Most Tech Interview Prep is GARBAGE. (From a Principal Engineer at Amazon)

is that a maschine in the background? awesome!❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥

I was a principal coder @ MS for 25 years. I've been through the interview loop grind and can say every big company throws a couple LC curveballs at you, even at that level, and if you can't answer them, you don't get to proceed to round two & three. My advice is: focus 100% on the LC questions, focus 100% on the systems design, and of course, 100% on behavioral. Oh, think I can't do my math, eh? They're all equally important. Just as important as it is to dance your way through the LC questions, you also need to invest the same amount of time to figure out how to answer SD questions. Likewise, BD questions. However long you think you have the patience to study up, multiply that by 3 and put in the effort. focus initially on interviewing with companies you DON'T want to work at, or don't admire, or would NEVER want to work at. Come up with good stories that work and you can see the interviewer start to pay attention and get involved. Go with these stories. Discard the ones that are boring. Talk to the recruiter and have a fake behavioral interview with them. They want to see you get hired, so they're work with you on your patter or your story or your level of engagement. I found not all LC sites are the same and generally the LC questions that are asked are sort of hard, but not as hard as I initially thought. Once you do a few hundred like I finally bothered to do, they become easier because it's easier to understand how to approach it. Not because I learned more how to code, but what the questions are looking for.

Why don't they trust the experience you had from previous companies?

Hi uncle steve, may I ask that for the most recent schedule, 55 mins 2 LP BQ, 1 Technical. how long should I take for initial STAR story for each LP BQ? I am assuming 25 mins for 2 BQ, 12 mins each. so should I use 5 mins to share STAR story and 7 mins for interviewer to ask follow-up, or should I use shorter or longer time? Thank you!

I see many bottles behind instead of books

This video is so good... Most videos just focus on full coding stuff. But when questions like: how would you manage to get your team closer when there's a big upcoming project ? code monkey answer: duhhhh for( int<0,i++) else fuck them. Or any question that is non coding related. I mean, nobody will want to hire you if you have the social skills of a neanderthal, and i don't mean making friends, i mean getting along with your team or clients.

I'm applying for senior position at amazon and I'm super happy that I watched this before preparing! Thanks!

I am a Senior Engineer. My issue is after studying and doing Leetcode questions if I don’t keep on revising I forget them in a week.

Sound leveling is garbage in this video!

“Uhhhhhh…. I’d use a hash map”

Ironically, I haven't studied for code, I know how to read and pickup the codebase and make modifications but to this day, if someone in a interview asked me to write a coding statement, i'd say uhhhh i'll usually google this but i'll give it a shot.

My question is where did you get the wig. Did you buy or borrow? What happened before the decision to make the video with wigs? Where do you get wigs? How do you even ask someone where to get a wig? few more question on wig. But everything else makes sense so thank you

I can admit pink fits you the best!

In the past when I passed interviews I felt it was pure luck - I just happened to study the correct subject the day before. In one particular case I soon found out I wasn’t qualified by any means to do the job and very quickly hit turbulence. I was lucky to not get fired in the first few months when my code brought the system down. As I worked in a team with many layers my part in the issue was obfuscated and blame was shared amongst my group and I survived.

Eventually, my interview luck ran out and I failed a bunch in a row. However, those fails spurred me on to get better across-the-board. Leetcode was an important part of that, but more importantly, was understanding underlying language (JavaScript) principles, basic computer science concepts (trees, search algorithms, Big O) and subjects such as Node, Vue/React and Docker. That’s what I’ve been tested on recently along with behavioral and situational questions.

I’m a much better programmer as a result and definitely feel less of an imposter than before.

Yes, the interview process is unfair, a pain in the ass and capricious but I feel I’ve grown as a programmer from taking part in it.

Though I agree with a lot of comments here about the LC game being so detached from the day to day of SR+, I also wonder what alternatives are possible to the LC game, in order to recruit in bursts and at scale. Especially at FAANG.

And FAANG matters because they set the precedent, given they have the best talent.

This video is great and gives a perspective not a formula. It depends on what level you are, no matter your title. In a lot of ways, the tech interview process is one of the best compared to other industries. Sorry to say folks, I’m in the same boat haha.

I had to chuckle when you said "n^2 algorithms are bad". n^2 for matrix multiplication would be revolutionary!

As a Senior Product Director, I can confirm that a lot of this advice is applicable to product, growth, design and TPM roles at higher levels.

The small to medium size company's I have interviewed with the past 20 years, hand you a coding test. I had one 5 month ago. The large companies do not. If anything it is a good litmus test of what kind of organization it is and do you want to work there.

I got discouraged and depressed after I watched your videos. But do love your contents and the way you talk

I could not disagree more. System design and behavioral interviews are easy if you are already a good senior engineer. I have 10 YOE and I barely need to prep for these to be moderately successful in most interviews. Coding problems, on the other hand, require countless hours of study time. If you can solve "Leetcode #4 - Median of Two Sorted Arrays" optimally with no study time, you deserve a Nobel Prize (and yes, Amazon asks this in interviews).

