Had an interview with Amazon. Still waiting for the result. I felt like I have not done a great job while responding to leadership principles questions mostly because I’m kind of unprepared for such questions. What’s the importance given to them ? How are they evaluated ?
I’ve one coming up soon. Could you please tell the format of the interview and what questions did they ask? To answer your question, my recruiter straight up told me to prepare two senarios for each leadership principle
I got 4 rounds of interview. 3 algorithmic and 1 system design. Every interview starts with behavioral questions for 20-25 min and 20 min of technical interview
Yea the LPs are very important; they tend to ask the typical “tell me a time when” questions and expect you to show how you exhibit the principles in your answers indirectly.
Last time, I had very solid tech rounds but fcked up in leadership principles and that too in BR round. Straight reject.
Read the LPs before you interview. Reflect on your career and have a scenario or two for each where you exhibited them and some scenarios where you did not.
If you don’t have real stories, you better make some up. Amazon is all about how much you can fluff yourself. It’s not about how good you are, it’s about how good you say you are.
well this is true for anything in life really.
You must prepare LP before the interview. They give you the list of questions beforehand and the expectation is that you have the answers ready. If you struggle with these, this is a bad sign.
Definitely this. Every recruiter I’ve ever talked with at Amazon was very clear and adamant about the LPs and their importance. This included links to the LPs and a healthy number of example questions to extrapolate on
All people complaining about LP questions is just ridiculous - these are the easiest questions to nail if you have real experience and if you seriously want an offer there then the least thing you can do is prepare. Every Amazon interviewer has several questions for a given LP handy so if you cant come up with one (ex: a disagreement with your manager- which btw is surprising) then just say you dont have such an example and move on. You dont get penalized for “small” examples but rather for errors of judgement on the ones you call out.
Yes, you can get leveled down or they can say you don’t meet the L(x) bar if your example is too small in scope. There are certain expectations at certain levels.
For one example no, if you have consistent answers in smaller complexity - then yes. And that sounds like the right outcome to me
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Practically the only thing amazon cares about TBH
I tried to be honest. But for most of the questions I don’t really have answers. Like they did ask if ever had conflict with manager how did I resolve it.
Yea it sucks when that sort of thing happens; whenever I encounter a situation like that I see if I can redirect to a similar question like “I can’t really think of an example for that situation but I do have an example of when I disagreed with a more senior engineer” etc