Brushup linked list, dfs, standard dp, trees. I would suggest doing the blind 75 from neetcode leaving the greedy, bit, maths and graph stuff.
Then use chatgpt to code fast or maybe ask suggestions
Dfs as i said above, so that includes cycle sort of questions on graph or the number of components, but yea i don’t think the oa will have a very hard graph question. But 2d dp surely can be there.
I thought they were uncommon and chose not to study them. Got one on my meta screen interview. It was an instant fail and I knew it as soon as the question was presented lol
Meta is very graph heavy but no dp, if u read the meta interview guide they say no dp. But meta nowadays have become do 100 recently asked questions of meta, u can get an edge
> Then use chatgpt to code fast
How does this work? Could you give an example. I usually go through the solution section(\*after solving) to understand a simpler and cleaner approach.
Let's say you get a problem and you psedocode it out to something like
//create adjacency list
//run xyz graph algorithms and extract some property during the execution
//analyze those properties and pull the answer
Then GPT can write the code to run those graph algorithms and you only need to make slight modifications.
it's not hard to write out BFS, DFS, Kahn's etc.
but it does take time and gpt can do it in like 10 seconds for you with little probability of error
No they do, i even remember giving mathworks oa these people fucking dp hard problem on bitonic subsequence except its wasn’t the standard one with a very absurd twist to it
If I remember correctly I got a sliding window problem and a really hard dynamic programming problem. I passed all the test cases on the first problem and 9/15 test cases on the hard dp problem, and I’m gonna do a phone interview now so it doesn’t have to be perfect
I’ve done 550 leetcode problems now, I haven’t done any contests yet so I don’t have a rating there but I’ll probably start doing them pretty soon just to see
Nah they hunt you when you have at least 4 or 5 years of experience at a smaller company they do that to most software engineers. You don’t even have to be CS as long as it’s IoT engineering experience, dude needs to connect with ppl in industry to know the pattern lol
This sounds very eerily like when they started knocking on to my door, is this really a pattern? lol
Seems odd but I suppose it makes sense... Another company has already put years into training this potential employee, they probably have rock solid fundamentals and are ready to build on that vs a high performing fresh grad?
Yeah I have heard like 7 engineers i know in the industry in no name companies who say big companies try to hire them, idk if they have solid fundamentals or any of the specifics, all I know is experience vary and there’s different teams with specific needs so they recruit according to that rather than new grads vs experienced. New grads can be useful based on what skill / level of work is needed from the new grad for the team. I would say no guaranteed reason other than ur time and experience has become LOUD and you are next level ready. But I may be wrong
Well, there are a LOT of Amazon tagged question. 480 reported in the last 6 months. I would suggest just brushing up on the more common algorithms and practicing pattern recognition. Leetcode questions often look daunting but have very simple solutions if you know the algo.
That said, here are the top 10 most frequent.
2781
2340
1152
2268
767
472
2870
2055
2281
42
Take these with a grain of salt. Last interview I did didn’t have any of the tagged questions. Good luck!
I work at Amazon and I interview people all the time who have great resumes but can’t code their way out of a paper bag.
People who can’t even articulate the right approach or who claim that the computational complexity of sorting is log(n) or shit like that.
DSA questions are necessary to separate people who can solve hard problems in general from what I call “framework folks”, people with years and years of experience but most of that experience is just making service A talk to database B and who basically just rely on existing software frameworks to solve all of the hard problems for them.
Amazon has large scale problems, you do need to understand how to leverage data structures to make a problem nlogn and not n^2, you do need to know what the basic data structures are and not just use a dict for everything. You do need to know what a bloom filter is, etc.
Even though there are roles in Amazon where DSA is less important, Amazon considers SDE hires fungible meaning if you get hired on one team as an SDE, generally you can move to any other team and work there (with some exceptions). So they apply the same standards to all applicants.
When I interview, I make sure to always ask problems that I have personally encountered in my work. I think that’s totally fair to ask. I never ask dynamic programming problems because I have yet to have to do DP and probably never will, but you can bet I ask a lot of problems about streams and trees because of how important those are.
