In my first post ever, I am going to dive deep into the interviews for the very first gig I landed in my career as an SDE. Amazon!
This was actually a second chance for me, since I had also got the opportunity to interview in my 3rd year for their 2 month internship program in December 2023. At that time my DSA skills were not honed, but I still gave it a shot. After the online tests, I was given the opportunity to interview. I was asked to solve a DP problem: House Robber and I went blank. I had no idea how to solve it. The second question was a basic stack question, but because of the panic and nerves I couldn't solve it either. I couldn't qualify but it was an eye opener, that my focus wasn't where it should have been.
After that I started studying data structures and algorithms religiously, and tried to be consistent enough, so that the earlier incident did not repeat itself.
In September 2024, in the middle of endless rejections in placements, I received an interest form for a 6 month internship opportunity.I was sent 2 online tests, qualifying which I got the interview invite. This time , to my surprise, I was asked the same question (House Robber). I went prepared, and could easily walk through the dynamic programming as well as the recursive approaches. The second question was a mix of backtracking and trees Path Sum II, which I could solve and answer some follow ups as well.
After 10 days, I got the selection mail, landing me my first internship ever!
I spent the first half of 2025, learning ,growing, working hard and making history at Amazon's Bangalore office! Those were one of the most memorable 6 months ever :)
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