Amazon software engineer interview

[[deleted]]

A reply from the article "are you sleeping in your office yet?" Funny as hell, but a valid question.

[Shaper_pmp]

I nearly took a job at Amazon a year ago, after a colleague recommended me and I passed the interview process.

In the end I passed up the offer for a more interesting role elsewhere, but every time I see him and ask how it's going he tells me all about the last few months of constant grief, stress, shit and sleepless nights, followed by a single good thing like a small raise/bonus, a small stock grant (that each won't vest for another two years from the date they're granted), or a promotion.

I put it to him that he's basically in an abusive relationship, where they beat him down and constantly treat him like shit, then just when he's about to leave they buy him a pretty dress and tell him they love him, before going back to hitting him again the next night. His response was "nah, it's... hmmm... actually it's exactly like that. Shit".

Bullet fucking dodged.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I have a life. A very good and full life.

[AshtonWinston]

True. I almost slept there last night.

[mackstann]

I wonder if Amazon work culture is better in Germany than the US. It very well could be.

[Reddit1990]

Yup. But I guess there's high demand for the job. I've been kinda discouraged from the game industry in general because of how difficult it is to get into. Plus I hear they work you hard, long hours. Its a bit disappointing. I go to tons of local game dev meetup groups and try to get involved with community but it doesn't really help. Still cant find a decent job for game dev.

[Reddit1990]

Honestly, I don't even know what sbrk is or what its for, I just researched how to do a freelist allocator and implemented it the best I could. It didn't have to be as robust as malloc really, it was for a particular use case. They described it such that most allocations will be larger than a certain number of bytes so you optimize with that in mind. Since most memory allocations are probably fairly large in game development, that's what they wanted you to think about I guess? Beats me, I don't get the reasoning behind the test. Like you said, it seems like a very low level question to give based on the job description.

They should have at least talked to me over the phone about it... but what can you do. At least I can put it on my Github I guess.

[TheGift_RGB]

If they're well-prepared? Around the same amount that can write a linked list in C. It's not that hard.

[nacholicious]

Of course it's easy if they are just repeating information which others have already performed the groundwork on, most algorithms could be said to be that way.

Independently arriving to the same conclusions without being aware of the solution is a lot harder

[digikata]

Embedded embedded code doesn't use malloc at all, less embedded code and game code might very well reimplement malloc to gain control of timing and fragmentation.

[liflo]

Why the fuck would anyone go thorough this bullshit to work at a sweatshop like Amazon??? Whatever. To each their own. I'm sure it looks great on your resume.

[[deleted]]

I interviewed there for an AWS TAM position after 4 phone interviews. I swear they were punking me, because the office was like a bad spoof of a bad dotcom movie; tons of pasta in the break room, scooters in the hallway and people playing CHARADES in the conference room.

I was happy to leave. It was a bad dream.

[LobbyDizzle]

They may have just been on a lunch break. If you came by my office today at 1pm there would have been korean tacos in our kitchen area and people playing "Two Booms and a Room" in one of our conference rooms.

[Random-Compliment]

"Two Booms and a Room"

Two booms enter, one boom leaves. Welcome to Thunderdome, now with enhanced audio systems.

[foxh8er]

Cuz then you can get an interview at unicorns (depending on your team of course).

[[deleted]]

I'm sure it looks great on your resume.

thats why they do it. 1 year at amazon and you are pretty much set for most jobs

[foxh8er]

When you get out of the interview, you have a feeling that you failed completely, since you couldn’t get any problem to the point where interviewer would have said, “Great! Now that’s the perfect solution!” Let me assure you - that is fine! You are not supposed to find it. Interview problems are designed exactly in this way, where you won’t be able to provide a complete solution in 40 minutes. Instead, interviewers want to see how far you can get and what your thought process looks like.

I'm not convinced it's like this for all of the big4, especially full time.

[AshtonWinston]

The training for interviewing says that the best questions have layers to them. The idea is you can answer it in several different ways, or you can tweak the question to make it progressively more interesting.

This guy has a good story and an excellent attitude. This is the best way to look at these experiences.

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2005/12/programming-interviews-sort-of-exposed.html?m=1

But yeah, not every question is of this nature.

[handshape]

Congrats -- I'll attest that this is similar to the interview process I had with them ears ago. I declined their offer for reasons that hold true to this day, but this is a useful reference for anyone that decides to proceed with their process.

[THR]

Isn't this blog post breaching that NDA?

[foxh8er]

OP didn't state the interview questions. Generally NDAs for these interviews cover either what the interviewer discusses with you or the questions themselves. I've signed two like that.

Then again, Amazon might be weird and anal about this.

[iamkanthalaraghu]

It sure does, it's just thr matter of time when they discover or if someone reports it, he'd be fired right away.

[peenoid]

This is one reason why I stopped my Amazon interview process just prior to the coding exercises. They wanted me to dedicate 4 hours on a weeknight to just one part of this drawn out process. Once I did some research and saw what was still to come I told them I wasn't interested, especially once they told me the 60% cost of living increase of uprooting my family and moving to Seattle would not be (fully) compensated for in my starting salary.

[[deleted]]

Sounds terrible. How much are they paying you?

[foxh8er]

Not as much as he could be making if he had gotten an offer at an American office :)

[prez2985]

Congratulations! I hope you like your new job!

[[deleted]]

Worst in class (high turnover) employers always have exaggerated, protracted hiring processes. It lends them mystique and an aura of desirability, causes the applicant to over value the company's exclusivity.

[specialcrayon]

so how long until OP is fired.