I had an onsite with Amazon for SDE2 and I've got mixed feelings. I thought some of you might be interested and I'd also like to hear your opinion. - OA: ACED it! (all tests were passing for all problems with more than half my time still remaining) - Phone Interview: Got an LC Easy (lucky me) pretty much aced it as well. Had a chat with the recruiter on the phone before the onsite. She told me that she can't give me feedback about my past rounds but said that I should be happy with my results and that she thinks I've got a pretty good chance. Also let me know who the bar raiser is going to be. Moving on to the virtual onsite. My communication skills were (I think) excellent. I was always talking out loud, made sure to communicate my thought process and let my interviewers know when I planned to start coding. LPs were ok I guess. There were a couple of good ones and a couple of OK ones. It was 50/50. 1) Algo round Don't want to go too much into detail but based on what the interviewer said and how he conducted the interview I could tell that it was one of his first interviews so I hope his input won't have that much weight. I had to find all possible subsets of given elements and return the subsets that met a condinition. I went for recursive approach although he resisted it at first but since we were running low on time he let me do it. I brought up memoization, time and space complexity without him asking it, thinking I can grab some extra points for it. I finished coding it up, but then I realized I forgot to call my function recursively (what an idiot) and also left out memoization. Quickly tried to fix it but he said its ok and that I shouldn't worry about not finishing my code he understood what I was going for. I think that it does matter and that he was just trying to comfort me, what do you think? All in all I was able to come up with a working solution, probably not the optimal one and wasn't able to finish coding it. Apart from good naming, my code wasn't clean at all! 2) Algo round Got a standard graph problem, find path between two points. I grabbed some extra points for coming up with a solution for the shortest path, even though any path would've been fine. I ended up needing 1-2 hints, for example I was struggling a bit too long on figuring out how to keep track of the path in a BFS. (DFS it's easy, you've got the stack itself) Ended up coding the whole thing but didn't have time for testing it or checking for bugs / edge cases. I feel like this was just the warmup question and the "real" problem was going to be Dijkstra's algo for shortest path because when I was asking whether the edges are weighted he said "for now let's just say they aren't". What do you think? What would be expected from an SDE2? 3) Systems Design This was the "bar raiser" interview. It went pretty well, even the interviewer said at the end that he was happy with my solution. I was able to come up with a feasible solution and answered all of his questions correctly. I'd be very surprised if he didn't give me a "hire" mark. 4) PM round? idk. This was a bit strange for me. I talked with the PM about some technical topics about the system I'm working on at my current job. He asked me how do we deploy our system, how do we do testing, etc.. Felt like he was just making sure I know what I'm doing and know the whole process / system and not just my part. My company does a few things in a weird way so he was surprised with some of my answers but I was able to tell him how I would've done things differently. All in all I think this round went ok. I'd appreciate any FANG (or similar big tech company) interviewer's feedback, especially if you have experience in what goes on when grading a candidate's performance. TC: ~30k USD (I live in a poor country) YoE: 4 #amazon #interview #swe
Your post didn't ooze LPs from every line = no hire.
🤣
I'm confused by 30k TC
In my country 500 usd / month gets you a pretty a good place to live.
I see!
What are the chances of me getting a down-leveled SDE1 offer? (They are looking for SDE1s as well)
Your system design round went well so no reason to down level you to sde-1. You will either get sde-2(I voted Leaning hire) or you will be rejected(low probability considering the amount of hiring going on) .
Update: got rejected.
Amazon is a shitty company anyway
tl;dr - OP thought he was the shit before on-site - OP needed hints throughout the on-site
Thanks for the tl;dr I know some people (like myself) like detailed posts so I just went for it.