This is a rant post for onsite interviews at Amazon. I interviewed with Amazon for 4 times until now. Reached onsite everytime. At this point I feel I am not Amazon material and I do have lot of respect for people who get offers from Amazon. This was the last time I tried for them, and never again I am interviewing for Amazon.

1st Instance | 2017 | San Diego CA
This was years ago, so don't remember the entire process. This position was for Amazon fresh. Applied online. Had a tech phone screen followed by onsite. Onsite was pretty straight forward. 2 System designs and 2 LC problems both of which are popular (similar to Word ladder and merging sorted lists to get top K). Got rejected cause I couldn't do 1 LC problem.

2nd Instance | 2017 | Palo Alto CA
Interviewed for a9.com. Standard interview process. Wasn't offered cause the recruiter mentioned that they found someone else who was better suited for the position after keeping me on hold for 2 months.

3rd Instance | 2020 | Vancouver BC
Interviewed for Amazon consumer products. Did a virtual onsite interview. No questions from Leetcode. 1 question was to find and manipulate number from within a string. Other was a graph problem. 1 system design and 1 API design question. Chime started giving issues during one of the interviews and missed answering the question. Didn't get an offer.

4th Instance | 2020 | Cupertino CA
This one was the most frustrating so far. AMAZON, if you want to ask a hard questions in an interview, stop asking leadership principles. Interview is 60 mins, 15 mins are leadership principles and 5 mins are reserved for candidate to ask questions to interviewer (even if I don't want to ask questions :D ). If Amazon is then expecting me to solve a hard level problems (which I have not seen before - not on LC - DP & Graph) in 40mins, then yes I am not Amazon material.

After all rejections, I do have few tips for Amazon interviews. Not sure if I am the right person to give you guys tips, but doing my part here:

• Write down your experiences for each Leadership principle.
• Make sure you are thorough with Graphs & string manipulations I think Amazon loves asking these questions.
• When practicing for Amazon, make sure you are setting the timer to 40 mins and NOT 60 mins.
• Amazon does say that interviews are language agnostic, but I think the questions are more suited for Java or any OO language. If your weapon of choice is python (or any other interpreted language) make sure your solutions are OO in nature.

That's all for now guys. Thank you for listening & best of luck!