Amazon | SDE2 | MTV | May 2020 [Reject]
Anonymous User
695

I was contacted by a recruiter about 2 months ago regarding the AWS position which is not my domain. But I tried.

[Phone interview]
As always, he started with LP question, it was not that awkward.
The coding started with very popular MED question in leetcode, I answered it easily.
But he followed up two more steps - at first, I solved this question with DP but he asked me to optimize the space complexity by not using the total size, but only constant size. I successfully solved that. And he asked the different output from this question. For example, if the original question asks the number of total case, he asked me to print out all cases. The time expired while I'm trying.

The recruiter contacted me a week later to proceed more, he also said the other team is also interested in me so the interview will be combined with two teams.
At this moment, the original recruiter forwarded my case to the other guy. Actually I posted this to complain about this shit. As I mentioned above, my interview was formed by two different teams which works on different area, so I needed to get more detail about them. But this person was not helpful.

  1. I sent him to ask the interview session details three times but he didn't reply and I just got them one day before the interview. He said he can let me know the interviewers' name but cannot say each session for what question - some other companies provide them - but that's fine. I just wanted to know what time the each session starts and ends.
  2. I also asked him about the system design interview would be, as one team is AWS and the other is device but he just said it will be distributed system based question (one line reply) but as you see below description the actual question was not like that.
  3. I don't have a webcam, I tried to buy one a few months ago but it was sold out at Amazon. So I used my mobile phone Hangout with some other companies for former interviews, it was no problem. But Amazon asked to use Chime desktop, for the same reason, I asked this recruiter if I can use the Chime mobile and he just replied one line "It should not be a problem". But I noticed the audio doesn't work ON THE INTERVIEW DAY - I could hear them but they couldn't mine, I tried to reset the phone but it didn't help - I and the first interviewer(he was the bar raiser) spent some time to fix it but gave up. This gave me a stress and not a good sign to start.

[Virtual interview]
All sessions had LP question and Coding combined, some people may prefer or like to be asked LP like questions but it's very stressful to me even I have prepared a lot, they just asked me the similar questions. I already know I have to give them the STAR case all diffently but it's not easy because the questions were similar. Also some interviewer asked LP first and Coding, but other asked the other way which means he just skipped the conversation while I talked about my coding approach. I understand they have to follow their protocol for interview but I don't know how much it worths.

1st session: I didn't see this problem at leetcode but remember I saw similar one from someone's posting. Input is (task_id, resource, period) then output will be (task_id, available_time). For example, Inputs are (Task1, pencil, 10), (Task2, pencil+pen, 15) ... then needs to return (Task1, 0), ........
Honestly, I didn't understand this question clearly. If somebody is aware of this question then please comment.

2nd session: HARD in leetcode but easy HARD. I think I was okay only at this session.

3rd session: Implement CircularQueue with resize() API. I wrote the typical interfaces of CircularQueue but struggled to write resize(). I couldn't find this from web either. I have to handle front and read pointer after memory reallocation. Anybody knows a complete answer?

4th session: The interviewer drew a small picture with handwriting and took the photo with his phone and sent it to me. Well, I don't know if they think this is actual situation and it's enough for me to understand the problem but the handwriting was bad and I didn't understand the question clearly right away with just some circles and arrows.
The first question was very simple, he asked me the data structure to return the "highest" value but I over-thought it, I tried to make a priority_queue which he didn't seem to expect. I just needed to maintain one variable to keep the maximum. And followed by modified question, around this time I felt I messed up this day's interview.

5th session: This was totally LP.

The recruiter sent me email 5 days later, of course, he said he can't give me the detail feedback, but provided some advices and links to improve my lack. According to that, my coding mistakes are not only problem, LP should be better. Well, again, my feeling is this recruiter was just interested in initiating and closing my interview, no other support. I have been interviewing multiple companies but I never experienced this quality of recuiter.
I asked the other person to send me the post-interview survey.

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