Team: Alexa | Hiring Event | Last Friday, Saw more than 30 people come into the office for interviews.
The result was so disappointing that i thought of not posting because i was still not over it, But LC has helped a lot and am posting in the hopes that this would help someone. This is the second time i am attending the onsite, the first time i did not even attempt the bar raiser, so i knew i would not get through.

YOE: 7 months FT

Verdict: Not selected

Experience:
The first two rounds were Algorithms, People from Alexa team.

Round 1:
https://leetcode.com/problems/populating-next-right-pointers-in-each-node/
I had around 20 mins in behavioural and then we came to this problem. I solved it using level order and had the perfect working solution, in the last 5 mins he asked if i could optimize it. At that instance, the in place did not strike me, So i could not.

Round 2:
20+ mins of behavioural.
Given a sudoku, validate it. I did the rows and columns validation when i got to the 3x3 validation got stuck in it but explained my approach.
They said it went well and to concentrate on the bar raiser.

Round 3: Entirely behavioural

Round 4: Bar Raiser: This was the most important round. She was some one from the Kindle team having 20+ years experience.
Question: I would have to guess a word(This would be my input for example: --------). I would have an API(which when passed a character would return me the index of the letter in the word if it exists). I also would have a dictionary which would contain a list of legit words.

getPosition('a') -> [0, 1]
getPosition('b') -> []

I would have to find the most efficient way and return the word.
This round was the best one by far, She seemed to be happy with my approach and then told me to code it, and considering it was bar raiser, and the LDP going well, i thought of like 70-30 chance of getting it.

I got a call yesterday saying, they discussed my profile for over an hour to get to the verdict, he said we usually dont give a feedback but you did really well and the LDP were perfect as well. But the TC for the first round was not the optimized, We would want our next hire to be better than 50% of the current people on Amazon and to be a bar raiser hire.

I felt really annoyed tbh for a company with no proper hiring structure, where for the same SDE 1 people have new grad positions and some of my friends had to go through 5 rounds, harder than mine and we were not "Bar raiser" enough. The feedback i got was a confirmation of how my interview went but just not solving the optimized way in the last 5 mins being the reason to not give you an offer is BS. If they want the brute force and the optimized way in a 30 min interview is possible mostly if you had only solved the problem and happen to remember it.

Posting it in the hopes that it would help someone.