This interview definitely was my worst one as I had the rudest interviewer possible. I've had interviewers spaced out or just start texting on their phone but no one was this mean. I got the standard OA 2 weeks after applying (debugging, basic LC, LP) that you find on the forum. I was told that I passed and waited another 2 months for the next round. It was the 3 round back to back.
Round 1:
- LP principles
- atoi
Went fine for the most part but I didn't cover some test cases by the end. Interviewer was helpful though and pointed out which edge cases to test for.
Round 2:
I thought about complaining to HR for this round as this was the nastiest interviewer I've ever met. This was with the engineering manager. If this is representative of managers at Amazon, no wonder so many people have poor experiences.
- LP Principles
- Reverse Linked List
- Reverse Circular Linked List
I asked for clarification on question #3 as I wasn't sure what we would consider the head after reversing it and wanted to be sure. Instead of clarifying, he said "Well, what do you think?" and told me it was a stupid question. I then tried to explain pseudocode and he told me that he doesn't care about my logic and just to write the code. When I wrote it and the logic wasn't immediately right, he would yell at me telling me that I was doing it wrong and that I needed to fix my buggy code. When I tried to explain my logic, he would just cut me off and started yelling, saying my code was completely wrong and I needed to fix it. He also had a heavy accent and when I asked him to repeat what he was saying, he would get clearly angry and agitated. At the end when I asked him to answer questions, he gave me one sentence reply and told me "yeah ok bye."
Round 3:
Design Round. It was just making a mock implementation of a deck of cards and shuffling and what not. Interviewer was really helpful and at the end told me that he hoped to see me at Amazon. Gave very thoughtful replies to all the questions I had.
Nonsurprisingly, I got a reject 2 weeks later. Honestly, this experience makes me glad that I'm not working at Amazon. I ended up getting a similar offer from a similar tier company and I'm very happy. I can't believe they would hire a manager who was straight up an asshole to me during the interview. I've done 30 interviews in the last 2 years for internships and new grads and have never had an experience like this.