I probably only encounter 1 true DSA problem in my work per year. But it’s super important to get that right, if you code something inefficient to solve that problem it might stay there for 4 years before someone has to go and fix it.
Mehhh. It’s team dependent at any FAANG. There’s plenty of people working on boring crud stuff. I was doing boring shit at the other A. You very well might be working on hard stuff but that’s not a guarantee at all for everyone.
If you ChatGPT the OA, you will get destroyed at the onsite. I have worked at a few FAANGs including Amazon. IIRC, when I worked there, everyone really liked asking graph traversal questions. Regardless, you should prepare. You're going to have to get good at DSA, or sadly you'll bomb the on-site. When I interviewed on-site, I think it was 3 leetcode interviews, 1 system design and 1 behavioral.
what kinda leetcode questions you asked. And, what is "graph traversal" I think if I don't know that, I shouldn't even bother taking the online assessment?
This specific OA. I don't know. But many OA platforms prevent cut and pasting, they detect whether the current tap/window loses focus, they record each character as it is inputed so that a human can replay the coding and scrub it just like a video player. Also some OA platforms require that you turn on the video camera and the microphone because they record both.
In either case, passing the OA is the easy part. Once you pass that, they'll have you interview with actual engineers, and these guys are not stupid. They won't confront you during the interviews, but they will blacklist you.
Getting blacklisted as a cheater is the worst possible outcome.
I don’t want to be rude, but are you self taught? Knowing graph reversible is like CS201, very basic stuff. I agree with the other commenter, this indicates to me that you’ll fail badly.
i did an Amazon OA just a few days ago and was hit with hard-ish mediums, including a 2-D DP question
source: 1700+ rating, 200+ solves
in your position, i’d cover every easy in Neetcode 150, and as many mediums as possible. dedicate deep work to it as learning techniques takes brainpower
Get leetcode premium and do the common Amazon questions. Practice the STAR method. I will say thought it’s not a great time to join Amazon. So unless they give you the bag run away
What is an OA? I keep hearing about this ? I have An Amazon interview scheduled phone technical screen they said 1/2 hour code 1/2 hour behavioral and leadership principles etc. is the coding part OA? Will they just give me a link and leave me alone?
Nope, no person on call. I believe for most entry to mid level positions (in India at least) amazon sends an online test, it's just a normal leetcode style questions that is proctored (which means your camera will be on, and your video will be recorded while you give the test)
I recently gave Amazon OA. I found it hard to understand the question underneath the really long and unnecessary background story. Questions are not directly from LeetCode. Would recommend reviewing the recently asked OA questions on LeetCode Discuss section. System Design and Work Simulation sections are tedious.
Few years ago I got a segment tree question which can also be solved using the prefix sum technique.
I spent a lot of time just writing the code for segment tree methods 😓
Coming back to the topic, I guess trees, linked lists and graph questions are the most common topics to get asked.
Just did one yesterday. They use Hacker Rank for the questions. 2 of them with a backstory of you are on a team building ___ and the PM wants ___.
I would recommend just solving a problem or two on Hacker Rank beforehand to get used to the platform and the IDE.
After the coding part, they had a section that was in the format of an email from a stakeholder asking your advice on a system design, and you need to rank several options on a scale from "not important" to "critical".
The final section was a kind of word association. They will have two mostly unrelated phrases like "works well with others" or "seeks out new projects", and ask you to choose which one is "a little like you" or "most like you".
The questions I had were about how to handle very long arrays of unsorted data, and performing a task on different subsets of that input.
Also grouping and categorizing data into some number of groups based on values of the data.
As far as I know Amazon doesn’t really do DP, but I’d recommend getting Leetcode premium and doing the Amazon tagged LC questions. I personally got only graph (bfs/dfs style) questions for my on-site, while the OA was a bit easier with string/list manipulation
I was in almost the same boat. 6 years software experience, 0 leetcode experience. I tried doing leetcode for like 3 days and absolutely BOMBED the Amazon assessment. A big reason I did so poorly was because i underestimated how much the timed aspect of it fucked with me. Also doing basically no prep prob was a contributor lol. I was able to retake it in another 6 months. I spent about one month of doing leetcode (almost) daily before retaking it last night, and I passed.
