Member-only story
What I Learned From My Engineering Interview With Amazon
How failing a technical screen helped me grow as a developer
As a software engineer entering the job market, I have had the opportunity to speak with dozens of companies, from two-person startups to giant companies, including Facebook and Amazon.
Companies interview technical talent in vastly different ways. I have been asked to share stories about my past experience, build a stock trading application in four days, and the classic — solve a coding problem on a whiteboard to show my chops in algorithms and data structures.
I have learned so much throughout this process.
One of my most recent interviews was a one-hour phone screen with an Amazon engineer. In addition to the behavioral component (two pieces of advice there: STAR method and Leadership Principles), we spent a little over half of the time working through a coding question on a digital whiteboard while speaking over the phone. I didn’t end up moving past this stage (aka I failed — trying to get more comfortable saying this out loud), but I learned a ton.
I asked the interviewer for feedback at the end of the call. I highly recommend doing this because even though I was not feeling super confident about my performance, I knew that interviewing at…
