Background: 3 years in front end development
Interview 1:
- System Design
- Was asked to go through the component architecture of an application
- My thoughts:
- I struggled with this as the interviewer was asking about some things I haven't had the chance to implement/work with yet (authentication) and I felt like we didn't really connect that well during the interview.
Interview 2:
- Leetcode questions off of amazon list
- Behavioral questions
- My thoughts:
- This was very straight forward, the time for the question was very limited though so it was good that I recognized the question and was able to do it quickly. After I finished this and the behaviorial, instead of giving me time to ask questions the interviewer gave me another leet code question lol, also from the list. I didn't have time to finish this obviously and the interviewer was okay with it, just wanted me to talk through it
Interview 3:
- Custom DS&A question in javascript. Probably around easy level
- Follow up question was to create a new function object constructor and was asked how to add my function as a method (the answer was to use the .prototype property and add it as a function, basic OOP stuff)
- Behavioral questions
- My thoughts:
- Really enjoyed this interview as I had good conversation with the interviewer and I thought their question was very similar to what you would do on the front end.
Interview 4:
- Behaviorial (bar raiser because the people interviewing me were not from the team I was interviewing for)
- My thoughts:
- This was very straightforward and I thought we had good conversations
Interview 5:
- Front end interview:
- Behaviorial questions
- Was asked questions about javascript, closures, event loop and asked to implement some stuff similar off of https://bigfrontend.dev/
- Also asked to implement a picture of a component using html. It was a very simple picture of a form basically.
- My thoughts:
- Straight forward as well and I thought the interview went okay and I was able to answer their quesitons.
Result:
A day later I received a rejection and my feedback was that even though my frontend, behavorial and conversations went well they thought my system design wasn't as good enough for the role I was applying to. Overall I thought the feedback was fair and happy to get in some interviewing practice with Amazon.
My recommendation for other front end engineers is to practice javascript really from https://bigfrontend.dev/ and also make sure you understand javascript (going through https://javascript.info/ was very helpful). There are a lot of other front end posts for amazon on leetcode as well so that was good. I also recommend just being yourself, being friendly and being engaged when talking to the interviewers. In the end it is about whether or not they want to work with you and the interview is just a way for them to help learn more about your communication and skills.
For the behaviorial questions I came up with around 15 stories based off the leadership principles and was able to refer to them during the interviews. This really helped make these questions a lot easier and really took the mental load off when interviewing.