5 rounds. 3 coding questions, 1 object oriented design, 1 pure behavioral. And a lunch round that doesnt count. Recruiter told me the technical rounds are 25% behavioral, 75% technical and all rounds are 55 minutes. Does this mean I should keep my LP stories short? Right now my stories go from 2-5 minutes. I’m feeling strong in my stories and my ability to tell in STAR format since I did speech in HS and college. I’m guessing OOD is more high level, like just writing some classes and the relationships between? Not as advanced as system design. I’ve done 350 LC all amazon tagged in the past 6 months. What else to focus on? I’m thinking to focus mostly on LP now TC: 110 YOE: <1
Did you end up getting the offer? I thought If another interviewer asks the same question that we should give a different story because they all compare notes together after
Sorry to hear that :(. Was it for SDE1? Did the tech questions trip you up?
Yes, if the same response is repeated more than once, it goes negatively on the feedback. You should have at least 2 stories per LP. In my onsite, it was 80% LP and 20% technical. The guy who did technical was so relaxed that he just asked me to walk through the work assignment I did.
Work assignment == online assignment? I aced the online assessment and got straight to onsite. My recruiter said it would be mostly technical but maybe that’s a generic response
I got one online assignment first before the phone screening and one after the phone screening. The one after phone screen is much elaborate - they needed full fledged architecture and design document explaining how my design meets their goals. They also needed me to create the entire solution on AWS account and share the credentials so that they can login and verify the solution.
The LPs are very important and being resilient to probing is also a big thing. They will try to push your buttons and if you crumble it will not go well. Amazon has a fairly cut throat culture so they make sure you are cut out for that kind of team.
Cleared Amazon SE2 and SE3 interviews at different times. Took the SE3 offer but did not stay very long. It was not for me.
Thanks for the heads up. I did debate in high school so I’ll keep this in mind
Save your best stories for the pure behav round. That would be with your HM I guess. In my onsite I told my best stories in HM round and repeated a couple of them in other rounds. Make sure you tell your best stories to HM somehow even if it is not related to the question asked. Tweak your conversation and mention tiny stories. For example I asked him this - “ How do you get user feedback in a big company like this. When I worked at <> I was sitting very close to my sales team who were users of my product. I used to spend 2 hrs a week to get feedback and understand how its working for them. I built <so and so> features using the feedback. Blah blah blah. Its very important to do well in that round.
This is really good advice, thank you
I had an on-site recently. The technical rounds were actually 50% behavioral. I also had a bar raiser interview and it was mostly behavioral, but he asked me an algorithms question in the last 10 mins. You’re right about the OOD interview. I basically defined the interfaces between classes, not a lot of actual code itself. LPs are extremely important, come prepared and do your best not to repeat stories. If you must repeat a story, mention that you already gave the story to a previous interviewer and then you should twist it a little to fit the actual question asked.
Thank you! It was 50% behavioral even though the recruiter said it would be less? This thread made me realize I should focus extremely hard on LP. It’s kind of strange that I might be putting more time into my stories than leetcode but I guess that’s how amazon works. Thanks for the scoop on OOD. That’s kind of what I figured. I hope your interview went well!
It did, I got an offer. Obviously trust your interviewer, I just gave you my experience. That being said, I would write down all 14 LPs and come up with stories for each.
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Yes, I spoke to a previous recruiter from amazon and she mentioned that they take LPs very seriously. So, be sure your examples show that & definitely quantify the results. Each interviewer is given 3 LPs that they’ll most likely test you on. Good luck 🙂
Each interviewer is given 2 LPs and a specific type of coding question to ask; Design, fundamentals, OOD, etc... For the LPs, we typically don't care what your team did, we care about what you specifically did. And we will drill into that to find out if you actually did it.