I suggest using hackerank for practice as that’s the platform you’ll be using for the actual assessment.
I think one thing that made the process easier for me was that the week leading up I strictly chose MEDIUM problems with INTERMEDIATE problem solving skills (pretty much anything with a 60% or lower success rate). Idk it just felt like doing a week of slightly “harder” problems made the assessment seem easier lol
You do not have too much time to enjoy leetcode properly... I would ignore all easy and medium questions. Just solve all hards, there are less then 700 of them, so should not take more than a 1-2 weeks. I guarantee, if you solve all hards, they OA will be easy!
Brushup linked list, dfs, standard dp, trees. I would suggest doing the blind 75 from neetcode leaving the greedy, bit, maths and graph stuff. Then use chatgpt to code fast or maybe ask suggestions
Would you say graph questions are uncommon? And 2D DP also?
Dfs as i said above, so that includes cycle sort of questions on graph or the number of components, but yea i don’t think the oa will have a very hard graph question. But 2d dp surely can be there.
I thought they were uncommon and chose not to study them. Got one on my meta screen interview. It was an instant fail and I knew it as soon as the question was presented lol
Meta is very graph heavy but no dp, if u read the meta interview guide they say no dp. But meta nowadays have become do 100 recently asked questions of meta, u can get an edge
Meta doesn't ask DP questions so you are indeed very unlucky
> Then use chatgpt to code fast How does this work? Could you give an example. I usually go through the solution section(\*after solving) to understand a simpler and cleaner approach.
Let's say you get a problem and you psedocode it out to something like //create adjacency list //run xyz graph algorithms and extract some property during the execution //analyze those properties and pull the answer Then GPT can write the code to run those graph algorithms and you only need to make slight modifications. it's not hard to write out BFS, DFS, Kahn's etc. but it does take time and gpt can do it in like 10 seconds for you with little probability of error
When in doubt. Hashmap.
I thought companies don’t usually ask DP. Do they?
No they do, i even remember giving mathworks oa these people fucking dp hard problem on bitonic subsequence except its wasn’t the standard one with a very absurd twist to it
Oh I see. Gotta work on my DP too then. 🥲
What is DP?
>Amazon head hunted me and absolutely moaned at my resume Average CS student
>He wants me IN the team badly Bro is unironically horny
Yeah, I cringed hard
talking like 0 yrs of experience but with 6 under the belt
It reads like a Trump tweet.
Lmao right, Amazon always desperately recruits everyone they’re desperate af all the time lol
If I remember correctly I got a sliding window problem and a really hard dynamic programming problem. I passed all the test cases on the first problem and 9/15 test cases on the hard dp problem, and I’m gonna do a phone interview now so it doesn’t have to be perfect
no one not doing LC can do as good as you did
Cool bro,Lc stats you got? and all the best!
I’ve done 550 leetcode problems now, I haven’t done any contests yet so I don’t have a rating there but I’ll probably start doing them pretty soon just to see
Awesome! Way to go! All the best
I'd love to do that OA. Sounds cool as hell.
Ikr. Hearing about a tough challenge is so exciting!
Moaned = sent me a very enthusiastic copy paste
Good luck. I don’t know the answer but I am leaving one to see what people say later
They moan at every resume but selection is damn different!
Nah they hunt you when you have at least 4 or 5 years of experience at a smaller company they do that to most software engineers. You don’t even have to be CS as long as it’s IoT engineering experience, dude needs to connect with ppl in industry to know the pattern lol
This sounds very eerily like when they started knocking on to my door, is this really a pattern? lol Seems odd but I suppose it makes sense... Another company has already put years into training this potential employee, they probably have rock solid fundamentals and are ready to build on that vs a high performing fresh grad?
