<story><title>Amazon software engineer interview</title><url>http://sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>catchmrbharath</author><text>I had this view when I was interviewing for internships during this quarter. I have spent working and interviewing at a couple of places, before I came to pursue my masters and I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot.&lt;p&gt;I interviewed at atleast 10 places for internships and every single of them asked one of the questions from either leetcode or cracking the coding interview. I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not. As long as you can reproduce the answers to the questions in a nice manner, you got selected. None of my interviewers were trying to understand &amp;#x2F; empathize how difficult it is to come up with a solution really quickly when you have not seen the problem before.&lt;p&gt;The thing I learnt through the ordeal is
1. Nobody cares whether you are thinking on your feet or not.
2. You need a month of preparation going into these sort of interviews.</text></item><item><author>geoelectric</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop.&lt;p&gt;I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that&amp;#x27;s experience now, but I don&amp;#x27;t remember any point in my career where I&amp;#x27;d have done something this extensive. I hope the poster doesn&amp;#x27;t feel they need a month&amp;#x27;s prep every time they want to go test the waters on the job market!&lt;p&gt;I do agree with the frequent recommendations for Cracking the Coding Interview. As a lead who interviews frequently, my biggest tip is to be honest about what you do and don&amp;#x27;t know--take what you do know right to the limit then talk about how you&amp;#x27;d figure out the rest given normal professional time and resources.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not usually grading someone on whether they can solve my specific problem so much as whether I think they&amp;#x27;re someone I can work with while they do it. That said, if it&amp;#x27;s on your resume you&amp;#x27;d better be able to talk intelligently about it to whatever level makes sense for your experience. I definitely probe around that stuff to figure out if I can trust the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kamaal</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt;I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not.&lt;p&gt;There are section of people among programmers who give away tens of hours of time per week on sites of the likes you mentioned, these people have no other hobbies, hardly do any other productive or creative work, have no real social circle and generally spend all the time of their life in &amp;#x27;karma hunger&amp;#x27; kind of a pursuit for points in solving some thousand people like themselves already solved.&lt;p&gt;Now they have to justify all mega massive wastage of time by at least making it look some kind of an intellectually superior activity which other people are incapable of. They might as well fail a few people in the interviews to get some consolation for that kind of wastage of time.&lt;p&gt;Everytime I see people spending scores of time on these leetcode kind of sites, I&amp;#x27;m reminded of exams in India, where students just sit down and mind numbingly practice several years of question papers in hopes of finding similar questions or sometimes the same questions with minor modifications in exams. Finally you get students who barely know anything at all but pass the exams with high marks.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon software engineer interview</title><url>http://sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>catchmrbharath</author><text>I had this view when I was interviewing for internships during this quarter. I have spent working and interviewing at a couple of places, before I came to pursue my masters and I believed people valued coming up with the solution on the spot.&lt;p&gt;I interviewed at atleast 10 places for internships and every single of them asked one of the questions from either leetcode or cracking the coding interview. I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not. As long as you can reproduce the answers to the questions in a nice manner, you got selected. None of my interviewers were trying to understand &amp;#x2F; empathize how difficult it is to come up with a solution really quickly when you have not seen the problem before.&lt;p&gt;The thing I learnt through the ordeal is
1. Nobody cares whether you are thinking on your feet or not.
2. You need a month of preparation going into these sort of interviews.</text></item><item><author>geoelectric</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop.&lt;p&gt;I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that&amp;#x27;s experience now, but I don&amp;#x27;t remember any point in my career where I&amp;#x27;d have done something this extensive. I hope the poster doesn&amp;#x27;t feel they need a month&amp;#x27;s prep every time they want to go test the waters on the job market!&lt;p&gt;I do agree with the frequent recommendations for Cracking the Coding Interview. As a lead who interviews frequently, my biggest tip is to be honest about what you do and don&amp;#x27;t know--take what you do know right to the limit then talk about how you&amp;#x27;d figure out the rest given normal professional time and resources.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not usually grading someone on whether they can solve my specific problem so much as whether I think they&amp;#x27;re someone I can work with while they do it. That said, if it&amp;#x27;s on your resume you&amp;#x27;d better be able to talk intelligently about it to whatever level makes sense for your experience. I definitely probe around that stuff to figure out if I can trust the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geoelectric</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a shame. When someone sails through something I gave them, I usually kick myself for giving them a crappy or cliched problem and assume they&amp;#x27;ve probably solved it previously. In that situation I absolutely am trying to figure out if they at least understand the answer so I&amp;#x27;m looking for them to talk through, etc.&lt;p&gt;Coding on the board is a broken process anyway (just one I rarely have the influence to redefine wholly) but coding on the board as a &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; interview question is downright stupid. You learn absolutely nothing relevant about the candidate, and they learn absolutely nothing about you. I&amp;#x27;m sorry to find out that was the bulk of your experience.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, once you get enough experience to pick and choose, that would be a bad smell for me interviewing at a company. If I feel like there&amp;#x27;s no rapport and I&amp;#x27;m just getting grilled in an interview past the initial tech screen, I will and have stopped the process myself. Life&amp;#x27;s too short to be a cog.</text></comment>