Degree: Pursuing MS in Software Engineering
YOE: 1(in India)
Status: Reject
Amazon Assessment:
Applied to the position on Feb 22, 2020 through the careers website and received the coding challenge on Feb 26, 2020. I gave the challenge on March 2,2020.
Assessment Questions:
The assessment was of 2 programming questions followed by "describe your approach" section and final the workstyle form.
The time limit for the coding challenge is 90 minutes. Coded in 50 minutes and passed all test cases.
For Amazon assessment, I have seen a trend that if you pass all test cases then you won't have to go through the phone screen, but if you miss some test cases then you might have to go through an additional phone screen for SDE positions.
After the submission of the test, I received the call from a recruiter within a half-hour and informed that I have will be called for virtual onsite with 4 virtual rounds and asked me to reply to her email within dates.
Virtual Onsite: (March,26 2020)
Round 1:
What is the team about (2 minutes)
Interviewer's Introduction (2 minutes)
Personal Introduction (2 minutes)
LP-1 (10 minutes): Tell me about a situation where you have missed a deadline
Follow-ups: Did you learn anything from it, how did your manager reacted.
LP-2(10 minutes): Tell me about a situation where you had a disagreement.
Coding Question: Shuffle an array.
Explained him a brute force approach where we will have an array of elements and a boolean array to mark them as visited. Since I solved the question before on LC as I aware of the optimized approach which is a linked list solution but he was puzzling me on the probability distribution of random function of Java.
At this time I realized that I had a bad start.
Round 2: (Bar Raiser) (The recruiter told me beforehand during the warm-up call)
Interviewer's Introduction (2 minutes)
Personal Introduction (2 minutes)
Any Project which is on my resume (5 minutes)
LP-1 (15 minutes): Tell me about a situation where you did something extra for your product, which was not part of your daily tasks.
Follow-ups: Explain the impact in terms of numbers, why was the task was not in sprint task.
LP-2 (5 minutes): Tell me about a time where you missed a deadline.
Coding Question: Minimum Window Substring.
Explained him both the brute force approach and sliding window approach with the respective time and space complexities and coded out the entire solution
The bar raiser went really well, as I was able to solve the coding problem and I was also ready with the scenarios for the above LP's.
Round 3: (Hiring Manager- There are two hiring managers for this team )
Hiring Manager's-1 Introduction (3 minutes)
Hiring Manager's-2 Introduction (3 minutes)
Personal Introduction (2 minutes)
Explain your current role where your interning and the product you are working and some cross questions(12 minutes)
Coding Question: Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree (30 minutes)
Explained him the preorder approach and coded the question.
LP-1 (15 minutes): Tell me about a situation where you learned something very new and aced it.
This round also went very well as I already had scenarios prepped for this LP.
Round 4: (Design Round)
Interviewer's Introduction (5 minutes)
About Team (3 minutes)
Personal Introduction (2 minutes)
LP-1: Tell me about a situation where you did something innovative. (10 minutes)
LP-2: Tell me about a situation each team mates proposed a different solution for same problem and you had to accept their approach (10 minutes)
Coding Question: Design a vending machine (30 minutes) (Object Oriented Design)
I didn't approached the problem well, as I took 10 minutes to come up with requirements. The interviewer wasn't that helpful as well. I was concentrating more on the Object diagram and design patterns for the design but the focus of the round is to come quickly with requirements and code the required functions. I coded out few interfaces according to the diagram I explained and since time was running out I could only declare variables and the respective functions and arguments.
After the interview, I did not have a good feeling about the interview because I have repeated my LP scenarios in one case and I did not have proper scenarios worked out for conflicts and deadline where I faked my scenarios on the fly and the follow ups were enough for the interviewer to understand that I was faking.
Takeaways:
- Amazon imposes a great importance on LP, so try preparing well for the LP scenarios.
- In each round coding round was about 30 minutes and LP was approximate for 20 minutes.
- Do not repeat your LP's
- Try answering your LP's in a STAR(a situation, task, action, result) manner
Got a call from the interviewer a week later saying that I have been rejected with no particular feedback for me.