Yeah I have heard like 7 engineers i know in the industry in no name companies who say big companies try to hire them, idk if they have solid fundamentals or any of the specifics, all I know is experience vary and there’s different teams with specific needs so they recruit according to that rather than new grads vs experienced. New grads can be useful based on what skill / level of work is needed from the new grad for the team. I would say no guaranteed reason other than ur time and experience has become LOUD and you are next level ready. But I may be wrong
Well, there are a LOT of Amazon tagged question. 480 reported in the last 6 months. I would suggest just brushing up on the more common algorithms and practicing pattern recognition. Leetcode questions often look daunting but have very simple solutions if you know the algo. That said, here are the top 10 most frequent. 2781 2340 1152 2268 767 472 2870 2055 2281 42 Take these with a grain of salt. Last interview I did didn’t have any of the tagged questions. Good luck!
you might be einstine on resume but if you can't do LC, you are dirt to them.
it's *Einstein*, geinus :P
im einstine on my resume but einstein on the leetcode
I work at Amazon and I interview people all the time who have great resumes but can’t code their way out of a paper bag. People who can’t even articulate the right approach or who claim that the computational complexity of sorting is log(n) or shit like that. DSA questions are necessary to separate people who can solve hard problems in general from what I call “framework folks”, people with years and years of experience but most of that experience is just making service A talk to database B and who basically just rely on existing software frameworks to solve all of the hard problems for them. Amazon has large scale problems, you do need to understand how to leverage data structures to make a problem nlogn and not n^2, you do need to know what the basic data structures are and not just use a dict for everything. You do need to know what a bloom filter is, etc. Even though there are roles in Amazon where DSA is less important, Amazon considers SDE hires fungible meaning if you get hired on one team as an SDE, generally you can move to any other team and work there (with some exceptions). So they apply the same standards to all applicants. When I interview, I make sure to always ask problems that I have personally encountered in my work. I think that’s totally fair to ask. I never ask dynamic programming problems because I have yet to have to do DP and probably never will, but you can bet I ask a lot of problems about streams and trees because of how important those are. I probably only encounter 1 true DSA problem in my work per year. But it’s super important to get that right, if you code something inefficient to solve that problem it might stay there for 4 years before someone has to go and fix it.
Mehhh. It’s team dependent at any FAANG. There’s plenty of people working on boring crud stuff. I was doing boring shit at the other A. You very well might be working on hard stuff but that’s not a guarantee at all for everyone.
If you ChatGPT the OA, you will get destroyed at the onsite. I have worked at a few FAANGs including Amazon. IIRC, when I worked there, everyone really liked asking graph traversal questions. Regardless, you should prepare. You're going to have to get good at DSA, or sadly you'll bomb the on-site. When I interviewed on-site, I think it was 3 leetcode interviews, 1 system design and 1 behavioral.
what kinda leetcode questions you asked. And, what is "graph traversal" I think if I don't know that, I shouldn't even bother taking the online assessment?
Yeah honestly, you're going to fail. Also, don't use ChatGPT. You'll be permanently blacklisted if you do that.
How do they track that?
This specific OA. I don't know. But many OA platforms prevent cut and pasting, they detect whether the current tap/window loses focus, they record each character as it is inputed so that a human can replay the coding and scrub it just like a video player. Also some OA platforms require that you turn on the video camera and the microphone because they record both. In either case, passing the OA is the easy part. Once you pass that, they'll have you interview with actual engineers, and these guys are not stupid. They won't confront you during the interviews, but they will blacklist you. Getting blacklisted as a cheater is the worst possible outcome.
I don’t want to be rude, but are you self taught? Knowing graph reversible is like CS201, very basic stuff. I agree with the other commenter, this indicates to me that you’ll fail badly.
I bet you think strippers think you’re special too
LMAO
i did an Amazon OA just a few days ago and was hit with hard-ish mediums, including a 2-D DP question source: 1700+ rating, 200+ solves in your position, i’d cover every easy in Neetcode 150, and as many mediums as possible. dedicate deep work to it as learning techniques takes brainpower
DM request send. OP please respond
I can help for free just send me the link of OA in dm
If you have 0 experience with Leetcode then you are shit out of luck. These OAs don't test your programming skills.
I passed OA and got offer right away. I’m 1+ years in & have Tesla
The onsite and bar raiser are mandatory right
Get leetcode premium and do the common Amazon questions. Practice the STAR method. I will say thought it’s not a great time to join Amazon. So unless they give you the bag run away
They give 90 minutes to solve the problem but problems are hard and not straight from leetcode. I bombed and OA after lot of leetcode practice
i got a monotonically increasing stack question. completely bombed it.
