How covid-19 helped me to get an offer from FAANG.

Education: Computer science degree from a local university (in a third-world country)
Experience: 7 years of experience software engineer, in different smallish companies
Position: SDE II at Amazon
Location: Europe
Offer date: Summer 2020

Some abbreviations: LC – LeetCode, LP – leadership principle, OA – online assignment.

I am not going to disclose the interview questions as I have signed a NDA.

A recruiter from Amazon contacted me over the LinkedIn and told me about a virtual hiring event. Here is the list of events that followed:

1. CV sent.
2. Received a standard OA with two coding questions. After the coding part, there was also solution evaluation and explanation part, and also non-technical, LP part.
3. The recruiter came back to me and told me that we can proceed with phone interview.
4. During the phone interview I have been asked about my current and past work experience, projects, LP questions. Also questions about computer science fundamentals, algorithms, and data structure. No coding questions.
5. During the onsite interview, there were 4 rounds, each of them consisted of 25-30 minutes of LP questions and 25-30 minutes of coding question. More or less all the LP questions can be found here (https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/437082/Amazon-Behavioral-questions-or-Leadership-Principles-or-LP/397167).
   • 1st round: An exact LC hard question.
   • 2nd round: OOD round. The question was not anything like can be found on LC.
   • 3rd round: System Design. A typical system design question.
   • 4th round: A slight variation of a LC medium question.
   I am not sure about the which of them were the hiring manager and bar raiser.

A week later, the recruiter contacted me and told that I have passed the interview.

Preparation

I think this is the most important part of an interview experience story. How a candidate prepared, which resulted in offer.

This was the second experience with FAANG. Last time I was interviewed for Google in 2019 but failed at the phone screen stage. Back that time, again a recruiter contacted me and honestly, I was not prepared at all and had no idea how interviews are conducted at FAANG compnaies. I have learned about how FAANG companies carry out interviews and about the existence of LeetCode from the preparation materials that recruiter sent me. Back that time I practiced a little bit, then forgot about the LeetCode. However, started to take courses like https://www.coursera.org/specializations/algorithms and https://www.udemy.com/course/master-the-coding-interview-data-structures-algorithms/.

This time, as I thought I do not have a chance to reach to the onsite interview, I postponed LeetCode preparation until the phone interview. Then I started my extensive preparation and as Amazon’s hiring event day was fixed, I had just about 2-3 weeks to prepare.

Preparation for coding problems:
Started to look into the questions tagged with Amazon.
Total LCs solved: ~95 (45 easy | 45 medium | 5 hard).
Tried to solve different types of problems and understand principles, rather than solve multiple problems of the same type. The preparational 2-3 weeks were not easy as I had almost no experience in competitive programming, plus I was working full-time.
System design: I have about 2 years of experience in working with distributed systems, so this part was not hard for me. Just watched a couple of YouTube videos to get familiar to interview style questions on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-vYrOAmtrx9sBzJAf3x_xw and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRPMAqdtSgd0Ipeef7iFsKw channels.

Behavioral questions, Leadership Principles.
I think this one is very important, especially for Amazon. Allocated about 20 hours for going over all the principles and recalling examples from my past experience related to each principle. Compiled a list with over 30 examples. Rehearsed my speech a couple of times.
If you will take just one idea from this post, then please keep in mind, that communication skills and behavioral part DO matter. You can do hundreds of LC questions and ace all the coding problems, but no one would hire you or want to work with you if you lack communication skills. So, make sure to practice this part as well.

Covid-19
So, how covid-19 helped me in all this? Well, it is obvious about time saving on commuting during the preparations, virtual interviews from home etc.

I had planned a vacation in abroad long before interviews and made all the reservations for it. The irony is that the hiring event day was in the middle of my vacation week. Since I thought that I do not have a chance to reach even to onsite stage, I’m sure I was not going to cancel my vacation trip for flying to their hiring event. But covid-19 made me to cancel it and also made the hiring event virtual. That means, if covid-19 hiring event would not have been virtual, I wouldn’t participate for sure.

Thank you to LeetCode and the community. Well-structured website, solutions, discussions, interview experience posts and Premium subscription were the main help in the interview preparation.

P.S.
During the OA, I struggled to solve the second question. At the very end I had my code compiling, but all the test cases were failing. I though “either I have some bug in my code, or I got the solution completely wrong”. As I had a couple of minutes left, I just could go over my code once more. I found a little bug, fixed it, ran my code, all the test cases passed. Looked on the time: “Time left: 1:27“. As Winston Churchill said – “Never, never, never give up”.