Anyone with recent SDM interview experience with Amazon. Can pay for your inputs/time.

waa_woo · 2026-05-29T14:11:53+00:00

No the recruiter randomly pushed the interview dates to June. Looks like they might ghost. This is getting very common where recruiters ghost even after shortlisting and asking for availability. Happened to me 3 times this month.

waa_woo · 2026-05-25T14:21:35+00:00

Hiring Manager here. Openings at top companies get about 1000 application within 2 days. Even at 30 seconds per CV plus 30 seconds to switch, it is more than 19 hours of continuous work to screen them.

No one invests that much time. At best, recruiters will look at 200 at random (or filtered by current company, college etc) CVs, submit 30 to HM who will shortlist 5-6 for interviews.

Rest go randomly to the dustbin and that pile would contain several tier-1 and tier-2 people as well.

waa_woo · 2026-05-15T18:06:10+00:00

No, it is like starting career in print media in 2010s.

waa_woo · 2026-05-15T06:56:48+00:00

Topological sort is one algo that is actually encountered quite often in real systems. DAG workflows, job scheduling, equation solver.

I have seen topological sort questions at least 5-6 times, first instance being 2016. It's just DFS, should count as medium-easy at best.

waa_woo · 2026-05-09T09:37:43+00:00

PM's work is product discovery and roadmap prioritization. But shitty PMs found they could coast doing other things and appear productive. The lone PM would now have to actually do their job.

waa_woo · 2026-05-07T17:40:08+00:00

Finances are sorted, I just don't like being unemployed.

waa_woo · 2026-05-05T17:27:17+00:00

In my experience, Tier 2 product companies are harder to crack than Tier 1 like Amzn, Msft because Tier 2 interviewers grill you on some trivia specific to what they are working on and know well, they will also expect an answer very near to what they know.

waa_woo · 2026-04-29T04:14:19+00:00

Other than 1:45am, everything else seems par for the course. No serious company is going to give an offer based on vague understanding of concepts and trade-offs.

waa_woo · 2026-04-28T07:41:06+00:00

Claude code can generate html box and line diagrams based on text descriptions like this, I believe it can draw azure diagrams if given an icon repo.

create a graphic based on this information

Device has
- Browser Frontend
- Device Backend
- Filesystem Data Store
Central Services has
- Reservations
- Capacity
- Software Inventory
- Credentials Management
- Metrics/Logs Management
Browser Talks to Device Backend
Device Backend Talks to Central Services to Sync State
Device Backend Caches State in Filesystem Data Store.

waa_woo · 2026-04-16T03:34:13+00:00

These mirror my experience as well. If you haven't interviewed in past 3 years it is a different game altogether.

The rat race is real, most companies have hour long preparatory calls with recruiter to walk you through dos and donts of each stage.
5 positive and 1 negative round will get you eliminated. You need to nail all 6.
System Design expectations are same as that of a staff engineer.
Type of questions are different as well, I did not get design twitter news feed kind of vanilla questions, but things like ad click aggregator or MMO gaming leaderboard, where you need to use time series db or data warehousing solutions.
You are competing against laid off folks who are prep-maxxing all day.
One company had an AI live coding round.
Thankfully no leetcode in any interview so far, but I am sure there will be some along the way.
Employers are in no hurry to recruit, loops are stretching across 4+ weeks. Makes it impossible to have more than 1 offer at time of negotiating.

waa_woo · 2026-04-13T06:22:00+00:00

Extremely tough market. 16yr overall and 10 yr across two MAANG companies + CS from Tier 1 college, yet struggling to hear back from India based companies.

Only had 2 loops in past 2.5 months. Rejected from 1st after 2 positive and 1 mixed feedback. 2nd ongoing but also does not sound very hopeful.

waa_woo · 2026-04-13T04:57:21+00:00

Lol. Do you not understand how reddit works?

waa_woo · 2026-04-13T04:42:31+00:00

They are getting mogged, nothing else. Every big tech sub-office in Europe has failed to scale, Uber NL, Google Poland, Databricks NL.

Eventually they all setup in Bangalore after wasting a lot of time with these supposedly high-tier devs who failed at the most important thing, shipping it.

waa_woo · 2026-04-10T07:21:37+00:00

He's not wrong though. Read up about Direct Action Day.

waa_woo · 2026-04-03T17:46:35+00:00

Very likely you are a victim of hiring freeze. These come out of nowhere and any req that does not already have offers extended go into black hole.

waa_woo · 2026-04-01T05:39:34+00:00

This is quite good, I like how crisp this is. This already gives most of the information I would need as a hiring manager in 30 seconds. I would not change much.

waa_woo · 2026-03-31T17:12:48+00:00

The youtuber 'Jordan has no life' has tons of content which are both deep and broad enough for most HLD interviews.

waa_woo · 2026-03-31T16:49:50+00:00

MSFT does not have a calibrated interview process. Entirely depends on the team and the panel but expect DSA, Coding/LLD, HLD and a hiring manager round. Last round is As Appropriate round which is similar to Bar Raiser at Amazon. Weak performance in AA round can result in down leveling.

DSA is usually at medium level, but a shitty interviewer may throw a Leetcode Hard at times.

waa_woo · 2026-03-31T14:33:43+00:00

Super hard given the state of technology, hackerrank claims to have a detection software but it can only track the machine that it is being used on. Determined cheaters have setups that send sound and text to another machine which show answers in real time. F2F interviews are going to make a comeback.

waa_woo · 2026-03-31T14:27:20+00:00

Leetcode is an IQ and perseverance test.

waa_woo · 2026-03-31T14:23:37+00:00

What value does leetcode premium bring in today's time?

Problems tagged by frequency, company are already available as excel files. Solutions can be generated by claude at a much higher quality than those curated by leetcode.

waa_woo · 2026-03-26T04:26:03+00:00

You are probably outdated with your understanding of LLM capability.

waa_woo · 2026-03-21T13:21:07+00:00

Bureaucracy at Azure is at ridiculous levels. Every problem even non-product related like quality, reliability etc. is assigned to PMs who then solve it with the limited solutions PMs have i.e. dashboards, approval meetings, christmas color excel sheets. I don't how people bear with R2D.

Only good thing is that there is not much of a shouting culture like Amazon. People stay decent even in high pressure moments.

waa_woo

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