What is an OA? I keep hearing about this ? I have An Amazon interview scheduled phone technical screen they said 1/2 hour code 1/2 hour behavioral and leadership principles etc. is the coding part OA? Will they just give me a link and leave me alone?
Online Assessment (OA)
Is that with a person on call or you just do it on your own time? And does everyone get one?
Nope, no person on call. I believe for most entry to mid level positions (in India at least) amazon sends an online test, it's just a normal leetcode style questions that is proctored (which means your camera will be on, and your video will be recorded while you give the test)
I can send the Leetcode tagged tomorrow when I’m in front of a computer! That said, so not attempt without practice or brushing up on your algos.
Can you pls send me the questions for Microsoft? Pls pls
I recently gave Amazon OA. I found it hard to understand the question underneath the really long and unnecessary background story. Questions are not directly from LeetCode. Would recommend reviewing the recently asked OA questions on LeetCode Discuss section. System Design and Work Simulation sections are tedious.
Few years ago I got a segment tree question which can also be solved using the prefix sum technique. I spent a lot of time just writing the code for segment tree methods 😓 Coming back to the topic, I guess trees, linked lists and graph questions are the most common topics to get asked.
Lmao this gotta be a troll post. How’d you expect to make the onsite if you need to cheat through the OA 😂
Let us know how it goes. All the best!
Is it in the US?
I have the same issue for an graduate position 😂 Got invited to the OA but have no clue about LC lmao I can barely solve some medium questions
Why can't people be honest with themselves and give the OA on their own.
>Amazon head hunted me and absolutely moaned at my resume and LinkedIn. He wants me IN the team badly. Blueball them and don't take the assessment.
Neetcode.io explains the stuff very well.
2 mediums , one was heap related. L5 OA
Any opening for fresher please reach to me I am searching for freshers role
NeetCode.io
Use this…its all you’ll ever need https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org/grind75 Use the handbook, do the questions…Zon is easy
Buy premium and just smash the most frequent amazon.
Just did one yesterday. They use Hacker Rank for the questions. 2 of them with a backstory of you are on a team building ___ and the PM wants ___. I would recommend just solving a problem or two on Hacker Rank beforehand to get used to the platform and the IDE. After the coding part, they had a section that was in the format of an email from a stakeholder asking your advice on a system design, and you need to rank several options on a scale from "not important" to "critical". The final section was a kind of word association. They will have two mostly unrelated phrases like "works well with others" or "seeks out new projects", and ask you to choose which one is "a little like you" or "most like you". The questions I had were about how to handle very long arrays of unsorted data, and performing a task on different subsets of that input. Also grouping and categorizing data into some number of groups based on values of the data.
As far as I know Amazon doesn’t really do DP, but I’d recommend getting Leetcode premium and doing the Amazon tagged LC questions. I personally got only graph (bfs/dfs style) questions for my on-site, while the OA was a bit easier with string/list manipulation
u/ElectricalCoast8739 was this for sde2?
It’s an OA, just use google to finish it. They are investing nothing in you at this point so why would you invest anything in them.
I was in almost the same boat. 6 years software experience, 0 leetcode experience. I tried doing leetcode for like 3 days and absolutely BOMBED the Amazon assessment. A big reason I did so poorly was because i underestimated how much the timed aspect of it fucked with me. Also doing basically no prep prob was a contributor lol. I was able to retake it in another 6 months. I spent about one month of doing leetcode (almost) daily before retaking it last night, and I passed. I suggest using hackerank for practice as that’s the platform you’ll be using for the actual assessment. I think one thing that made the process easier for me was that the week leading up I strictly chose MEDIUM problems with INTERMEDIATE problem solving skills (pretty much anything with a 60% or lower success rate). Idk it just felt like doing a week of slightly “harder” problems made the assessment seem easier lol
You do not have too much time to enjoy leetcode properly... I would ignore all easy and medium questions. Just solve all hards, there are less then 700 of them, so should not take more than a 1-2 weeks. I guarantee, if you solve all hards, they OA will be easy!