Rejected by Amazon - Frontend and Software Engineer - Full Loop Interview Exp with no degree at all

are you curious about the amazon full
loop for software engineers so full
disclosure i did sign some ndas and that
means that i'm not going to be going in
depth about the problems that i solved
for these interviews or really talk that
much about the people that i met
it's just gonna be like a vague outline
of the interview that way i can still
you know tell you about it
so i was contacted through linkedin by
two recruiters and
it was for one uh two different
positions one was the software
engineering two and the other one was a
front-end engineering too
and not really that qualified so i'm not
sure if i'm good enough to be an
engineer too yet but i figured since i
was going for other positions at the
time anyway that i would use these
interviews as practice
yeah so uh since it didn't really hurt
to go for these positions i decided to
send my resume out to these two
recruiters
and they got back to me pretty quickly
both within 24 hours
and which i've actually learned is a
sign that the company is actually
interested because
before this i would you know wait for
days weeks at a time like are they gonna
respond but no if they don't respond
relatively quickly within a day or two
they're probably not interested
so yeah i got my responses and i sent
them like i responded to their email
about you know my inquiry my resume
and things like that and we started on
the tracks that for the two separate
positions
and since there's two i'm going to start
with the software engineering position
i'm going to set up chapters in this
youtube video so you can if you want to
skip to the front end engineering
section you can just click that
for the software engineering role it
didn't start from the phone interview it
actually started from an objective
assessment
so i was sent this objective assessment
that i was scheduled and you know forced
to take within seven days
and of course i took the entire seven
days to prepare
and when i took it
it was actually two roughly elite code
mediums
and i was able to solve it within i
think an hour and a half time frame
and
in addition to that it was like a super
long leadership survey
but i was able to pass both my solutions
with all test cases passed i think it
was like seven or eight test cases with
edge cases and everything
and the day later i was told that i was
selected to move on towards the phone
interview
so after some back and forth with emails
i told them that i wanted to schedule my
phone interview a couple weeks out
which is another thing i learned from
this process is that you know they're
not really in a rush
so if you want to schedule things a
couple weeks you know almost a month in
advance
that can be arranged and i've actually
been able to
um reschedule a different interview
before like phone interview
months you know in advance and then
actually i was able to delay it even
longer because i just wanted to have
some more time to prepare okay so but
for this particular interview i was
given two weeks to prepare for the phone
interview
and when the day finally came
i was so nervous because this was my
first interview a phone interview with
one of these big tech companies you know
and i
i didn't really prepare very well i was
like lead coding up until the last
minute okay
and this was like five minutes before
the interview i hadn't even tested chime
yet which is amazon's video chat
application that they use for these
interviews and just a lot of other stuff
in general i think and so i didn't know
how to connect my webcam to the
application in time
so he my interviewer was in
the
you know in the web chat with his face
and everything and then i had to fumble
around like text in the chat chat box
and i said i'm gonna have to call you
so i called him through the the hotline
or whatever and i got put his extension
in and we got connected
and we were able to start from there it
was like i think i think we're like five
minutes late or something
so after a couple of leadership
questions that i really think i fumbled
around with
i moved on to the next section which was
i thought was like some kind of weird
system design or something it was
actually a really strange question i
hadn't gotten anything like this before
on the code it was actually surprisingly
practical
and uh so i thought
i just went over like 10 minutes
basically of clarifying questions and
then i was like wait am i supposed to be
coding this right now
and he said yeah this is your coding
question
and i was like okay uh all right so i
just like quickly started coding some
really inefficient code it was like a
brute force solution
and
like obviously i didn't get
uh to move on to the next stage for this
position but i did learn a lot you know
it was
my first attempt at one of these things
and it actually i think it helped calm
my nerves a lot for the next one
all right so for the second position
that i went for with amazon it was a
front-end engineer two position
which again i wasn't necessarily
qualified for but you know who cares i'm
going for it anyway
we're code phonies right this one i
didn't start off with objective
assessment i started with a phone
interview which now you know i know is
possible
and
with this phone interview i got chime
set up correctly beforehand and
everything so it went pretty smoothly
the leadership questions i didn't do so
great in i hadn't practiced that very
much i just you know wrote down some
generic answers for mine
and with a coding question you know i
thought i was doing well but then
towards the end i just completely drew a
blank with a very obvious javascript
question
it was like something about promises and
for some reason i completely forgot how
promises worked
and i just straight up told him like
the promise this promise thing is really
confusing me
and uh we just moved on from there but
by some miracle i guess i actually made
it through to on-sites for this one
even though you know i thought i did
terribly in the phone interviews
so because i was so excited and i really
wanted to you know give it my best shot
i did like 20 interviews with mock
interviews on pramf.com it's a pramp.com
not sponsored or anything it's just a
great website that i use to prepare i
met a lot of cool people i actually
learned a lot while i was doing those
like coding interviews and behavioral
interviews to prepare for the on-sites
so if you're preparing right now i
highly recommend it i think algoexpert
has mock interviews too a bunch of
different websites they're doing it now
and yeah after the phone interviews i
scheduled my on sites uh two weeks after
the results of the phone interview
which i was hoping for more but they
seemed like they were in a rush they
wouldn't really budge that much on this
some other companies i know of have you
know extended me much longer than this
and but you know i just worked with it
after two weeks of leak coding and doing
mock interviews
whenever i started my first interview
with these guys it felt like everything
went out the window
the questions actually ended up being
easier than i thought they were going to
be but still because you know i was
under
so much stress i guess i i felt like
i was wasn't performing as well as i
could have
so after about five hours of programming
and talking programming and talking you
know answering leadership question after
leadership question
doing my system design interview
it was over and i really didn't feel
like i had gotten it because
you know you can just tell
and it's one of their policies as amazon
that they don't they don't tell you how
you did afterwards which kind of sucks
but i can i can tell that a lot of
people would be angry with the feedback
that they got and just waste a lot of
company time but really during these
interviews you can tell how you're doing
if you self-reflect a little bit and i
can know i know for sure that i wasn't
coding fast enough
um i was making mistakes left and right
because i was trying to code faster
and i was just wasting time by having to
go back and correct these mistakes and a
lot of times there were simple mistakes
that i should have seen you know and
this you know just conveys someone who
is reckless
and also my knowledge wasn't as in-depth
as i'm pretty sure that they would have
liked so of course i wasn't given an
offer
but you know it just comes with the
territory and i'm just grateful for the
opportunity to go through the entire
process like this
and get some get a behind-the-scenes
look at the interview process that i
would have never gotten to know
otherwise
you know no amount of googling is going
to let you know what it feels like to be
in the hot seat
and
just go through that entire gauntlet of
interviews
and before i forget i think i know who
my bar raiser was
i think i know because the tone got a
little more serious whenever he you know
started asking me the questions
and they were just a lot more difficult
than the other interviews