I recently interviewed onsite for an engineering role. I met 5 people. Most interviews were behavioral. Typical questions were like “describe me a situation where you ... “ . There was one system design and one coding round but they spent more than half of the time asking same behavioral questions. This is so unlike any typical tech interview so far I have experienced. The hiring manager was yawning all the time and not listening to me. He was asking the same things I had already answered a couple of minutes ago. Is the Amazon interview process changed ? Interview Result: Reject
Did you share your current level with them ahead of time. It’s likely they had confidence in your technical ability, but behavioral is a wild card with every candidate
No I didn’t . All they know if that I am a senior engineer at Vmware.
Have you been interviewed for engineering role?
I have always been an engineer and always been interviewed for such roles. I work mostly full stack.
My Lab126 interview was the only one I have ever walked out on. The interviewer was rude and condescending and it was clearly not a good fit.
There was 1 interview where I wish that I’d done the same.
This was my experience last week. 50%+ behavioral, barely wrote any algorithms, this was for SDE2
They asked me one tree question and I solved it perfectly. There was one system design question and that was good too. I wonder who they are liking for ?
You could argue that attitude is more important. If you know how to learn it is more important that knowing algorithms. In saying that I don’t know why I bothered leetcoding, most of the questions were actually things that I would code in my job which was a bit shocking.
Amazon is more about behavior questions. Their tech questions are not that hard..
Interviewer dependent. My amazon interview was more difficult than google (Microsoft was more difficult than those 2).
Are you trying to say Amazon is better than Google in another way :)
I had similar experience with AWS. Interviewers asked so many repetitive questions. I think in the end they match your answers/scenrios etc.
I my case the hiring manager was sleeping/ yawning badly and not attentive. I was repeating myself multiple times to this single person.
It really doesn’t get any less professional. Were you interviewing in Seattle?
Amazon spends a lot of time focusing on how you demonstrate their Leadership Principles. They mostly feel if you made it to onsite you're a likely technical fit. The phone screen would filter you otherwise. Yawning behavior aside, sounds very typical
Now this is the answer I was looking for. Thanks. I guess some of my answers might have not aligned with their leadership principles.
It seems a bit far fetched given that the online screen is the two most recent questions on career cup which are both very easy
there are 10+ leadership principles and each interviewer is assigned 1-3
But why do amazon need to ask these bullshit questions when other companies dont. Google, msft, fb all doing just as good, and hire more smarter engineers coz they grind u more on algo/analytic. Behavioral should be judged during the duration of the interview itself, on how the candidate response, is a jerk etc. Asking BS behavioral questions prove nothing as people can make them up a night before and do just as good during the interview.
Your recruiter should have briefed you on that. My recruiter told me to go through the LP and came up with a few scenarios for each LP so for different interviewers you can give them different scenario.
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Closed now - thank you all
Usually when you don’t meet their needs. TCYOE? HW or SW?
Needs as in pre- determined and hence only behavioral?
Software. It was a UI engineer role and I have tons of UI experience. I probably knew more than the interviewers themselves. I asked some tech related questions about their project and they couldn’t provide satisfactory answer.