The Best Interview Advice You Never Got (from ex-Amazon Principal Engineer)

I love that the “question behind the question” is so consistent through the entire process. Motivation is frequently left out. Good point.

Interview order is always tricky--what if you get an offer that's also a big upgrade from one of the early "practice" ones and naturally want to accept it and certainly can't ask them to wait a month or more for your dream job process. Then you're in a weird spot of either positioning yourself to potentially leave within months or wait much longer for that dream job anyway--or, if you're super bold I guess, declining a hard won offer because you think you can do better. Also most openings close quickly in this job market--maybe fine for companies with 10,000's of employees that always have some hiring market conditions suiting, but many great smaller companies out there where they only get a small number of positions a year.

“Their soul has left them…” lol

🌟 Make your work life easier and try monday-com for free - https://bit.ly/3F6jznJ 🚀 Get my in-depth promotion video course ($10,000 value) absolutely free 👉 https://geni.us/TakeYourPromotion 💥 Continue the conversation on my Discord server with like-minded ambitious tech professionals. #accountability is **chef's kiss** and #wins is motivating - https://discord.gg/HFVMbQgRJJ 📈Transform your tech career with my free weekly newsletter - https://alifeengineered.substack.com/

spot on i did exactly opposite of all this and crashed

The funny thing is that what you said is exactly what happened to me. I failed at round where I wrote the optimal solution for coding questions and I got an offer when I was completely off rail then got back onto the right track after the hint during system design.

Thanks for sharing, this is really helpful. Especially, you mentioned at the end of the video "Treat the interview as a date, the only thing you can optimize is fit".

Completely agree with all the advice. When I start interviewing, I always start with the companies I wouldn’t mind getting an offer at. Most likely to not get selected on the very first interview.

I cannot believe sometimes that still even after all these years in the industry I get stuck on having to give the right answer. Thank you for the reminder!

I’d model the seating in “venues” as seating rows with a single integer. To find the a contiguous block of k free seats, treat the integer as a bitmask of free and occupied seats, and first negate the bitmask, then start right bitshifting/anding wizardry and you end up with a result . Ofc you can model this with more structure at a data structure level but this way could work too !