I interviewed with Amazon a few years back. The whole thing turned me off. A recruiter reached out and I was interested (it was late 2020 and the money was tempting). But before the first phone screen I had to have a call with the recruiter again, where she gave me a list of things I needed to "study" and was told that "successfully candidates usually spend 5-10 hours preparing for the interview". The study list was the usual list of CS101 topics. I didn't bother preparing and it was a good thing because on the phone screen the guy just asked me some a fairly mundane coding question and then some more general stuff (it was actually a very reasonable interview). Based on that they wanted to proceed to a final interview which was an all-day affair (on zoom of course because this was during the pandemic). But first I had to do ANOTHER 1h call with the recruiter where she gave me ANOTHER list of things I needed to "study" and reminded me that I should spend 5-10h preparing. That was too much for me and I politely declined the opportunity.
I refuse on principle any interviews that expect you to study or "prepare" for an interview. I'm sure I've missed out on some money, but they've also missed out on a pretty good engineer and teammate :-)
You should prepare for an interview. However 5 hours seems like a lot and I question if CS101 is worth preparing for. (If I know you will ask about a red-black tree I can look it up - but like most engineers I never think about it because my standard library has it implemented for me - unless the job is implementing the standard library I would not expect you to ask that question)
You might be asked to write something like fizz-buzz in an interview - but the point is there isn't a good answer to that. (there are a few possible solutions, but all of them have something you should not like - which makes it a simple yet real world like problem and thus something you should be able to figure out in less than an hour without study)
What you should prepare is figure out how they interview and thus what questions they might ask. (nobody will tell you what questions will be asked, but they may tell you the style) Practice the answers. Practice stories of how you worked in the past so you can twist the story to answer the question (the above is how you should prepare for the STARS interview my company does). If you were in prison or something then be prepared to talk about why they should believe you are reformed, but most people don't have such a thing in their past that they should find.
yeah, you should put your prep time into the non-technical parts of the interview.
- everybody you meet is going to ask "so, tell me about yourself" so you better have a good answer. have a pitch that highlights relevant parts of your work history, discuss goals/interests, show a bit of personality.
- there's always going to be "do you have any questions for me?", so you need to have a couple of questions ready to go that make you seem interested/thoughtful AND help you extract good signal from the interviewer.
If you are going to refuse any offer don't waste their and your time. However if you might accept an offer you should prepare, since you want to know what you will be getting yourself into.
part of preparing is learning what the company does. Most of us work for a company the majority reading this have never heard of. you want to know what the potential company does so you can ask intelligent questions.
You might be misunderstanding what I mean by "prepare". I mean companies that expect you to have crammed algorithms/leet code/CS new grad before their interviews. Then if you don't, they treat you like you are a huge imposter/liar who cannot code.
I certainly am mentally prepared when I speak with a company and treat them professionally. I expect the same basically.
You need to go back and read what I wrote originally - I thought I was clearly stating that you shouldn't be cramming algorithms/leet code. That should be a waste of your time, and even when it isn't it is a bad sign if the company asks questions where such studying would be helpful (though sometimes that might your least bad option to take a job there anyway).
Prepare for an interview means look up the company. You often can figure out what style of interview they do and prepare to answer those questions. You often can figure out if there are concerns that you want to probe in your turn to ask them questions.
every job process i went through so far has been applying -> if they like me a call with the usual job interview questions -> if both want to proceed a meet-and-greet with the actual team -> if both still are interested, sign a contract.
I am absolutely sure that the money you missed out on had a bigger affect on you than them missing out on hiring you.
Every large tech company or any tech company that pays decent money requires preparing for coding interviews *if you are trying to get hired as a developer*.
I personally didn’t do much prep for my Amazon loop accept practice answering behavioral questions in STAR format. But I also had to thread the needle of having experience to get into the Professional Services department as someone who knew cloud, how to talk to people, architecture and leading projects.
If I came out of college post 2012 instead of 1996 with path dependencies in 2012, you damn well better believe I would have been “grinding leetcode” to make BigTech money.
I call it a “gravity problem”. I might not like or completely understand gravity. But it makes no sense to complain about it. I’m not going to jump out of a window on the 30th floor.
If you want to make $150K+ straight out of college and $259K+ a year three years into your career, you play the game. If you don’t want to play the game, accept the reduced amount of money from staying in enterprise dev.
At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any lathe company especially BigTech again and I’m definitely not going to chase after a job where I have to work in an office. But I know what I’ve been giving up for the last 2+ years by ignoring recruiters from GCP’s internal consulting division based on my stances.
But again, I’m also 51, I’ve done the build the big house in the burbs thing twice and I have grown (step)children that I’ve raised since they were 9 and 14 who don’t live with us
I think the idea is they want to inconvenience you to filter out people who aren’t desperate and willing to deal with their bullshit. But, expecting you to cram for an interview just makes it seem like they value metrics over actual merit.
