How I got a 6 months Internship at AMAZON | Interview Experience | SDE Intern | 2022 | Set 53

Question

Answer 1

How I got a 6 months Internship at AMAZON

Introduction

I am a fourth year B.Tech student pursuing Computer Science and Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology.

I recently got an offer for SDE intern position at Amazon. Here, I will be sharing my experience.

Coming to the structure of the selection process, we had just 2 rounds for Interns, the first being an online test, followed by an interview.

Online Round

The online round was scheduled for a duration of 90 minutes. It was split into three sections, namely:

1. Debugging:

• Given small snippets of code or functions: We were suppose to find the bugs/logical errors/syntax errors in the code snippets according to the expected output.

2. Aptitude Questions:

• The questions were mainly based on probability, mathematical puzzles, age-related problems, work and time problems etc.
• They had a tight time bound therefor we should not waste too much time on a single difficult question, but instead try to solve more questions and come back to the difficult ones later if time permits.

3. Coding Questions

• We had 50 minutes to solve two questions in our prefered language.
• I don’t remeber the exact questions but both ranged from medium to difficult.

Interview

My interviewer first asked me how I was doing and asked me to talk a bit about myself. I talked about my background, achievements, internships, projects, hobbies, etc.

Then, in the technical section, these were the questions asked:

• Theoretical:

1. Explain hash-maps in detail.
2. What are the different sorting algorithms that you know?
3. How does bubble sort and merge sort work?
4. Time complexity of min-heap, max-heap, deletion and insertion in stack.
5. Can stack be implemented using heap and array?

• Practical:

1. Write down the C++ code for merge sort.
2. Then he gave 2 coding questions and asked some followup questions on the implementation.

I had answered all questions.

The shorlisted students were announce and I was happy to be one of them:)

Some general tips for internship interviews:

1. Some of the online round platforms are not very convenient to use. Practice well enough to debug code without being given compilation logs or test cases.
2. It’s more about the number of test cases you pass in a question, than the quality/efficiency/complexity of code you write (in online coding rounds)
3. Treat the interviews like technical discussions.
4. Learn from your mistakes in previous tests, and stay focused.
5. Focus on your skills and projects alongside DSA.