Career Advice About Amazon

I am working in 3 XFN projects (Say Projects A, B ,C) at the same time. Manager wants success in Project A for sure . But he doesn't allow me to be fully dedicated to Project A. He also wants me to come with suggestions to make project A successful. The thing is Projects B & C are huge time consumers and I am left with very little time for Project A. How should I approach my manager to assign me fully to Project A. I have successfully deliver projects in past when I was assigned to a single project only . I am bad at multi-tasking. Project A's success will definitely increase chances of my promo.

I have been an Android engineer since my first job 7 years ago. I learned React and React Native along the way and made myself into making apps for iOS. I really like working on this environment and would like to gear myself up with native iOS dev skills.

I do get to design solutions and review other mobile engineers' design docs and code. I often find myself struggling to review the objective C code and nuances of iOS platform API usage (like animations, background operations, ARkit etc).

Where should I start to get better in iOS native app development?

I want to become better at

1. Writing objective C/ Swift code using native iOS platform APIs
2. Reading iOS platform documentations

Thanks!

My team is responsible for an ambitious product that we're looking to have a multi-year time horizon for. I know that it's important for senior engineers and especially staff engineers to be able to think proactively, so I was wondering what can concretely be done to get better at creating that long-term vision spanning across many years?

Sometimes I sit in meetings that I feel aren't really necessary. How can I better identify whether these meetings are necessary and propose a better asynchronous form of communication (slack post, quip doc, etc) if they aren't?

Some of these meetings include status update meetings (besides standup), and meetings where people are there just to absorb knowledge. Is it a general rule of thumb to have meetings primarily to get alignment on decisions? Are there cases where we can get alignment asynchronously as well via commenting on a slack post/quip doc, etc.

I've looked at the leadership principles. But it's a bit overwhelming the number of questions that can be asked. I dont want to be caught like a deer in headlights when I'm asked a question. But it also doesnt seem practical to prepare every question.

I'd love to know people's preparation strategy. Are you preparing 5-10 stories and then tagging them to different principles? if so what kinds of stories should I be preparing? i.e. what are the broad topics of each story?

Or Maybe are you preparing 1 different story for each leadership value?

Also If I'm asked "Who was your most difficult customer?" how would I answer this if I'm just a junior and have never dealt with customers first hand? or similar where I'm just like i've never been in this situation

I'm a pretty new SDE 2, and I know that the SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotion is really difficult at Amazon. Given that, I would like to start working on this promotion as soon as possible. However, I'm new, so I don't want to make things weird for my manager and I. When does it make sense for me to bring up this topic of promotion and start working on a growth plan with my manager?

Through a series of unpredictable events, my team has boiled down to just my manager, myself, and many entry-level engineers (SDE 1s). Some of the SDE 1s have some experience (e.g. a somewhat tenured internal transfer) but many are new grads.

My manager is being more hands-on with this gap (and I like my manager overall), working through technical reviews and whatnot, and has other plans to shore up the seniority of the team. However, it looks like a lot of responsibility will fall on me to upscale this team and help deliver. This is nice as there's a pretty clear path to SDE 3 for me, but I'm also a relatively new SDE 2, so I'm unsure if I have what it takes.

All that being said, is this overall situation good or bad? The growth potential is there, but I'm also afraid of being overwhelmed.

One thing I have noticed about competent engineers is that they have a very strong understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies in terms of what are the typical parameters being passed into our API's and what we return and what are the things we pass into our dependencies API's and what they return,

How can I learn the context behind what data is typically being passed quickly? I understand that one of the best ways to learn is to start tinkering, and call the API's myself and see what they return. I was wondering if there is any faster way because surely a staff/principal/TL doesn't have the time to tinker with all of the different dependency services and understand what they take in and return. Is it just a matter of reading documentation and asking around?

Preparation: Standard top 100 most freq LC problems + Infra System Design Problems + Behavioral problems in STAR format

Interviews

Meta phone screen: Asked two questions directly from the top 50 LC tagged (Array Sum and Tree BFS categories). Aced both questions and was notified the next day that I had moved on to onsite.

Onsite prep: This would be my first system design interview and I did not want to mess it up. I booked multiple mocks and though they weren't cheap, I was satisfied with the overall quality, feedback, and accurate grading.

