Profile:- MS CS top 20 university
Work Ex: 2 years at a big bank, 1 FANG internship(not amazon, but at G/fb)
LC :- Around 530+ solved on LC
I interviewed at Amazon the past week for SDE-1 role
OA:- Two coding questions
- Top K frequent elements
- Find connected components(Union Find)
Solved both questions with all test cases passed with 30 min to spare
Onsite: 3 rounds, each had 30 min LP's and 30 min coding + 1 hiring manager round
1st round :- LP + Word Break 2 on Leetcode(30 min).
Given a list of words [high, way, super, highway, superhigh, superhighway], return all the ways each word can be split using other words in the input
Output:- [[high, way], [super, high], [super, highway], [super, high, way], [superhigh, way]]
My Approach:- Basically "Word Break 2" on leetcode on every word with the remaining words as dictionary
2nd round :- LP + strange question(30 min)
Given a string "I would like to buy a table for 30"(coz 0.85*30 = 25.5)
My approach :- Split the string based on spaces. Check if each word is a number, if it is extract that number into a Double. and update the value with a discount.
Interviewer followup:- What if the string of the number is split on commas(like 25,000$). In some countries commas happen after 3 digits(like US), but some other countries commas happen after 2 digits(like India).
My response:- Handle it by taking an input variable called context which has details like after how many positions we should split the number etc.
2nd followup :- What if the splitting character is a '.' instead of a ',' (German uses dot left of decimal point and use comma afterwards)
My response :- Use context variable to take the splitting character in, and use that in my extract number code.
3rd round :- LP + design round (When my interviewer said design is rarely asked)
Design a parking lot system.(30 min)
Wrote like vehicle class, Parking lot class, Parking space class. Parking lot manager class with assign() and remove() methods.
I felt this round i did the worst. The interviewer seemed very unhelpful. (later looked the guy up, he was a recent amazon hire after spending 5 years or so at Infosys)
4th round :- Hiring manager round(60 min of pure LP)
I felt like i aced this round
Final result : Reject
Recruiter called and said :- Your Data structure and Algorithms skills are good, but your coding skills are not upto scratch and asked me to apply after 3-4 months. Hiring manager really wanted to hire me, but the design round guy was hesitant. She said it was a close call
Thank lord I have a couple of other strong offers lined up
My review of the whole process:- Not great, Pretty whack.