Had a phone interview with Amazon last week and I was pretty nervous. I clicked on the live coding link in my email when the interview began as instructed and every single thing I knew about coding just vanished from my brain. The guy was reading out the simple function he’d like me to write and I was listening but it was like he was speaking Korean.
The solution was as simple as checking one array for the inclusion of an element in a second array. Checking for duplicates, basically. Simple stuff. Absolutely bottled it in front of two senior Amazon devs. Couldn’t think, had no idea what to even start typing, mind was blank, all whilst two guys are breathing down the phone and watching your screen. I was so close to saying ‘sorry for wasting your time, thanks for the opportunity’, and hanging up before I’d even typed anything.
In the end I stumbled through the exercise after having the task broken down into steps several times by the interviewer. Didn’t get the job, obviously.
I interviewed a senior dev the other day who just smashed through my graph problem, nailed it when I asked him to justify his use of DFS vs BFS (this one usually stops them dead). He talked me through what he was doing nonstop, wrote a very simple version first, refactored smoothly when I asked, and talked me through turning the problem into a microservice perfectly. It was breathtaking. He was like an interview-bot. At the end I felt as if I had been interviewed. Oh and it took him about 20 min end to end.
TL;DR the meme is true for everyone but this one guy.
invalidaccount-585 on June 6th, 2019 at 02:35 UTC »
Why is this so true?
Ryphor on June 6th, 2019 at 06:05 UTC »
Had a phone interview with Amazon last week and I was pretty nervous. I clicked on the live coding link in my email when the interview began as instructed and every single thing I knew about coding just vanished from my brain. The guy was reading out the simple function he’d like me to write and I was listening but it was like he was speaking Korean.
The solution was as simple as checking one array for the inclusion of an element in a second array. Checking for duplicates, basically. Simple stuff. Absolutely bottled it in front of two senior Amazon devs. Couldn’t think, had no idea what to even start typing, mind was blank, all whilst two guys are breathing down the phone and watching your screen. I was so close to saying ‘sorry for wasting your time, thanks for the opportunity’, and hanging up before I’d even typed anything.
In the end I stumbled through the exercise after having the task broken down into steps several times by the interviewer. Didn’t get the job, obviously.
Anxiety can be a bitch, huh.
hippopotobot on June 6th, 2019 at 06:30 UTC »
I interviewed a senior dev the other day who just smashed through my graph problem, nailed it when I asked him to justify his use of DFS vs BFS (this one usually stops them dead). He talked me through what he was doing nonstop, wrote a very simple version first, refactored smoothly when I asked, and talked me through turning the problem into a microservice perfectly. It was breathtaking. He was like an interview-bot. At the end I felt as if I had been interviewed. Oh and it took him about 20 min end to end.
TL;DR the meme is true for everyone but this one guy.