Amazon Interview: Rejection
Hi,
I was recently contacted by Amazon via LinkedIn immediately setup a phone interview.
Phone interview was 90 minutes long. Apparently went well because they offered to fly me our no more than a day later.
Scheduled the on-site interview like 3 weeks out. Was juggling a summer class a full time job and prepping for the interview so needless to say it was difficult.
Interview wasn't terribly bad I guess.
Stuck on all of the... "Can you tell me a time when..." questions, which frazzled me a bit, but eventually came up with something.
Tech questions weren't hard, but that was because I think the only ones I was asked were the easy ones. I may have spent too much time talking before the tech questions and when I got to the tech questions, I think I may too much time in my method: clarifying, solving the problem conceptually, writing pseudo code, and then writing the final code.
I think my resume was misleading. I've been my current company for almost 5 years, and I've been going to school and working the whole time.
The current company isn't a tech company. I've been building software for them the whole time I've been here, however for the first 3 years, I've been doing it in a void. Within the last year or so me and my direct manager have been making strides to make it become a software shop.
So when they asked me questions about my clients and such it was very difficult to come up with an answer.
In addition to that during the interview one of the interviewers clarified if I was applying for SDE II. I replied pretty adamantly SDE I because I know where I stand in terms of experience.
I am going to ask my recruiter for some feedback and how long I have to wait to reapply. I've read on here and other places 6 months, but I don't know how bad I really did and my head tells me they might have black balled me from amazon entirely.
Either way I'm not going to give up. I never thought about interviewing for a top tech company until this experience and now I want to see if I have what it takes to become an SDE for one of the big guys.
Considering all this information, any feedback would be great. In terms of approaching preparation, resume clarification, or just anything in general.
Thank you.
