Hi, I'm gonna be finishing my Master's in two months, and I tried Amazon interview just for the FAANG interview experience. I did 60 LeetCodes over last two years (40/40/20 difficulty split), gave five days to system design (which was out of my field of "expertise", so I had 0 knowledge beforehand), and did a couple of problems from CTCI. I somehow got the offer. The thing is – the team matching was absolutely terrible (nothing even close to the research I did in school), so I'm not really excited to join them. On the other hand, I'm kinda slow on the interview questions. Sometimes it takes me a lot of time to even "get" the solution if I read how it should be done. So I'm afraid I won't be able to get a job with Google/Microsoft. So my question is: if I passed the Amazon interview with relatively low effort, should I be able to pass Google/Microsoft interview with a lot of effort? I feel like by taking the Amazon job, I'd be throwing away all the "expertise" I got in university, since it seems like a "reglar" programming job, which I could probably do even without attending university.
You can move around amazon fairly easily after 6 months. There’s tons of different teams and opportunities to keep you busy.
Yeah, this is the safe route, but still...
You can always work for a year or two and then pursue a PhD. Working for a bit before going back to school made my graduate degree more meaningful. The work experience helped me understand what I was interested in and what I was not interested in.
most things you learned in school are not useful at work, so don’t think you will throw away anything. also if you aren’t top 5% in whatever field you studied, you will not be doing the same things at work
Take it, learn as much as you can for a year or two then GTFO of Amazon before it corrupts you as a person
Take amazon, you normally don’t really practice what you learn in school. Corporate is way different then school
Kinda makes me want to go for a PhD. I really love what I do, but getting paid peanuts isn't fun, and I want to have more direct real world impact.
You sound really young, my advice is make as much as you can and volunteer on the side if you want to make a direct impact. Later on you can get out of the rat race and do something you love
What did you research?
I started with compilers, but moved to concurrent data structures and spent a lot of time researching dynamic memory allocation, from implementations on kernel level, to user-level implementations, etc. Basically very low-level stuff, but not HW stuff. Feels weird that I should be creating React frontends and Java backends...
what about interview for kernel team
Passing Amazon interview doesn't give any signal. It has a mass hire and fire policy.
School is theory, your job will be real life. Ur likely not going to use much more than basic CS information you used regardless of where you go.
Google interview is harder. Microsoft interview is usually about the same (comparing Microsoft 61 with Amazon l5). I've heard Amazon l4 is fairly easy
Tell the recruiter you don't want to work for that team and tell them what you're interested in. There's always demand for developers in all parts of the company and a lot of people don't get through the interview so they'd rather pair you up with a job you wanted than lose you.
Yeah, I tried looking for other positions at Vancouver office (since I'm not a US citizen), but couldn't really find positions that would be suitable. In US I would be able to pick. And I don't think it's because I'm really picky, just seems that Amazon all-in-all focuses more on high-level services, not low-level research. Seems to me that Google/Apple/Microsoft have many more teams in these fields. Maybe it's just not a company fit.
You don’t have enough experiences to be hired for those roles. People I know work in those teams have been there for years and some are the main developers on Linux or FreeBSD projects. should try compony like VMWare, it has some junior roles. It’s a much better company if you like Kernel development, the interviews are hard, you really need to know the lower level details quite well, leetcode won’t help you there.
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Not the perfect answer for you, but hopefully this can help! https://www.rooftopslushie.com/request/47