My FAANG journey from "Unfortunately we are moving ahead with other candidates" to "2 teams are fighting for you!"

Disclaimer: I signed NDA

Hello Leetcoders,

Posts about interview experiences have helped me a lot. It is my turn to give back to the community.

Background
Bachelors and Masters in a Non-CS background
10 years of work experience in the IT industry
Leetcode: 210 problems (last 3 months)

Timeline
Started preparing in Feb 2020
Reached out by Recruiter April 1st week 2020
Cleared Online assessment April 2nd week 2020
Scheduled onsite May 1st week 2020
Recruiter confirmed offer on 3rd business day after onsite

Interview process
Initial Online Assessment:
2 questions from Amazon 2020 Online Assessment (Look at Leetcode and Aonecode for this year's OA questions)

Virtual Onsites
Interview 1: Behavioral + a medium level coding question on Tries
Interview 2: Behavioral + incremental coding question. Initially started with a simple coding question and went on adding requirements
Interview 3: Behavioral + a medium level coding question on Trees
Interview 4: Behavioral + Design round

Each virtual onsite round lasted for 50 mins. (10 min behavioral, 35 min coding/design and 5 min reverse interview ).

For Amazon, behavioral/Leadership principles questions are very important. Please prepare for these from your past experiences.

After Online assessment, the recruiter reached out the next day saying I passed.
Scheduled Virtual onsite after 3 weeks. After the onsite, recruiter reached out on the 3rd business day with good news.

Preparation

1. You need the CS basics - Datastructures & Algorithms are key
2. You need a decent resume sometimes - I invested 250$ in TopResume for professionally written Resume, Cover letter. However this may or maynot help for FAANG. In my case, no. Yes for other companies
3. Leetcode premium - A lot of people say it's not needed. But I went ahead and purchased Leetcode premium for the entire year. It helps you target company-specific questions. I didn't get any direct or frequently asked questions from Amazon but the pattern of the questions was definitely similar.
4. Grkng the system design - If you are targeting for a Senior level position, I highly recommend this. The idea is to understand the framework used to answer Design questions.

FAANG Struggle
2012 December - Failed in Amazon phone screen for SDE 1
2014 November - Failed in Amazon's 3rd phone screen for SDE 1
2016 March - Failed in Google phone screen
2016 March - Failed in Facebook phone screen
2018 March - Failed in Amazon phone screen for SDE 2
2019 September - Failed in Amazon online assessment, Linkedin, Walmart Onsites
2020 May - Amazon offer as SDE2 (my first onsite of FAANG)

Resources that helped me land my dream job

1. Leetcode (Practice is the key!)
2. Grkng the System Design (Don't think too much. Just buy this if you are aiming for a senior position!)
3. System design interview channel - Youtube (Free resource with about 6 highly informative videos)
4. BytebyByte Dynamic programming questions (This was where everything changed from my side. I never properly understood DP as I am not from a CS background. Sam is a real lifesaver for DP) - https://www.byte-by-byte.com/dpbook/
5. ByteByByte top 50 interview questions - https://www.byte-by-byte.com/50-questions/
6. Abdul Bari - Algorithms Youtube (Again since I am not from CS background, I studied these like a textbook in class)
7. Mycodeschool (Youtube) - Binary search and other interview questions are explained really well
8. Reverse Interview - viraptor (Github)

Takeaways

1. Interviewing from Non-FAANG to FAANG is harder than it sounds
2. I think the most valuable purchases I made are Leetcode Premium (150$)andGrkngtheSystemdesign(70$). If we can pay 120$ for Netflix, Prime video every year, we should not think while investing to improve our coding/algorithm skills and boost career opportunities.
3. Until 2019, I don't believe I was prepared correctly. I was weak in the CS fundamentals. All it took was consistency and starting with the basics.
4. Also, I can say that you don't succeed in a day. It takes enough hard work, consistency, and preparing in the right way to achieve it. If I could do it, anyone can!

Leetcode
In the last 3 months, Solved 211/1454, Easy 104, Medium 93, Hard 14
Most of the above are Top Interview questions and Top Amazon questions

I also completed the 30-day Leetcoding challenge for April and that actually gave me a habit of logging into Leetcode everyday and solve several problems.

Datastructures & Algorithims I primarily targetted
Alg: Dynamic programming, Sliding window, DFS, BFS, Binary search, Backtracking, Bit Manipulation
DS: Array, Linked list, Stack, Queue, Priority Queue, Deque, Set, Map, Tree, Graph

Compensation: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/648078/Amazon-or-SDE-2-or-Seattle

All the best to you all. Once again, thanks to Leetcode for being such a valuable platform.