Amazon | New Grad SDE - Intern Fulltime | On Campus | 2021 Reject

Amazon came to our campus in July for SDE. There was very less CGPA criteria that allowed almost all eligible branch students to sit for the initial assessment test. The eligible branches were CSE and circuit branches, ECE and circuit branches.

1. Assessment:

There were 5 sections:
Section 1: Debugging Questions (20 mins) - They were very easy. It had codes like simple sorting, searching algorithms, counting of characters. The incorrect codes were given, we needed to debug the code. Anyone who had basic knowledge of general algorithms and simple data structures could do those easily.

Section 2: Coding Questions(70 mins) - 2 codes were asked. One was Sliding Window Maximum, Another was an n-ary tree question, which involved some calculations for all the subtrees and then some comparison between the obtained values .

Section 3: Workstyle Assesment (20 mins) - Behavioural questions

Section 4: Reasoning ability (35 mins) - Aptitude questions

5 days later, results for assessment were released. 60 people were called for the next round. I was one of them.

2. Interview Round 1:

The interviewer was very friendly. The interview started with an introduction of both of us. He then asked 2 questions:

1. A modification of Rotting Oranges. - I had ignored graph till then, but the interviewer helped me with hints and somehow with the basic tree BFS knowledge and the hints he gave, I was able to code it completely, but this question took a long time.
2. Daily Temperature. - I could relate this to next greater element problem using stack and hence was able to do this. There was little time to code, so he asked me to explain the pseudocode and I also did a dry run with an example.

I did not expect much for a call for the next round, since I could not implement the second code because of less time. But, after an hour or two, I was called for the next round.

3. Interview Round 2:

There were two interviewers. They both were not that helpng and friendly like the first one. This interview also started with an introduction. I was asked 2 questions.

1. Clone a linked list. - I struggled for some time, but ultimately I did the code for this.
2. It was a binary search related question. For a given sorted array, every element appeared twice except one. The question was to find that element which occurs once. I gave an initial solution which had a single condition for both odd and even indexes. The interviewer gave hint to look for index value, after which I was able to code it completely.

After this, there had to be the final round. I felt I could get a call for that, but I didn't. Maybe the interviewer had higher expectations or my peers performed better. Final results were released after 2 days. 13 students were selected.