.e input name="person.name.first" name="person.name.last" should be {person: { name: { first: "The Value", last: "Some other value"}}} etc.

Implement a package manager (I.e A depends on B depends on C and B depends on E depends on F and F depends on C) basic depth-first search, or topological sort...checking for cycles

Systems design - develop the amazon search bar, taking into account Locale and some other stuff...honestly I don't use Amazon for anything so I had no clue what the Amazon search bar or home page looked like. This system design interviewer spent so long on LP questions I only had 10 minutes to even discuss how I might do this...but I knew I wasn't getting this job any way.

FE/UI specific questions were par-for-the-course

I did not apply for this job. I get recruiters from Amazon all the time. I never have agreed with how Amazon does their interviews. Glutton for punishment I guess.

Overall, the interview is not hard...as long as you play the game. Definitely not the hardest interview I've had, but certainly the longest. I regret over-studying.