Hey all, I got rejected for SDE II Role at Amazon :(

Background:

• Bachelor in CS from Indian University
• 12+ years of experience
• Working as Lead Developer for Indian Consulting Firm

Timeline/Details:

• Reached out by recruiter in April
• Online Assessment on April 11th
  1. Question was similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-connected-components-in-an-undirected-graph/, little variation, instead of array of edges, input was a matrix of 0s and 1s where matrix[i][j] = 1 means (i, j) edge is present.
  2. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1085968/Amazon-OA-or-Optimization-Box-Weights/862764
• Recruiter came back to me following week and mentioned that I had advanced to onsite (no phone screen).
• I asked for 6 weeks to prepare for onsite, which I was given
• Onsite was conducted on 1st wee of June
  1. System Design
     • 2 LPs with follow ups which took about 30 minutes.
     • Design a photo sharing app
     • Was taken by the hiring manager. Overall went okay (not too good, not too bad).
  2. Coding -1
     • 2 LPs with follow ups. Interviewer was happy and I was through the LPs in 10-15 minutes.
     • https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder/
     • I was able to communicate my approach and coded the solution well. Overall went well. Interview completed with 5 minutes to spare
  3. Coding - 2 - I think this was the Bar Raiser
     • 2 LPs with follow ups which took about 35+ minutes.
     • Build Order: https://www.byte-by-byte.com/buildorder/. Similar to Coarse Schedule 2
     • Question was ambiguous. I had to Design the method signature, including input and output. Also had to ask several clarifying questions and run through 1-2 sample inputs which cost me another 10 - 12 minutes. Eventually I just had about 15 minutes to code the solution.
     • I suggested Topological sort for ordering but could not advance much. Interviewer hinted at DFS but I got too nervous and got stuck because of lack of time. Could not complete the code and I think this round decided my fate.
  4. OOD - Coding
     • 2 LPs with follow ups.I was able to finish within 20 minutes.
     • Code LRU Cache and encapsulate and abstract the caching logic so that you can reuse same class as MRU cache by just giving a parameter.
     • I was able to code. I also followed few hints given by interviewer. Overall went well.

Informed by the recruiter in the following week that I had not made it. Felt dissapointed. Overall it was a good experience. Please prepare your LPs well. If you manage to get through them quickly, then you get more time to code. Best of luck !