I'm now interviewing at AWS Singapore. I have presently gone through 3 rounds, which have taken at least 4.5 hours. If you ask me, it's getting more and more insane with interviews nowadays in the tech industry. I'm not even that interested if you ask me, but I need the interview experience to keep me on my tops so I'm prepared for other (easier) interviews. I was sort of pushed through this interview by a recruiter. Going through one of these interviews is like going through a meat grinder, at the end hopefully you're not ground beef yet. Apparently, the entire hiring rate is 1 out of 50. Which makes it a measly 2%. The odds aren't that great. But if you do make it to the 2% you're going to have a much better time with other company interviews, and even if you don't make it, you're still going to have a much better time with other company interviews!
Round 1
I spoke with a solution architect who asked me various questions like what I learned in the past few years that was the most interesting, what am I learning now, tell him a time when a project failed, followed by some technical questions like Imagine you're building a website which will have a global audience, what will you consider? What's the difference between TCP and UDP? You're building a streaming video website, which protocol would you use? What is a container compared to a virtual machine? What is a reflection attack? What's the purpose of encrypting data at rest? How do you test if an application is vulnerable to SQL injection? I think I even got asked a question about SAN and RAID. Oh and what is CAP theorem? So it's generalist technological questions but also some behavioural questions. You don't have to know everything by the way but it would help you to know something.
At the end we kind of ran out of time, I was still talking about building a website for a global audience and I had to stop talking. I got to ask him some questions and went overtime about 20-30 minutes. Then he started to tell me about the entire interview process (supposedly 3, but turns out that wasn't the case as I found out later). I kind of figured at that point I made it to the 2nd round since he started telling me about the entire process and when you're always overtime in an interview it's a pretty good sign.
So I passed that round and made it to round 2 which was on-site at the Amazon office.
Round 2
I actually met the hiring manager who asked me close to 55 minutes of behavioural questions. And boy, it was tough. Real tough. Had to really dig deep into my brain to give examples of various situations over the past few years. They were all indirectly related to the 16 leadership principles. I gave one where I could not meet a commitment, but then he asked for another one, I guess it wasn't good enough. But the questions where all like "Tell me a time when you went above and beyond", or "Tell me a time when you disagreed with a work colleague", and I'm not so great with these questions.
In Amazon it's not good enough that you answer questions well. You have to be outstanding in some areas. If not you're not going to pass the interview. Think about that for a second. 100/100 isn't enough you kind of have to score 120/100.
At the end I kept asking questions and we went over an hour. The interview ended up being 2 hours. When he was done he told me that at some point I'll speak to some name of some person. That was when I knew I had passed the 2nd round as well. He was pretty good and told me lots of helpful information to pass the other rounds. So I really appreciated that. He told me that I'm competing with everyone else who was sitting in the dining area. Then gave an example where when he was in Japan he asked someone where his hotel was and the person took him to the hotel. So that's above and beyond. Yeah. I know. I'm telling you it's tough and you need preparation!
So I found out a few days later I passed, and round 3 was also on-site at the Amazon office. This time I was given a problem to solve where I had to prepare an architectural proposal and present it to them as if they were a customer.
This time I definitely went overboard, above and beyond. I not only created the proposal, I actually created the actual architecture which can be deployed for the project. So I was pretty much building the building, in addition to providing a blueprint! If this isn't above and beyond honestly I don't know what is.
Round 3
I was only given an hour to present kind of had to cram it all in, which I did. I was also asked a lot of questions, some of which I had to look up afterwards. I think it was a reasonable session but that didn't stop me from being stressed. The hiring manager acted as COO and another architect acted as CTO. I was asked all sorts of questions from disaster recovery, to databases, networking, storage, containers, pipelines (how to create one for them), IAM roles, application considerations when deploying to the cloud, containers, load balancers. I started off by introducing myself and then mentioned I'll go through the diagram describing network flow and then later going through the components in a bit more detail and saving questions at the end. After all the questions that were asked, at the end we had 8 minutes left so I gave a demo of what I did as well (as in show them the actual website, but this was a pre-recorded demo which I showed. Yes I even recorded a demo!). Then the CTO had to run as he had another appointment and the COO let me off and said the recruiter will get back to me. So no overtime this time. After I got back I followed up with the questions they asked in the presentation as well, not sure if that'll get me bonus points but I did anyway.
