Amazon | SDE2 | Seattle | May 2020 [Reject]
Anonymous User
13196

Quick breakdown of the COVID era Amazon interview process to help others, seems like a lot of people got rejected recently looking at the recent posts here:

YoE: 4 at private company
Interviewer reached out to do an OA

OA:
-number of islands type question
-reorder log files type question

Recruiter immediately reached out to schedule onsite

Onsite: 4 rounds, each round had a few behaviorial amazon leadership principle type questions

-System design, design Dropbox

-Question about how to efficiently find smallest container a package with size x can be placed in, you are given an array of counts of package sizes. Follow up: what if the size of the container received includes multiple dimensions like height width length, how would you sort in better than O(n)?

-Question about creating a calculator that takes a string containing numbers and operations and returns the integer result, including error handling

-Question similar to Course Schedule but completely different story involving packages

Overall I thought I did okay, obviously the recruiter did not give any feedback so I'm not sure. I devised a solution for each problem but I ran out of time before completing the calculator problem. System design was probably average at best. Don't have any real advice since I didn't get feedback on which areas were poor but I would probably just practice doing problems with time limit. I think also it's important to mentally check that you're not getting tunnel vision trying to force a solution with the first idea you think of, I wasted time trying to do that and did not consider trying another option until I had insufficient time to complete the solution.

One thing I was surprised with is that they did not ask me to explain time space complexity at all.

LC: 200ish, mostly easy and medium

This was my first FAANG interview and I thought it went ok so it is a bit disappointing. Good luck to everyone grinding.

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