Meta onsite 1 (coding): This round tripped me up and I was disappointed given how much I had prepared :(

• First question: Tree BFS (was able to get optimal runtime but not optimal space)
• Second question: Multiple binary searches on an array (did not get the optimal solution) (also did not find a similarly tagged question to this)
• Immediately after the interview, I realized the mistake I made on both questions but could not go back and change it :(

Meta onsite 2 (behavioral): None of the questions were a surprise and I answered them to the best of my capacity stressing my ability to work with other people specifically

Meta onsite 3 (system design): The question is similar to

• I had trouble understanding the interviewer and threw all my system design knowledge out there. There wasn't much discussion but I did mention concepts such as inverted index, sharding, replication, hot partitions, cache invalidations, etc

Meta onsite 4 (coding)

• This was my strongest performance and I was proud of myself after this round. I solved both questions optimally
  • Question 1: Number Verification (LC Hard)
  • Question 2: Tree BFS
• Surprisingly (given my other rounds) I received a call the next day saying that they wanted to give me a follow-up coding round

Meta onsite 5 (follow-up coding)

• I fumbled this round, which was especially heartbreaking considering how close I had made it. The questions were related to Palindrome (LC Hard) and Grid DFS
• Same day I was notified after the follow-up I was rejected :(

Eye-opening experience overall and I know I have much more work to pass next time around. The total time to interview was a little over ~1.5 months.

I’m choosing between three different options for organizations to join as an undergrad in CS. I’m an incoming Amazon SDE Intern and looking to focus on maximizing prepping for the internship and future opportunities.

First, a group working (paid part time, associated officially with college) on a student facing grading tool used actively by 8000+ students. Java/Spring Boot tech stack. Large code base with full-on github style pull and merge contribution style. Ex TikTok SWE told me it’s the closest they’ve experienced to industry style SWE at my college.

Second, various student-led groups with focuses in quant finance, data science, etc. Some doing projects with companies like quant companies like Millennium, Sig, etc. Some doing app projects used by thousands of students on campus (dining hall, game tracking, etc)

Third, focusing on my own growth and development. Setting more time aside for interview prep/side projects.

I believe this discussion would be very valuable to any undergrads because this dichotomy of choice is common. Personally, since Alex emphasizes the importance of contributing to large codebases like in open source then I see the first option as the leading candidate. But I’ve been running with the third option of solely focusing on my interview prep and it seems to have yielded well.

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team.

I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed?

What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

With a recent, completely unexpected reorg, the product my team owns has effectively been cancelled and will be sunsetted. The company is trying to figure out new scope for my team, but in the meantime, I don't really have stuff to work on. Here are my questions:

1. Is having 1-2 months of downtime like this okay for my job and career?
2. What can I do in the meantime to be productive? I've mainly just been doing auxiliary things like reading documentation.

Background:

I interned on my current team last summer and returned full-time at the beginning of this year. I've been performing well and have a great relationship with my co-workers, manager, and skip manager.

However, I'm not satisfied with the level of engineering in the org as a whole. Specifically, our service does not operate at a high scale and thus the engineering constraints are very relaxed. It feels like we can get away with making poor decisions and I often think that I am not learning good engineering principles by being here. It also feels like my peers are not that ambitious or passionate about engineering which makes me feel like I don't fit in at times. As a result, I'm looking to change teams even though I am only ~6.5 months into my career.

I recently did an internal loop with another team that does very interesting work with high-scale and low-latency services. The interviews went well and I was given the transfer offer. I think my mind is mostly made up on joining the new team, but just wanted to ping-pong my situation with the Taro community as a sanity check on whether I am making the right choice.

I'm aware that switching teams is essentially a "soft reset" on my promo timeline. I have a lot of substantial work artifacts from my current team such as: code reviews for important feature work and docs that contributed heavily to the service we just launched.

I'm okay with taking a hit to my promo timeline because in my mind, if I zoom out and view my career as a 30-40 year span, it won't really matter whether I got promoted from new grad engineer in 1.5 years or 2.5 years.

What does the Taro community think of my situation? Am I thinking about this in the right way? I tried to keep some details vague as to not speak too negatively on my current team in a public forum. But I'm happy to provide more details to the best of my ability!

Hi Taro. When choosing a team, we also have to choose their specialization and tools. If the specialization is niche and the team uses exclusively internal tools I won't gain any transferable skills. I got laid off from AWS and I am realizing that I have little transferable skills. I used mostly internal tools. Believe it or not, many AWS teams do not use AWS extensively.

How can I choose a team or focus area for transferable skills? I was considering pivoting into Android and IOS development because I see many job openings for these.

Hello, I am a recent graduate with a background in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. I have Amazon’s final virtual interviews, consisting of four rounds, in 10 days, and Google’s final virtual interviews, also comprising four rounds, scheduled for early November. Although I passed the online assessments for both companies, I am not at all confident in my upcoming interviews. I have realized that my Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) skills, as well as my proficiency in Leetcode, are quite very rusty. There have been times when I struggled to solve many of the Leetcode problems.

I am currently using Neetcode to practice DSA and advanced algorithms, but I am feeling demotivated about tackling these coding problems and breaking into MAANG, despite having secured interview opportunities. I would greatly appreciate any advice on how I should approach my preparation if I were to start over from a beginner's perspective.