I work at Amazon too. this is total BS. many interviewers come with the intention of failing a candidate. They ask some math intensive lC problems that they themselves have no idea about. I have a team member who says she wants to learn from the interviewer cuz she was not able to understand it during her prep. Most of the principal engineers at AWS/Amazon are not even fit for a SDE 2 position, they just cram these LC or get lucky

Most Amazon engineers are not smart.

None of these sound appealing to me. I did 6 months of leetcode but then got bored because i never use most of them in real projects.
I'm not really good at telling stories, no matter how many projects i've already finished. All these questions about how would you scale this to billions of users are lame. You can only steal that experience from other companies. Everyone starts small, facebook didn't start with billions of users.

Finding this could not have come at a better time. Thanks so much, I'll revise my strategy asap.
Yes, I was focusing too much on just coding challenges.

It’s called involution… one company started do leetcode and others copied😊

"I was balancing a binary tree the other day..." 😉

You have a lot of wigs! Very helpful video 👍

What is a good way to learn system design?

Nice one, but I would imagine these are a bit more towards lead and principal engineers, not necessarily senoirs. Depending on the definition of the given company ofc, maybe FAANG's use it this way, but it's not everywhere.

This is garbage.

"amazon teams do not expect new hires even at a senior level to contribute meaningfully before 6 months"
The big mistake here is that you made junior level hires look like they need more time than that of seniors to make some good contributions. Which is the opposite, everyone knows that, you sound like you either lack experience or made a typo in the script.

I've been reading through some interview questions and honestly, most of the things they're asking are 'challenges' / snippets I've already done in personal projects. I think that if you're pushing to get better at the craft most of the time then you have no choice but to use the kinda code snippets you see on LC etc. as you level-up. LC is great for keeping your s*** tight but I couldn't imagine shooting for an interview using sites like LC alone.

The first question is why would you want to apply for a large corporation job. Being treated like a number isn't fun. Not to mention it's much harder to make an impact and get promoted compared to a small company.

Now you also forget about AI, it is incredible how easy is to use and how fast you can develop an application from scratch. I thing this is going to help grandly the companies specially the smallest ones. Now it is becoming more important to ask the right questions to AI. A smart Developer can create a full application in probably half of the time of a team of three developers. This smart Developer can create an architecture of the project without a software architect, if the application needs the data structures that you are talking about with a simple well formulate question the smart developer can do that to without previous knowledge of those. I know the AI cannot produce the full result but if you ask to do small task is where is getting exiting. Any Software Engineer can decode complex task into small ones ask AI to code those for him, he just re-write code or cope and paste and test. You'll see what I am talking about. So companies need to train their personal to use AI, for fast and secure and easy to use apps. That is all, this is happening now.

I believe your tips are good, however I think your spend too much time on this video talking about how much companies loss in hiring bad or regular software engineers I strongly believe that as a Sr Software Engineer is crucial important for companies once they make a hire to train them in all the aspects of the production, is up to the company and their trainees to pass the rules of new hires, I believe every one has potential some more than others. Companies needs to spend at least one year training a new hire, find out what are the areas were the new hire can improve. I see how companies hire people and with not training given them task the they cannot understand or cannot find a way to solve that task and that is not a problem of the new hire, companies must be sure that in the project all the people knows about the tools and all the possible algorithms that this may take to produce a great application. So my point is very clear if the company does not give this guidance to new hires its their lost and really big lost. I see it over an over again, companies traying to find the knows all top notch guy and by the way they fail in that also because these guys most of them lack of human interaction and they have a big EGO that its impossible to talk to them, I have encounter a few o them also, the companies at the end, fire this guys also.

As someone with a non traditional background... ...B.S. in Business followed by a few years in a data engineering & fullstack web role without PMs and not much senior support - relying mostly on online resources such as Pluralsight, Udemy, etc. followed by a few years working as an independent contractor where it can be anything from the whole enchilada (Sales & Architecture & Implementation) to simply implementation - depending on the engagement. ( Depending on the end client & consulting firm - the resources available. Is there a PM? Business Stakeholders, Executive Sponsors, etc.)

...I find...
Level 1: Difficult
Level 2: Easy
Level 3: Easiest

Considering diving into competitive programming just to allay my LC concerns.

Most tech companies don't ask for any coding in their interviews, only questions about their past, which makes it unfair since most people can work on their coding skills, but they can't change their past.

Thanks, man!
First time on your channel
Very concise and clear!

This man likes his scotch I see several SMWS bottles and a Lagavulin

I believe some day (not far) that ChatGPT can do better than human in Coding Challenges. Because it's a boring work. However, I don't believe ChatGPT have the real talent and innovation capabilities than human in near future. So the choice is on you.

"Don't spend all your time on coding problems." Proceeds to give the candidate an OA + 3 rounds of coding problems.

Thank you, well needed advice.

In the beginning you talk about bad hires, what can you do if you're that bad hire? Assume that techinal ability is not the problem

So get system experience by doing system design which requires system design to get a job.

Thanks for all video,
I am wondering if an Amazon developer work in on project at the time or more?

The wigs section was hilarious.

Very informative video, but am I the only one who try to identify the brand of alcohol bottles behind him 😀