Amazon software engineer interview

what do i do if im a terrible person to work with? its something i really struggle with.

That's a shame. When someone sails through something I gave them, I usually kick myself for giving them a crappy or cliched problem and assume they've probably solved it previously. In that situation I absolutely am trying to figure out if they at least understand the answer so I'm looking for them to talk through, etc.

Coding on the board is a broken process anyway (just one I rarely have the influence to redefine wholly) but coding on the board as a "closed" interview question is downright stupid. You learn absolutely nothing relevant about the candidate, and they learn absolutely nothing about you. I'm sorry to find out that was the bulk of your experience.

FWIW, once you get enough experience to pick and choose, that would be a bad smell for me interviewing at a company. If I feel like there's no rapport and I'm just getting grilled in an interview past the initial tech screen, I will and have stopped the process myself. Life's too short to be a cog.

>>I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not.

There are section of people among programmers who give away tens of hours of time per week on sites of the likes you mentioned, these people have no other hobbies, hardly do any other productive or creative work, have no real social circle and generally spend all the time of their life in 'karma hunger' kind of a pursuit for points in solving some thousand people like themselves already solved.

Now they have to justify all mega massive wastage of time by at least making it look some kind of an intellectually superior activity which other people are incapable of. They might as well fail a few people in the interviews to get some consolation for that kind of wastage of time.

Everytime I see people spending scores of time on these leetcode kind of sites, I'm reminded of exams in India, where students just sit down and mind numbingly practice several years of question papers in hopes of finding similar questions or sometimes the same questions with minor modifications in exams. Finally you get students who barely know anything at all but pass the exams with high marks.

Interesting and valid points. I have some things to add.

Disclaimer first: I'm a technical interview coach. We run http://InterviewKickstart.com, which provides structured and intense group programs for early and mid-career software engineers, with the sole purpose of preparing for technical interviews.

In an ideal world, brushing up is all what it should take before going into interviews. Practicing Software Engineers shouldn't need to spend months working through books and courses. Interviewers should be thoughtful enough to interview for the thought process and experience, more than DS and Algos.

Trouble is:

* Many interviewers are not that thoughtful. Even for the most well-meaning ones, it takes a few interviews to truly be good at judging someone in those 30 to 60 minutes. If a candidate is caught into the cross-hairs of an interviewer's learning curve, that candidate is not going to get a fair evaluation. Preparation helps in that situation.

* With the plethora of prep material available for past several years, the bar for interviewing has just moved higher and higher at good companies. If you look at G and F (and some others), there is no way you can get away with just knowing the basics of trees and binary searches. It just takes time.

e.g. If they ask you to merge sorted arrays and you don't know that Heap sort is the best way to do it, you've lost the interview no matter how clear your thought process is. Not because the interviewer is not watchful. But because your competition has solved it with Heap Sort. So even if both of you demonstrated a clear thought process, the other person gets the job, because s/he is more prepared.

* It takes a certain level of life-confidence to just go to an interview with what you know and take the rest head-on. Many people don't have that kind of confidence. Many many engineers are introverts, and to borrow an analogy from sales, they are artists, not hunters. They are equally ambitious as hunters, but their confidence comes from systematic, extensive, honest preparation, and not from experience thinking on the feet. That prep easily takes months, especially when they are doing it part-time.

* Most CS colleges do not actually prepare their students for interviews. Some top ones do, but a large majority of them are not calibrated to churning out students capable of handling interviews at top tech companies. If you went to one of those colleges, and want to try for better companies, you have to prepare explicitly and separately. You have to re-learn CS with a level of specificity, intensity and extensiveness that your school never provided. Yes, you only have to do it once, but that one time, it may take many months.