For Amazon’s interview, I have been following a 1-to-0 approach rather than a 0-to-1 strategy—focusing on reviewing solutions, understanding problems, and recognizing patterns using Neetcode and Grokking the Coding Interview, rather than actively solving the questions. With only 10 days remaining, how can I enhance my performance under pressure and prevent freezing during Amazon's coding interviews? Additionally, how can I sustain this momentum for Google’s interview preparation?

Thank you for your time and guidance.

Hi everyone, I am a software engineer since 5 years now.

Over time, I have realized that I am ambitious but not competitive. I do my work as I enjoy doing the same and when my heart is in it. This has two facets:

1. I am not bothered when someone is doing better than me. I am loved by all. Nobody sees me as a threat. I love helping everyone.
2. Without feeling competitive, there are times when I lack the motivation at work. This also means I don't have the heart to snatch or ask for the better projects of my colleagues when I know they really want to do it. I am fairly excluded from the power hunger games.

I want to seek advise on what are the ways you have sustained your motivation at work and your ambition to climb the career ladder if not for competition? How much has a competitive spirit fuelled your career growth?

How do you respond to an email or over a phone conversation from recruiter asking:

1. Recruiter: What leveling would you prefer? L5, L6, etc (This is for Amazon)
   My thoughts: I personally think I'm somewhere in between L5 and L6 (much closer to L6). But I'm not sure what the right response should be.
2. Recruiter: What are your compensation expectations? We have a limited amount of positions open at the moment (but more coming soon.) And we like to know a little more about this from each candidate so we don't waste anyone's time involved, specifically yours :)
   My thoughts: I don't want to give insanely high number to Tier 2/3 since I want to increase my chances of getting interviews. But for FAANG I don't want to give a smaller number either.

Could you please tell how to handle such questions?

I like my team and management. I would like to stay here and yet address the comp concerns. Promos are too difficult.

So I would like to learn from Alex, Rahul and community members here on how I should go about the retention offer.

What are the things I should do in order to increase my chances. I want to plan it thoroughly and execute it without getting burnt out.

Joining a FAANG (Amazon) as a senior eng after being mid level at another FAANG. The team uses Go programming language which I've never used before. Should I work hard on learning this language (in the week I have before starting) or just relax and wait till I actually start?

As a team switcher, I'm worried that I could join a team that is rapidly expanding in headcount but isn’t having a clear business impact so the execs don’t care:

• As an engineer, would you get punished for this with worse performance reviews and slower career growth?
• How can you evaluate the business impact of a team?
• Is it just an educated guess or are there concrete things I can look at to judge this?

As a senior IC, I am included as part of leadership meetings (Director+). I gain a lot of early insights into business direction, which is great. However I would like to see how i can take part in the discussions and have effective conversations?

I am looking for a book suggestion and/or framework to use on how to go about improving on this?

Few dimensions which could impact this -

1. Personality of the individual
2. Awareness/one’s expertise of the topic being discussed

I'm fortunate to have someone who will refer me for whatever role I want at Amazon.

The problem is there are tons of very different teams and I can't tell which teams are growing or impactful. My intuition is mixed: Products drive revenue, so product teams should be the most impactful right? Quite easily not so as tooling teams can also scale massive impact at companies like these.

The first step I took is to reach out to my contacts at the company. I have multiple, but none of them seem to have a strong opinion, often indicating their own limited view across the company.

How should I think about this? Is there public data I can tap, or should I just get in wherever and transfer later?

Hi Taro. I worked at Amazon as an SDE for a couple of years before I was laid off. Recently, I signed an offer for a 6 month contract at Amazon. I might get a one year contract at Meta soon though. I never worked at Meta before. I wonder if it is worth burning the bridge with Amazon to take the role at Meta.

I have a few reasons for wanting to take Meta.

• Amazon is only 6 months and it may not get renewed. I don't want to put a short role on my resume and be looking for a job again in 6 months.
• Long term, I don't want to be at Amazon. Amazon really hurt my mental health.
• I would like to join Meta as a full time a lot more than I want to for Amazon. Their culture reputation is not great either, but I really believe it's better than Amazon.

I have one reason for wanting to stick with Amazon:

• It's not like jobs fall out of the sky. I am returning to Amazon now and I may return there one day for a full time role even though I prefer not to.

I was inspired by the gamification on Duolingo, which is a language learning app with a "daily streak" mechanic. The incentive to do something in the app every day has been very powerful for me - I have a streak of 200+ days!

I want to bring this idea over to an engineering context, creating an app called "Leetfriends". The purpose of the app is to have friends share with one another their Leetcode streaks, using social pressure to encourage consistency for everyone. I’m hoping that the app does well, so I could include it in my portfolio and boost my job prospects. How do I best go about this app?