Background

• I'm from a generic state school
• 3.30 GPA
• One year internship @ an incredibly small company

Online Assessment
Spooky, had the traditional three rounds.

Round 1: Debugging questions. Your choice of language.
Round 2: Scary coding exam.
Round 3: Work-life assessment. Just know your leadership principles and what to prioritize. Then you have a logic section. I'm pretty sure I failed that though--was a confusing one about a table or something like that.

Final Round (Virtual Interview)
You're given three links with engineers. You talk to them via Amazon Chime.

Round 1:

• Started off with a standard LP question. Have some relevant stories about LP (Leadership Principles) and be obsessed with your customers.
• Then the coding problem came. Due to NDA I will not discuss this--however, it was a graph question and I did not even write the optimal solution.
• It was a really strong blow and a rough start to the interview. I went over time and had literally 0 minutes of rest before the next interview. I did my best to calm myself mentally but it was really tough having to sell myself less than 1 minute after losing all confidence. Brace yourself for situations like this.

Round 2:

• I aced this portion--LP and all. I think this was the bar raiser, as there were two people there. There were more LP than usual, followed by a coding question. It was in Cracking the Coding Interview. The followup question to that was not--but if you know your data structures well the answer was rather obvious.
• Both engineers were silent throughout this whole process. It was awkward, but I did my best to talk and explain to them my thought process (I began to treat it more like a presentation and began to start mimicking Back to Back SWE without realizing it until much later).
• Session ended with him saying that they had "collected all the data that they needef or this session". This probably made up for the abysmal first round.

Round 3:

• Did pretty well on this section. Was asked standard LP once again.
• This question was a pretty unique variation and combination of Leetcode patterns and required a pretty good knowledge of data structures. I'd rate it at best a Medium though. I got the optimal solution down rather quickly. A follow up question was then made--which I was actually not able to finish on time.

Some Takeaways:

• I really thought that I had failed, considering I was not able to answer two technical questions. I must have either really impressed them with LP, or had some amazing voodoo explanations while I was talking about my thought process.

• I definitely made sure to test my code and look for edge cases--and verbally talked about them every single time while I was coming up with a solution. I was actively searching for ways to break my code and fix them as soon as possible.

• I attempted to make it more like a conversation with an interviewer--even if they weren't talking back, I was still walking through each idea I had. After I tested my idea, I began writing the code after letting them know about my solution.

• I then ran through my code line by line with my own given test cases. Check for mismatched > < (this happened to me twice), and == vs = (this happened to me four times). I was not expected to run my code though. I just VERBALLY walked through it.

• For LP, I just used standard STAR format. Overall, it was a pretty good session.

Offer Timeline

• It took 7 days to hear back from them (interview was on Thursday). I heard internally that hiring decisions were usually made on Wednesday--and this seems to be the case.

Preparation

• For preparation, I had some pretty amazing friends talk about my mock performance. I don't really think I'm that smart--and I failed two-sum when I first tried a mock interview less than a year ago. Overall, I spent about 2 months preparing and doing nearly 5-6 Leetcode questions a day. I was quite literally depressed and mentally ill doing this while handling 73 job rejections--so I suggest giving yourself more time to prep. Procrastination hurt me bad. Really bad. Don't do 5-6 Leetcode a day. I missed out on precious moments with my new kitten and nearly compromised my current relationship. Take your time.

For those of you who are going through this process--best of luck to you guys. If I can make it, anyone can.