AmazeWoW Interview Experience

AmazeWoW is a development initiative with internship and FTE SDE (Full-time Software Development Engineer) opportunities for Amazon in India, focused on bringing in top talent from engineering institutes. I got to know about the program through my campus placement cell. I applied for the role at the AmazeWiT portal and passed the resume screening.

In about two weeks, I got the confirmation for being shortlisted for online assessment for the 6 months Internship + FTE role.

Round 1(Online Assessment): This online assessment comprised of 30 questions with 2 coding questions and 28 MCQs.

Coding Questions:

1. It was one of the most common Dynamic Programming problems: Longest decreasing sub-sequence.
2. It was an easy question that needed us to find out the mean, median, and mode in an array.

The MCQs were difficult that required a good understanding of Computer fundamentals. I was shortlisted for the Technical Interview Round 1. Amazon organized various webinars to guide candidates for the interviews.

Round 2 (Virtual Technical Interview 1): This was round 1 of the Technical Interview series. The interviewer didn’t seem to be interested in knowing about me or anything else, so he immediately started with the coding part. It was a 45 minutes interview with 2 coding questions:

1. There is a stream of numbers scattered in memory, and we need to find out the frequency of corrupted data. Corrupted data resembles a given pattern. (Not sure if this was the exact question. It was a bit confusing.)
2. This problem was a variation of one of the most famous Graphs problems, the Number of Islands. We’re given a 2D matrix of 0’s and 1’s, where 1 represents land, and 0 represents water. All the 1’s together represent an island. So, we need to find out:

• The number of islands
• The size of the largest island
• Number of islands nearest to a given coordinate

I could attempt both the problems but wasn’t able to satisfy the interviewer with my approach. I couldn’t move ahead for further rounds.

Mistakes:

1. Didn’t understand the question completely: I couldn’t understand the first question correctly. So, I tried every possible approach I could think of at the moment and most of them were not relevant to the question asked.
2. Didn’t perform self testing of the code: For the second question, I completed the first two parts correctly but for the third part, I neither reviewed my code nor performed the testing.

Advises:

1. Impressive Resume: Prepare an attractive resume. Include only relevant things with minimal words. You can follow this guide “How to write a resume: The Complete Guide”
2. Understand the problem completely: If you don’t get the question, ask the interviewer twice or thrice until you get the question correctly.
3. Keep talking: During the whole interview, you should be talking to the interviewer because if you stay silent, the interviewer won’t understand your thought process.
4. Don’t jump to coding: First, try to explain your approach to the interviewer and try to optimize your approach as much as you can. After you’re done with maximum optimization, you can code it now.
5. Comment your code: For every line of code, write short comments for your and interviewer’s ease.
6. Always review your code: When you’re done with your coding, try to explain the algorithm with a sample test case and perform the complete dry run.

All the best everyone!