I loved Amazon because I learned a lot and my experience over there was the reason I was able to easily pass (and exceed the expectations in) the design/behavioral interviews. I hate Amazon because of 2 things: 1. Extreme frugality in every aspect (from cold cheese sandwiches for candidates as their lunch, to not giving refreshers and extremely low base increase). 2. Lots of (and I mean LOTS OF) terrible managers. I've had 6 managers at Amazon: One of them was amazing (who then moved to Fb a year later) and one ok and 3 terrible ones and one monster. The last one couldn't even understand the technical aspects, was extremely micromanaging the whole team, was very biased against females (I honestly felt bad for them and reported him to the HR, and no result. He continued the same way). This was my last team and the previous manager who hired me left the team 2 months after I joined, and this monster became my new manager. Long story short, he put me on the dev plan (although I was the one who delivered 3 org-impacting pojects in a year all the way to production and the rest of the team delivered one.) Frankly it was really hard to practice and prepare for the interviews having that much of pressure at work and not being appreciated at all, but I did it. TC at Amazon: 180k (L5, hit the cliff and they didn't give me anything because of the dev plan) TC at G: 350k (T5) Yoe: 4+ (all at Amazon) plus a no-thesis master's degree from an unknown university.
Agreed... Horrible managers at Amazon
All from India or China. And if I refer someone not from one of these origins none makes it passing the interviews. Why? I am the only non-Indian walking the corridor. It makes me question this all the time.
Were tagged Google LC questions enough to pass the coding rounds? Also, how did you prepare?
Forced myself to practice at least 2 hours every night for 3 months excluding the weekends. I kept the weekends to have fun as a reward to myself. Originally even some of the easy ones would take an hour, but eventually I was able to solve medium ones in like 15 minutes and hard ones in like 30 minutes. This consistency helped a lot. And yes mostly Google tagged or most liked ones.
Gotcha. How many LC questions did you solve in total before you felt ready to interview?
u are amazingly good. 4 YOE knocked the t5 door at google
I've worked on huge systems and highly impactful projects at Amazon. That helped me a lot. I'm thankful to Amazon for that. If it wasn't for that, I would have gone crazy with what my last manager did to me. I just mentioned a bit of the story, but what he did to me was so much worse that I got headaches almost all day long the last 3 months (and I've never had headaches in my life).
I am sorry you have been through this. Where is he from culturally? He doesnt sound American.
Awesome man
Congratulations! Mind if I drop you a DM?
Congratulations, you have done amazingly well for yourself. Were you brought in for an L5 or did you ask for it?
During the original calls with the recruiter I insisted on having interviews for T5 and explained my work (projects) to show the impact and the work I've done to convince them I can. So they considered it during the interviews and the offer came for T4, but after again lots of talking and negotiations they changed it to T5.
That’s awesome, I wish I had read this comment before my process began
I am hoping you leaving the important project(s) at Amazon at least caused some dents 😁 and put the manager in their place. Do they try to retain you? Or is putting on dev plan pretty much a hint asking you to leave?
Asking to leave I guess. The first team really liked me and I liked them too, but the second team was a mess. I didn't like the team overall and the manager was horrible, so I didn't ask to stay.
what was so bad about the manager and why did he put you on dev plan?
4 YOE to secure T5 at G? Are you PhD?
My design interviews went extremely great (I could tell while I was there) and thanks to my Amazon experience for that. But they had lots of behavioral questions which I think went pretty well too. For coding, thanks to LC. No PhD, just masters
You are awesome OP! Way to show them how to act or they lose talent. I am planning to leave after 4 years too.