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Amazon software engineer interview

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Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#91

Post by lj3 »

soham wrote: post #77
geoelectric wrote: post #40

I'm all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop. I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that's experience now, but I don't remember any point in my career where I'd have done something this extensive. I hope the poste…

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 Engine…

> It takes a certain level of life-confidence to just go to an interview with what you know and take the rest head-on.

Apparently, I have that kind of confidence. In my experience, confidence is good for winging the personal questions and talking about my past projects, but at the end of the day technical interviews come down to being able to solve problems you'd never (or rarely) see on the job. If you walk in unprepared, you will fail. I usually fail the first 5-10 in my job search before I get a yes. Walking in unprepared is ridiculously suboptimal.

Just to clarify, I don't mean just the google style interviews where they ask you graduate level DS and algo questions. Thankfully, a lot of smaller companies are transitioning to asking questions about the tools, languages and techniques specific to the field. But, that still requires weeks of study because the level of detail most interviewers go into far exceeds what you see working on CRUD apps. Not to mention the difficulty of memorizing every CSS3 property available.

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#92

Post by [deleted] »

pconner wrote: post #11
ideaskid wrote: post #10

one question. i'm a total noob in my 3rd year CS undergrad. I've just started prep to crack companies like Amazon. Any pointers or tips to get started?

Get the book, "Cracking The Coding Interview." It was the most valuable resource for me in preparing for technical interviews near the end of my time in undergrad.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#93

Post by dpark »

einrealist wrote: post #45

I don't understand why to have all these tests for an applicant? Why not integrate an applicant into a team for a day and have pair programming sessions? I found, that nothing else works.

> Why not integrate an applicant into a team for a day and have pair programming sessions?

I'm not sure what you think you'll learn in one day like this. You're throwing someone into a high-pressure peer-programming session with someone they don't know and a codebase they've never seen. In order to get them to complete anything you're probably going to have to stage a bunch of stuff and basically give them a fake assignment anyway ("fill in the body of this 'findUserByOrderNumber()' method for us") which has turned it into the equivalent a whiteboard coding question anyway. If you give them a single pair-programming partner, you only get one hiring opinion which is a pretty bad idea, and if you give them multiple pair-programming partners the work will have to be even more trivial.

I don't think a one-day trial like this will tell you more than a standard interview loop. Some people might do better with it, others will do worse.

I also don't think you should expect to get real work out of someone before you hire them, either. If you want me to spend 8 hours building you a feature, I expect to get paid. And the overhead of paying me for 8 hours of work is probably not worth it to your company, because it's a ridiculous amount of paperwork. (And not even possible for people who need visa sponsoring.)

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#94

Post by [deleted] »

yomly wrote: post #84
catchmrbharath wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this view when I was interviewing for internships during this quarter. I have spent working and interviewing at a couple of places, before I came to pursue my masters and I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot. I interviewed at atleast 10 places for internships and every single of them asked one of the questions from either leetcode or cracking the coding interview. I found none of the…

> I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot. So I 100% agree with this. Being intuitively clever and being able to apply what you know is intrinsically valuable: Think of the extreme, imagine someone who is unable to apply something they've learnt unless it's exactly in the context they learnt it. That said, I think it's often underestimated how valuable prep is. Some people even get a bit salt…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#95

Post by lj3 »

dpark wrote: post #93
einrealist wrote: post #45

I don't understand why to have all these tests for an applicant? Why not integrate an applicant into a team for a day and have pair programming sessions? I found, that nothing else works.

> Why not integrate an applicant into a team for a day and have pair programming sessions? I'm not sure what you think you'll learn in one day like this. You're throwing someone into a high-pressure peer-programming session with someone they don't know and a codebase they've never seen. In order to get them to complete anything you're probably going to have to stage a bunch of stuff and basically give them a fake ass…

> I also don't think you should expect to get real work out of someone before you hire them, either.

This has grown on me. It's a lot of time invested per company, but it's still a hell of a lot less time than the interview prep mentioned in the article. It's also more pleasant, since I'm programming something real instead of the fibonacci sequence.

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#96

Post by Retra »

soham wrote: post #77
geoelectric wrote: post #40

I'm all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop. I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that's experience now, but I don't remember any point in my career where I'd have done something this extensive. I hope the poste…

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 Engine…

I've been pretty seriously studying CS for a while, and there's a trillion things I don't know.

>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 [...]

... no matter the fact that there are a hundred ways to sort an array, and you think you know the best one? Has it been proven the best, or is it just the best you know? How many ways do you actually know to sort an array? Has all research on array sorting ground to a halt because there's no better way to do it?

If someone asked me the best way to sort an array I'd say "probably radix sort." If you expected "merge sort," then you're the fool.

My point being, I study a lot, but that doesn't give you answers. I gives you a base from which further study can happen.

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#97

Post by eropple »

outworlder wrote: post #22
blueatlas wrote: post #9

In total I had a little less than one month to prepare for the interview. I can't help but to wonder if it was really worth it. Surely, his prep helped him get the job, but the entire prep stage he describes seems like a very high up-front cost. I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. You should know exactly why you want to work for Amazon.…

> I've always felt that if I can't get through an interview with a little prep and my existing skills, I don't belong. I have this feeling too, but I am not sure if it is warranted. Let's do a thought experiment: grab an engineer at random, don't tell the interviewers that they are already a colleague, and subject to the same interview process as everyone else. Now, is this engineer going to pass the interview? Maybe…

> Maybe, but I would not be surprised if most failed.

I used to work at a place where this was an actual goal: "we should always be raising the bar." Needless to say, that particular unicorn ended up shedding people pretty quick.

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#98

Post by SonOfLilit »

soham wrote: post #77
geoelectric wrote: post #40

I'm all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop. I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that's experience now, but I don't remember any point in my career where I'd have done something this extensive. I hope the poste…

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 Engine…

> 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

Sorry, I'm confused. I love heaps, but... what's wrong with this simple O(n+m) time and space solution, that I can easily prove is the theoretical limit (because the output size is O(n+m))?

    def merge_sorted(a, b):
        result = []
        la, lb = len(a), len(b)
        ia, ib = 0, 0
        while ia = lb:
                result += a[ia:]
                break
            if ia >= la:
                result += b[ib:]
                break
            if a[ia]

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#99

Post by SonOfLilit »

Retra wrote: post #96
soham wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Engine…

I've been pretty seriously studying CS for a while, and there's a trillion things I don't know. >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 [...] ... no matter the fact that there are a hundred ways to sort an array, and you think you know the best one? Has it been proven the best, or is it just the best you know? How many way…

His question was about merging pre-sorted arrays, not about sorting arrays. (Still, see my own disagreement in sibling)

Re: Amazon software engineer interview

#100

Post by buzzybee »

catchmrbharath wrote: post #54
sotojuan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contribute to a personal project, socialize, learn a new language or framework, read books, etc. Amazing how many things you can miss out on with a month of "code" prep. And yeah, this definitely reminds me of high school a bit too much.

I used to believe this. As a masters student who is going to graduate soon, I have to put in months of preparation for the interviews. Nobody believes in your ability to write code even after having close to 100+ commits to a popular open source project. People expect you to come to the correct solution after 5 minutes of them asking the question.

IME the interview you have depends a lot on org size and how close the interviewer is to the money. A technical founder will tend to interview with an eye towards product and marketing and sitting down in a real environment to do sample code. As you go down the line and interview at bigger orgs with more departments, it becomes more specialized, the culture overwhelms the business, and you get more of the "idealized CS graduate" syndrome.
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