Status: 5 years non-tech xp, Masters CS top 5 CS School
Position: SDE 2 at Amazon
Location: Nashville, TN
Date: May 4th, 2020

Online Assessment (1hr):

• leetcode easy
• leetcode medium
• both show up in top amazon interview questions

Virtual Onsite (4 rounds):

• Hiring Manager (1hr)
  • Sys. Design, very common question you can find on youtube.
  • 2 LPs
• Bar Raiser (1hr)
  • approx. Leetcode medium/hard because main focus was to see my thought process, how I digest a difficult hard problem.
  • 2 LPs
• Fellow coder (1hr)
  • approx. Leetcode easy because main focus was on OOP and writing extensible code
  • 2 LPs
• Two fellow coders (1hr)
  • approx. Leetcode easy ramping up to medium because main focus was on DS + Algs
  • 2 LPs

Result:
sys design, missed one important feature but otherwise got the gist of it.

bar raiser, almost completely whiffed it, had no idea how to solve it past brute force solution but kept talking out loud. so I said the brute force outright. and then it seemed like an eternity of something like "hmm.. can i use x data structure, can i use y data structure...? what if i tried this....". Needed alot of guidance, but eventually I realized an optimal solution. with 10 minutes left, i quickly coded out as much of it as i could, it was basically there. I started talking over edge cases and how i could make the code change to handle these, but we ran out of time.

OOP problem, not phrased as such, so I started just talking about how to solve the problem (it was quite simple, really). But the interviewer started acting all sus asking me "well what if we wanted to extend this to more devices" and i picked up on the hint that she was expecting me to use OOP design to this. I switched gears and she seemed satisfied with my solution.

DS + Algs problem, almost completely whiffed as well. I was told my mediocre/poor performance on this one was what really drove them to downgrade me to SDE 1, because otherwise I was SDE 2 material.

I was told I was incredibly strong in leadership principles, and the recruiter asked me how I prepared. I'll share here what I told her.

• Started off with each of the 14 leadership principles, listed in a google doc.
• I went down this list, carefully reading the description of each and scratching my head and thinking of various work experiences that I could use to tell a story about how I satisfy a particular LP.
• I wrote this down in STAR format.
• I went over mock LP interviews with a friend, telling them my STAR story as if I was asked this in an interview. Friend gave good feedback like "stop saying um so much", "this is a poor example, come up with a better one", "you dont want to sound so negative, try to frame your story more positively"
• went back to the google doc and addressed each of these concerns
• kept reviewing and revising my google doc up until the day of the interview. at this point i could recall maybe half the LPs from memory, along with my corresponding stories.
• during the (virtual) onsite, i had my notes open. I frequently repeated the question back to them, and said "please give me a second to think about this one". I took about 10-20 seconds between the interviewer asking me the question and spitting back my STAR format story.

Here's a rough timeline of what I did:

• started studying hard for technical ~December 2019, from a wide variety of resources
  • youtube videos from abdul bari, just the first 20-30.
  • leetcode

Passed my online assessment early April 2020

• continued leetcode for a total of
  - 62 easy
  - 30 medium
  - 0 hard

Around 2 weeks prior to the onsite, I stopped leetcoding and switched gears to sys design and behavioral

• systems expert (great resource for reviewing pretty much what I had learned in my masters)
  - only made it a fifth of the way thru
• various youtube videos for sys design
• the above detailed approach for behavioral

I guess the moral of the story is, you don't gotta be perfect. I thought I whiffed quite a few of my onsites. But I made sure they had a crystal scrying orb into my mind every second of the technical questions. equally important i'd say is paying extra attention to any feedback/guidance they give. finally, i also dedicated over 40 hours to make sure my behaviorals are as strong as possible.

180k TC, more than doubles my current salary, exceeded my initial ask by 20k, and much higher than typical sde1 on levels.fyi, so i accepted

i also started a google interview thing after i started amazon, but heard back that i got past the phone screen after i already accepted amazon :(