August 11, 2022
Very First Tech Interview - Amazon
Interviewing at Amazon
I recently graduated with a computer engineering degree and was excited to start my career in some kind of programming job, ideally something that focused on software engineering as the object-oriented programming I did throughout university was always my favorite work. I applied to several companies but focused my applications on the big tech FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) of which I could only dream of joining just a couple years ago, and to my happy surprise Amazon was the very first to ever reach out to me.
I spent the several days after being contacted by Amazon's recruiter revisiting my old college notes, attending any and all Amazon virtual events, studying old and new data structures and algorithms, and solving programming problems online for dozens of hours, enough to where I felt prepared for whatever technical questions may come my way. I was very just thrilled to have the opportunity to interview with such a prestigious company…However, I failed. I was rejected during the interview process.
This is all relatively fresh news so I’d be lying if I said I wasn't still sorely disappointed, but I can't deny that I've learned a lot from the experience and it's a straight up fact that I came out of it with a lot more excitement and motivation to continue learning than I anticipated. I was able to process the whole ordeal and learn from my mistakes so that I will do better on subsequent interviews. Really, I am grateful for the opportunity to have interviewed with Amazon at all and plan to try again in a few months. I would encourage other students to not be discouraged if they don't get their dream job right away; it's important to learn from your failures and keep trying.
"You always pass failure on your way to success."
-- Mickey Rooney
And that's how I became an Amazon reject! That's not what this piece is about though. In truth I mostly want to use this space to share some of the different resources I discovered throughout this recent amazon experience that have made me enjoy my practice with coding even more. Some of these are sites that just feed you problems to solve back-to-back while others are structured more like an off-campus college course or detailed online tutorial. I suggest briefly checking them all out and playing around with the different sites to see what you end up enjoying most or find most useful to your personal growth process.
Programming Practice Resources
| Link | Description |
|---|---|
| Codewars | Codewars is a great resource for learning and practicing programming concepts. The site has a large community of experienced programmers who can help you learn and improve your programming skills. Every time you submit a solution, you are shown the top ranked community answers based on best practices or whatever was deemed most clever. In addition, Codewars offers a variety of challenges that can help you learn new programming techniques and improve your problem-solving skills while letting you rank up your profile in martial arts terms (dan ranking system). |
| Leetcode | Leetcode is a great resource for practicing programming questions and preparing for programming interviews. It can help you improve your problem-solving skills and learn new programming concepts by feeding you a seemingly endless list of problems which you can filter by topic or difficulty. |
| HackerRank | HackerRank is a well-respected resource for learning programming, enough so that Amazon themselves were using this site as part of their interview process. The Online Assessment that they sent out to the potential SDEs gave us two programming questions where all test cases had to pass within a specific time limit. HackerRank provides a variety of challenges and projects for you to work on, which can help you learn programming concepts more quickly. Familiarizing yourself with this one is a good idea if you're applying for Amazon. |
| Cracking the Coding Interview | Cracking the Coding Interview is a book that contains a lot of interview questions that are commonly asked by employers. It is a great resource to use to study programming because it will help you better understand the types of questions that are typically asked in interviews and help you learn how to better dissect and solve coding problems. It provides a structured approach to learning and contains a wealth of information on programming techniques, theory, data structures, and specific interview processes for each of the huge tech firms. |
| Microsoft Learn | Microsoft Learn is a free, online learning platform that helps you learn the skills you need to land the job you want. It offers a variety of learning paths, so you can pick the one that best suits your needs. The platform is constantly updated with new content, so you can always stay up-to-date on the latest programming technologies and trends. |
| Amazon AWS Educate | AWS Educate is a cloud computing platform designed for educators and students to get hands-on experience with AWS technology. It provides access to resources such as tutorials, videos, and online courses. It also offers discounts on AWS services. |