So the verdict is yet to be out. I tried my best that's for sure and definitely went above and beyond. I even printed out the documents for them and also brought my laptop over to the office in my shiny new briefcase.
It's definitely kind of fun, even though stressful when interviewing at Amazon. You sort of figure out what you're good at and what you're not good at. And even learn some new things along the way. I don't know if round 3 was my last round but yeah definitely fun and sort of pushes you a bit.
Round 1
I spoke with a solution architect who asked me various questions like what I learned in the past few years that was the most interesting, what am I learning now, tell him a time when a project failed, followed by some technical questions like Imagine you're building a website which will have a global audience, what will you consider? What's the difference between TCP and UDP? You're building a streaming video website, which protocol would you use? What is a container compared to a virtual machine? What is a reflection attack? What's the purpose of encrypting data at rest? How do you test if an application is vulnerable to SQL injection? I think I even got asked a question about SAN and RAID. Oh and what is CAP theorem? So it's generalist technological questions but also some behavioural questions. You don't have to know everything by the way but it would help you to know something.
At the end we kind of ran out of time, I was still talking about building a website for a global audience and I had to stop talking. I got to ask him some questions and went overtime about 20-30 minutes. Then he started to tell me about the entire interview process (supposedly 3, but turns out that wasn't the case as I found out later). I kind of figured at that point I made it to the 2nd round since he started telling me about the entire process and when you're always overtime in an interview it's a pretty good sign.
So I passed that round and made it to round 2 which was on-site at the Amazon office.
Round 2
I actually met the hiring manager who asked me close to 55 minutes of behavioural questions. And boy, it was tough. Real tough. Had to really dig deep into my brain to give examples of various situations over the past few years. They were all indirectly related to the 16 leadership principles. I gave one where I could not meet a commitment, but then he asked for another one, I guess it wasn't good enough. But the questions where all like "Tell me a time when you went above and beyond", or "Tell me a time when you disagreed with a work colleague", and I'm not so great with these questions.
In Amazon it's not good enough that you answer questions well. You have to be outstanding in some areas. If not you're not going to pass the interview. Think about that for a second. 100/100 isn't enough you kind of have to score 120/100.
At the end I kept asking questions and we went over an hour. The interview ended up being 2 hours. When he was done he told me that at some point I'll speak to some name of some person. That was when I knew I had passed the 2nd round as well. He was pretty good and told me lots of helpful information to pass the other rounds. So I really appreciated that. He told me that I'm competing with everyone else who was sitting in the dining area. Then gave an example where when he was in Japan he asked someone where his hotel was and the person took him to the hotel. So that's above and beyond. Yeah. I know. I'm telling you it's tough and you need preparation!
So I found out a few days later I passed, and round 3 was also on-site at the Amazon office. This time I was given a problem to solve where I had to prepare an architectural proposal and present it to them as if they were a customer.
This time I definitely went overboard, above and beyond. I not only created the proposal, I actually created the actual architecture which can be deployed for the project. So I was pretty much building the building, in addition to providing a blueprint! If this isn't above and beyond honestly I don't know what is.
Round 3
I was only given an hour to present kind of had to cram it all in, which I did. I was also asked a lot of questions, some of which I had to look up afterwards. I think it was a reasonable session but that didn't stop me from being stressed. The hiring manager acted as COO and another architect acted as CTO. I was asked all sorts of questions from disaster recovery, to databases, networking, storage, containers, pipelines (how to create one for them), IAM roles, application considerations when deploying to the cloud, containers, load balancers. I started off by introducing myself and then mentioned I'll go through the diagram describing network flow and then later going through the components in a bit more detail and saving questions at the end. After all the questions that were asked, at the end we had 8 minutes left so I gave a demo of what I did as well (as in show them the actual website, but this was a pre-recorded demo which I showed. Yes I even recorded a demo!). Then the CTO had to run as he had another appointment and the COO let me off and said the recruiter will get back to me. So no overtime this time. After I got back I followed up with the questions they asked in the presentation as well, not sure if that'll get me bonus points but I did anyway.
So the verdict is yet to be out. I tried my best that's for sure and definitely went above and beyond. I even printed out the documents for them and also brought my laptop over to the office in my shiny new briefcase.
It's definitely kind of fun, even though stressful when interviewing at Amazon. You sort of figure out what you're good at and what you're not good at. And even learn some new things along the way. I don't know if round 3 was my last round but yeah definitely fun and sort of pushes you a bit.
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