Status: Currently Employeed by Startup in NYC about 4-5 total work experience about 2 years coding experience (Bootcamp grad)
Position: L5 FEE at Amazon
Date: May 2020

NOTE:

• This is my second onsite interview w/ Amazon, I was rejected fron SDE role last year (they recommended me for FEE role)

Technical phone screen (1 hour):

• Behavioral questions

1. Don't really remember but nothing crazy or anything to do with 14 leadership principles (about 5 mins)

• Technical Question (JavaScript)

2. Was extrememly easy. Basically involved taking input and storing the input in Object for later use. Only tricky part was the method could be chained (see below). Just remember to return this.

array.method().method().method()

Virtual Onsite (5 rounds an hour each)

Notes:

• Each interview is approximately 30 mins behavioral and 30 mins technical
• The behavioral questions are mostly situational relating to 14 leadership principles, I'm sorry I don't remember all of them so I'll only give color to tech questions that were asked below but here are some behavioral questions I do remember:
• Tell me about a time you took calculated risk?
• Tell me about a time you had to weigh short term versus long term costs
• What are some of your shortcomings?

1st round
Frontend Design:
Given a online newspaper website, talk through how you would design it

• I chose to talk about the backend architecture a little too long
• I said I would react/redux abd explained what the store might look like
• I talked about incorporating a screens API to make pages more dynamic
  Feedback
• This was the best interview of the day for me, got solid feedback and had nice interviewer
• Give myself 5/5

2nd round
HR (all behavioral)
Behavioral question after behavioral question for an hour

• Get really good at making up shit on the spot
• Go over leadership principles before the interview and try to draw on your past experiences from school or work
• Emphasize CLIENT OBSESSION and OWNERSHIP

Feedback

• In the moment it felt okay, but afterwards I realized it probably could have gone smoother
• Give myself 3/5

3rd round
Bar raiser (I think)
Technical Question

• Some wild question that had you look up a directory in your computer, and produce metadata about the files within the directory in yaml file by reading the file names
• Had absolutely nothing to do with frontend
• You basically had to have fantastic eyesight to recognize pattern in file name
• The live code editor broke, so the interviewer was floundering around for 15 mins trying to figure out what to do before I politely suggested I share a repl.it link and I share my screen, he agreed to my suggestion and that's how I coded

Feedback

• Hard to know, guy was really hard to understand
• Didn't come remotely close to finishing the problem, spent a bunch of time trying to clarify problem
• Give myself 1/5

4th round
Frontend tech

• Question was finding lowest common parent in DOM tree
• I've done this problem before but couldn't remember how to solve in linear time, I was pretty shook from previous interview - wasn't thinking clearly
• I came up with shitty quadratic solution that involved slow-ass DFS and moving up parent
• Interview basically told me how to do it linear, when it clickled finally he asked me to implement it - I spat it out in 2 mins

Feedback

• Not really sure, I guess that probably means bad
• Give myself 3/5

5th round
Frontend Application

• Design and implement fullstack flashcard system
• I spent to much goddamn time designing backend again, guy told me to move on to frontend
• It wasn't clear to me if this was system design or actual coding, after spending some time explaining how I would do it using React, he asked me to build it
• I wrote gorgeous react component in like 5 mins covering a shitload of edge cases
• After I finsihed the component the guy randomly asked me if I knew what ARIA tags are, I honestly had no idea which is exactly what I said (at this point I knew I wasn't getting this job so I gave 0 fucks)

Feedback

• Guy had some bones to pick about the performance of my frontend app, specifically with callbacks within onClick tag within HTML element
• I said that I would employ "cursors" to know which cards should be returned from the backend, he was not following that idea at all, I tried to explain it 3 times very clearly but he was not understanding
• Guy was a tool
• Give myself 2/5

Closing Notes

• Looking back on my day, it took a turn for the worst after the bar raiser. If you find yourself shook after tough interview. Go take a shit, grab a cup of coffee, do jumping jacks, whatever. Give yourself 5 mins to recover and get in a better mindset.
• I believe I crushed the behavioral part, but unlike the first time I interviewed with Amazon last year, I did not prepare for the behavioral at all. I honestly just made shit up on the spot and was amazed with myself the stories I came up with. If you are fantastic at lying on the spot, like myself, you will do completely fine
• Technical was not that hard, the hard part of the technical is understanding 10000% of every line of code you write. I find that I definitely just take things for granted and when I was asked certain things I was like "oh because XYZ" but they like were like "what is XYZ" and I would have no idea. It benefits to understand the code you write on a very deep level.