I will try to give you insights into my interview experience as well as my preparation strategy. So, I had applied through the amazon-wow program. It is a program to hire female candidates only. In this program, for final year grads, there are 2–3 interview rounds whereas for 3rd-year students there is only one. Feeling Lucky as a 3rd year.
Background: I have been introduced to coding in my first year by our seniors. it fascinates me a lot. As I was more inclined towards the dev side, I did not do competitive programming. Although I have participated in hackathons and won too. I am proficient in the MERN stack and had done a couple of internships too.
Although I had made a scored of 2270 on Hackerrank and solved 300+ problems on code forces, I don't have that confidence in DSA. To gain that confidence I studied vigorously for 3 months.
The only thing that helped me in the process is my earlier hard work of doing questions on regular basis. With regular practice you can learn anything, so even when you don't see any progress, don't give up. It's the learning curve upon which each one has to pass.
Online assessment round 1 :
Duration: 1.5 hours
It had 1 coding question of medium level and 8 other MCQ sections which included, DBMS, Shell scripting, project management, Data structure and algorithms, pseudo-code, object-oriented programming language etc. So it was an easy peasy round.
Online assessment round 2
Duration: 1.5 hours
It had 2 coding questions and 6 other MCQ sections including behavioral questions. The 1st coding question was easy and 2nd was medium. The other section was somewhat similar to the previous one. Rocking it again as always.
Tip: focus on coding questions more and try to answer every question as there is no negative marking.
After the long wait and delay I finally got my interview scheduled on 25th Oct 2021, so don’t panic here, try to contact people who have finished their interview as it helps you to know the hot topic for your interview. I did the same, I reached out to every person on LinkedIn to know about their experience and topic.
Technical interview round :
Duration: 1 hour
Platform: amazon chime
My interview starts without the intro and other formalities, the interviewer comes and directly shares the question. The first question was to find the mean of the first 3 numbers in the running stream of numbers. I was able to answer it in a very decent way, by first explaining the brute force then the optimal solution along with explaining the time complexity. After this, my interview got some chill and we moved to my projects and internship experiences. As he was the tester, he has very good skills to find bugs, hence our discussion lasted for a long period of time. Now to cover the time he asked me another standard question to reverse the doubly linked list. This time I was able to write code in 2 mins and also explain to him line by line.
The interviewer was very happy with me and it ended on a happy note. At that moment I know I will be getting the selection mail soon.
Some Life-Changing Tips :
- Make good projects, the one thing which helped me in my interviews is the projects. They are different and hosted on platforms like Heroku, GitHub, etc. It helps the interviewer to see the result immediately rather than code.
- To complete at least standard DSA questions. I suggest the striver sheet in order to get the questions in one place.
- Practice and being consistent is the key to achieving anything. To solve at least 1–2 questions daily in order to master the coding interviews.
- Use Leetcode questions and filter effectively, it will help you a lot and you can also mention it in your resume
- Don’t panic if you are getting a delay in reply from the company side instead utilize it to practice.
Conclusion: I got my selection mail on 15 December 2021 ❤
