Position: Software Engineer internship at Amazon
Location: Luxembourg
Date: Oct 2019

Initial Round:

I applied in October for multiple Amazon internships at different locations.
I completed my debugging assessment and got 7/7, then had my behavioural assessment and I think I done well then received my 2 coding challenges.

I had the inflight movies problem and the K-Nearest-Neighbour truck problem.
[https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/313719/Amazon-or-Online-Assessment-2019-or-Movies-on-Flight]
[https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/]

The inflight movies I completed but didnt handle for the case where 2 values are the same which was just me being naive with my edge cases and time management.

The K-Nearest-Neighbour problem I was very used to, but in java the input and output they wanted (think it was a list of lists of points) threw me and I wasted a lot of time with it.

I was declined by my other locations as I did not pass all the test cases which is fine, it was at this point I started taking leetcode more seriously anyway and began completing harder challenges, looking back these problems seem much easier now than before.

Suprisingly a recruiter reached out to me saying they were interested, I was certain this wasnt due to my programming assessment (I dont think they looked at it thankfully)
I had a phone interview scheduled with a senior in the department in Luxembourg (which I applied to), I was told it would be technical questions on chime.

First Interview:

So I spent a few weeks before heavily covering leetcode.
The interview was with the senior manager of the department was really nice actually, he told me the department was new and asked a few questions about me, he told me I was added to his calendar last minute so he didnt have anything prepared. He didnt know anything about me, he didnt have my cv so I filled him in as much as I could and he sounded impressed and I did the standard behavioural questions and then he asked if I knew regex and I explained I did and how I would use it and some patterns and that was it for technical.
At the end I asked how I did and he said it went very well so I was confident going through.

A week later I received an email saying I was onto the final stage of the application which was 2 technical interviews both only 30 minutes long on January 15th.
I revised all over christmas and new years on my basic leetcode mediums.

Final interview:

On the 15th i had my first chime virtual interview with a guy from Luton, England suprisingly, I joined the call 50 minutes early, he was 15 minutes late, said he didnt have time for introductions so we jumped right in, we hopped on the coding platform and he began 'severely' mispelling max contiguous subarray.
I knew I should have told him I know the problem already but I forgot to in the rush, I just told him after basic explaining and querying that I understand the problem and I can do either the brute force or get straight onto the optomised approach, he said just do the optomised.
I coded the dp approach which was O(n) time with O(n) space, I know I could do O(1) space but in the moment I blanked on it and didnt wanna risk in the short time we had messing around,

public int maxSubArray(int[] A) {
	int dp[] = new int[A.length];
	int max = A[0];
	dp[0] = A[0]; 
	for (int i = 1; i < A.length; i++) {			
		dp[i] = Math.max(dp[i-1] + A[i] ,A[i]);
		max = Math.max(max, dp[i]);
	}
	return max;
}

He looked at my code, then his screen and said mine wouldnt work, I was sure it would and went over it in an example with him but he kept saying he didnt think it could handle negatives, I copied it to a notepad for later, he kept telling me I was missing a variable (no explanation further) which was his hint and he then suddenly started typing out a sum variable, I realised he had the O(1) space method on his screen so quickly took over and started fixing it to the O(1) space solution, he looked over it and said "ah see now this method works" like mine wouldnt,

public int maxSubArray(int[] A) {
    int res = Integer.MIN_VALUE, sum = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < A.length; i++) {
        sum = Math.max(sum, 0) + A[i];
        res = Math.max(res, sum);
    }
    return res;
}  

he asked space complexity, I said my initial method was O(n) time and O(n) space but this current one is now O(1) space, he said okay and just said "our department uses ruby on rails, you dont use it what are you going to be able to do here", I told him I had experience in it before and how I am a very efficient learner etc, usual blag.

Next interview was with an italian guy who was sitting on a couch very chill, we just did an entire interview of behavioural questions, it suited all my best scenarios I had ready, we had great back and forth chat, even finished early and he asked me questions about my company I asked about his interaction with customers. It was a very good interview.

The waiting period:

I was told I would hear back within 5 business days, so one week goes by, two weeks, I email my recruiter asking for an update, automatic reply saying shes on holiday for another 10 days. She gets back and no email, I wait a couple of days then email her again she responds within an hour saying its a busy period and she will flag my request with the department (never a good sign) and they will get back to me by end of week, ten days goes by no email, I email her again saying Ive heard nothing, no reply, wait another week and email her, yet again no reply.

I get an email to my spam this morning saying I was declined from Amazon UK services and my luxembourg application is removed from the jobs page.

Overall a dissapointing experience but I will just keep working at it, applying again.
Wish I had the option to reapply now and redo my 2 coding challenges but oh well.