How I Failed At Amazon Interview Because of LP
The interviews took place in fall 2020.
Preconditions 🔗
Education: Master’s in IT, System Analysis.
Experience: Software developer with 4 years in IT - ~1.5 years as QA Automation, ~1 as Fullstack Developer, ~1.5 as BackEnd Developer.
Algorithms and Data structures: ~200 easy/medium problems solved on leetcode, read Cracking the Coding Interview book.
System Design: Experience from real life projects, read Cracking the Coding Interview book and a few articles.
Application Process 🔗
I applied for Amazon hiring event in March 2020, however the event was cancelled due to quarantine, so I got no reply in March.
Half a year passed since then, I already forgot about my application. And here we go - in fall 2020 I received an email from Amazon’s recruiter inviting me to take part in first round of interview process - online assessment.
Since March, I haven’t solved any algorithmic problem. I had less than three weeks to refresh my knowledge and skills.
Unfortunately I had no motivation to prepare as it was the end of summer. I had more fun things to do than grinding algorithms after work and on weekends.
Interview Rounds 🔗
Online Assessment.
Preparation: 3 weeks - solved ~30 problems, reviewed ~50 from previously solved. Interview: 2 medium/easy leetcode problems. Result: solved 2 problems, but not all test cases passed.
First Technical Interview.
Preparation: 1 month. ~10 problems solved, ~30 reviewed. Interview: not usual problem solving, but Object-Oriented Design problem with a usual task to design classes, functions, interfaces, inheritance… Result: 10 minutes spent on clarifying requirements because never faced such questions before. However still passed.
Onsite Interviews (4 in a row).
Preparation: read Cracking the Coding Interview, few system design questions, 50 tiny videos about Leadership Principles (LP), 4 mock online interviews with peers, prepared 10 Leadership Principles answers, reviewed ~30 problems.
In the beginning of each interview I was asked 2-3 default Leadership Principles (LP) questions. All questions are from the “top 10 LP questions” from google.
Interview 1: easy leetcode question. Solved. Interview 2: medium leetcode question. Solved. Interview 3: easy leetcode question + medium follow up. Solved. Interview 4: system design question. Not sure.
Final result: Rejected. “haven’t shown desired Leadership Principles, we don’t feel that you took enough Ownership at your current project…”
Conclusion 🔗
I do accept that I failed at answering LP questions and next time will spend more time preparing for this silliness. It always seems like technical preparation is more important, but looks like that is not the case with Amazon.
There are some rumours that Amazon is looking more at LP answers than at technical skills.
It was one of the first interviews which I failed, which was a great experience.
Still, I don’t feel disappointed because there are definitely Pros and Cons of relocation and working for FAANG.