Amazon, Microsoft | SDE2, L60 | Seattle | April May 2020 | Offer
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MicrosoftAmazonSeattleInterview

My interview experience 2020

This year has been very challenging for most of us. My case was no different. I was working at a small start-up that provided financial capital to small businesses and due to COVID-19, was severely impacted. I got laid off in mid April.
Silver lining: Received offers from Amazon, Microsoft

Total Onsites - 6
Total Offers - 4
Cancelled Onsites - DataBricks and Google because of time challenges and longer interview process. (H1-B candidates have limited time to find occupation)

Education: MS in CSE
Years of Experience: 2 years at a startup (USA) + 2 years (India)

Previous Interview Experience:
June 2019 - Google : My first ever on-site. It went for hiring committee but I didn't get through.
Dec 2019 - Amazon : On-site. I did badly on the leadership principle questions. I did not prepare my stories and I failed.

Preparation:

  • Cracking the coding interview.
  • Lots of Leetcode (Used premium for company specific mock interviews).
  • Gr-okking the System Design Interview.
  • Highscalability.com
  • YouTube videos (Tushar Roy, Gaurav Sen).
  • Distributed Systems.

Strategy:

  • Most important: It's hard but try to be positive.
  • Even if an interview goes badly, it's momentary. Learn from your mistakes and focus on the next!
  • It can be really challenging to juggle between applying, corresponding to emails/LinkedIn, take home challenges, studying etc. Try allocating time for these separately throughout the day.
  • Be friendly and patient. More than anything they are looking for a person who will be a part of their everyday lives.
  • While explaining your current work / project, think of the interviewer as a potential teammate.
  • Test your solution and try covering multiple / all test cases. Try thinking about exception handling and code coverage too.
  • Eat properly but in small portions during your interview. I could not function on an empty stomach.
  • Find something to relax and unwind.

Amazon - Offer (SDE2 / Seattle)

Online Assessment
Questions can be found on https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/344650/Amazon-Online-Assessment-Questions

Onsite Interview

Interview 1 (Potential Teammate)

  • Leadership Principle Question (20 min)
  • Graph question. Solved using Dijkstras algorithm.

Interview 2 (Manager)

  • Leadership Principle Question (20 min)
  • Design Question (more on OOD side). With the help of the interviewer reduced this to a producer-consumer problem.

Interview 3 (Potential Teammate)

  • Leadership Principle Question (20 min)
  • A medium array based question similar to merging intervals.

Interview 4 (Manager)

  • Leadership Principle Question (20 min)
  • Design a card game. Extend this to design a casino, where statistics to various games is maintained.

Leadership Principle Questions based on:

  • Insist on the Highest Standards
  • Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
  • Something related to handling opposition / making changes / convincing co-workers.
  • Something related to finding a solution based on limited information (deep dive / bias for action)

Strategy : I wrote everything that I have worked on (things you want the hiring team to know/stories that your resume does not tell) in detail and tried to classify them into multiple leadership principles. It's beneficial to not repeat the same story, so try to not give unnecessary details, it can be useful in a different question. I frankly did not follow the STAR technique.
I tried keeping my stories brief and letting the interviewer ask me more specifics so it's more like a 2 way conversation.

Microsoft Azure Team - Offer (L60 / Redmond)

Phone

  • Introduction and some questions regrarding current work, background etc.
  • Leetcode medium question on Binary Tree.

Onsite
Interview 1 (Principal Engineer)

  • Focused on past work experience and some behavioral questions.
  • Leetcode medium question on LinkedList.

Interview 2 (Manager)

  • Graph based OOD question to determine if two people are friends or acquaintances (friends of friends)
    I had a lot of fun designing this and the interviewer challenged me to improve the system to scale.

Interview 3 (Potential teammate)

  • A leetcode medium question on Strings (Stack based approach).

Interview 4 (Manager)

  • System design question. Not a typical one I had seen. But the interviewer worked with me and guided me well to reduce the problem to an mere DP problem (similar to Longest common subsequence) . Very challenging and fun round.
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