The Amazon Coding Interview

What are people saying about Amazon’s Interview

PROS

Despite the stories, work life balance is reasonable
You learn to be a good engineer; even as an SDEI, I got good system design experience in owning a major feature
Interesting and challenging problems; easy to switch teams, lots of opportunities and flexibility within roles and teams

CONS

Projects can be cancelled or postponed, after a lot of effort put into it
Can be demanding; I had great performance reviews for 4 years, but with a new team where I wasn’t meeting manager’s expectations, I soon got put on a dev plan and ended up leaving soon after
Unequal promotion criteria across different organizations. Politics around reviews. The nature of engineering work in several retail teams is uninspiring.

What Amazonian have to say about interviewing

“Amazonians face problems they don’t know how to solve on a daily basis. We’re looking to get a line of sight into a candidate’s thought process, what questions they ask along the way, and what other approaches they could consider. How a candidate thinks about a problem is as important as the answer itself.”

“In general, our technical interviews typically require you to perform coding and system design white boarding exercises. Also keep in mind that invention is in our DNA, and technology is the fundamental tool we wield to evolve and improve every aspect of the experience we provide our customers.”

“Most of the work we do involves storing and providing access to data in efficient ways. This requires a strong background in data structures. You’ll need to understand the inner workings of common data structures and be able to compare and contrast their usage in various applications. You will be expected to know the runtimes for common operations as well as how they use memory.”

“Expect to be asked to write syntactically correct code—no pseudo code. If you feel a bit rusty coding without an IDE or coding in a specific language, it’s a good idea to dust off the cobwebs and get comfortable coding with a pen and paper. The most important thing a Software Development Engineer does at Amazon is write scalable, robust, and well-tested code.”

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