My experience with Amazon's interview process and how I ended up getting an offer.

Applied: September 19

OA1: Received and completed on October 12

Debugging. Easy af and usually just changing around a couple key words.

OA2: Received on October 12 and finished on October 13

2 technical problems. 1 medium and 1 easy straight from here. I got Longest Palindromic Substring and Most Common Word. Passed all test cases.

OA3: Received on October 14 and completed on October 17.

Work simulation and logic test. I applied LP to every question possible on the work study, and I think I did decent on the logic test but I can't say for sure (maybe missed a few?).

Invitation to sign up for final interviews: October 24, one virtual online interview

Did my final interview in the first full week of November. Had 2 LP at the beginning. One asking about ownership and one asking about bias for action. I had one medium level technical question copy-pasted from LC: A question that is extremely similar to Number of Islands.

Received an offer: November 13, offer for Seattle/Bellevue

When I started to applying to internships, I started grinding a bit of LC on the side. I have about 76 submissions since I started grinding (September 19) and I think I did around 30 problems (10/17/3). Honestly, the best resources I used were Back To Back SWE and Chris Jereza. Back To Back definitely has the clearest explanations on YouTube and helped me understand the concepts, like backtracking, recursion, and dp, while Chris' videos taught me how to pass interviews (this one helped me out the most by far).

However, the LeetCode community also helped out immensely. I most definitely could not have done this without this community and I must say that I definitely got lucky in the question that I was asked for my final interview and just in general during this process.

Even if you don't have an offer right now, don't give up. There's still plenty of companies hiring (and Amazon hires until March!). I hope I was able to help out at least somewhat. Also, try to keep your mental health in check. During this hiring season, I was able to get a few offers, but my mental health detoriated so much. Looking back on it, I could have taken more care of myself during all this, but I didn't because I was extremely tunnel-visioned on getting a good offer. Maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not.