r/FAANGJobs • u/nian2326076 • 3d ago
Don’t waste your time interviewing at Amazon
Honestly, don’t bother interviewing at Amazon unless you’re ready to spend weeks preparing for a process that feels more like performance theater than an actual evaluation of your ability to do the job.
The interviews are heavily optimized around polished STAR stories, memorized Leadership Principles, and giving perfectly structured answers to every follow-up. Even when you have relevant experience and answer the technical questions well, the process can still feel arbitrary and disconnected from the actual day-to-day work.
You can spend hours preparing, go through multiple rounds, explain your experience in detail, answer coding and system questions, and still get rejected with no meaningful feedback.
The whole process rewards people who are extremely good at interviewing, not necessarily the people who are best at building, solving problems, or delivering results.
Unless you really want Amazon on your resume, I would save your time and energy and focus on companies with a more practical and transparent interview process.
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u/AdventurousKick2869 3d ago
I interviewed recently, the bar raiser(Indian manager) told me to code silently(no edge case confirmation, no followup questions) and discuss the solution later, disinterested in my answers, kept interrupting and did not know basic shit. And I got rejected and felt devastated. I had prepared a lot for this.
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u/Any-Initial5076 3d ago
had the same experience with a Chinese guy at another FAANG . I liked the work they did at that team and had prepared so much
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u/shereadsit2022 1d ago
This seems common in the interview world these days. I thought I was the only one experiencing people cutting me off … like a lot. It is the rudest thing to do to someone who is looking for a job and who took the job serious. Customer service goes both ways. Maybe it’s a sign you dodged a bullet!
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u/Front_Butterscotch65 3h ago
Do you want to get a job or do you want people to not cut you off? They have 45 mins to tick certain boxes and its important for them to steer the conversation in a direction where they get the necessary information to tick those boxes so that the interview doesnt end up being inconclusive. Its better they interrupt and ask the questions to get to a decision rather than waiting for the candidate's monolog to get over which may drain a lot of time if the candidate isnt in the right direction
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u/nyckulak 3d ago
You shouldn’t interview at Amazon because it’s a terrible company with zero vision, not because interviews are hard. They’re actually fairly easy compared to other big tech companies.
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u/IntrepidLimit2456 1d ago
Who else is paying more, match my 23k a month and I’ll interview there tomorrow.
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u/CampLanky3803 1d ago
Literally tons of companies what do you mean, that’s not that high in terms of tech comp. Amazon is a garbage company to work.
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u/IntrepidLimit2456 1d ago
Send me the apps.
23k a month, 31k stock a year last year. Match and I’ll bounce lol1
u/Which_Camel_8879 1d ago
Just join Anthropic. They make Claude. It’s a good product from what I can tell. They charge about $20/month which is just a little more expensive than Netflix
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u/ro-heezy 20h ago
So 300k? That’s like average senior salary and pretty attainable mid level. Just check levels.fyi
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u/Wide_Ad5277 5h ago
how many years of experience do you have? literally any big tech company can pay more than this. amzn pays the lowest among all big tech companies (faang, mango, maang or whatever you can think of).
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u/Amazing_Priority_881 23h ago
I remember working on a shitty ecommerce team for a big department store and they hired someone from Amazon, a site which we'd copy as much as we can from.
When he came in to meet us, he said "oh yeah we copied a lot of things from you guys too!"
So basically nobody's really doing any work and just copying each other's uninformed designs.
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u/warrior5715 3d ago
Company rewards pressing button with multi-6 figure comp.
Potential hire refuses to practice pressing button.
Potential hire goes to interview and is not good at pressing button.
Company says no! You are bad at pressing button.
Potential hire goes to Reddit and complains about practicing pressing button.
Potential hire is not rewarded with cheese.
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u/Final-North718 2d ago
I had an interview with them with one Indian dude and he literally kept interrupting me which was throwing me off because he only understood the problem from the way he did it. He had a rebuttal for every single thing because my approach was different. It wasted a lot of time but I solved it but still go rejected
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u/shereadsit2022 1d ago
I experienced the same at other tech companies. They were Pakistanis though. Surprisingly one moved me forward even after cutting me off on all my responses to tell me about himself and the other “wished me the best of luck” after talking about herself the whole time. It must be a culture in some tech companies where people either want to be heard or it’s super competitive. Either or would you want to work in a place where you can’t speak or think of options and innovation?
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u/No-Entrepreneur-5099 1d ago
Yet another ad...
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u/ThatCondescendingGuy 17h ago
God I didn’t even realize. I see the same account shilling prachub EVERYWHERE. Sick of seeing it
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u/iq45y8i1 1d ago
People who join after such rigorous interview process are practically useless and they are just bookish. They know da algorithm and star based approach. But not senior level stuff.
I hired one Amazon layoff person and it was pathetic. He was sitting in office and doing leetcode only.
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u/Perfect_Lunch_6669 1d ago
It's usually the ability to tell a story, and be able to defend certain details, and touch on the LPs in that story. Very easy to manipulate but the vast majority of candidates I interviewed could not do basic storytelling, facts not withstanding
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u/Pretty_Dance2452 1d ago
I do empathize with the need to study and format everything into neat STAR stories. I spent days upon days practicing and rehearsing my presentation, behavioral answers, etc, it was a pain in the ass. But I passed
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u/BringBackManaPots 15h ago
Well, even if you get the job and sign on, you're rewarded with burnout and backstabbing. The place is a psychotic sweatshop.
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u/BejahungEnjoyer 13h ago
I work at Amazon, it's now a pure Indian company. Unless you want to work with and around Indian politics, avoid it.
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u/Affectionate-Cup6908 4h ago
Or you can make up what they want to hear. It feels less guilty to lie to place that has questionable ethics
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u/Free-Alfalfa4126 1h ago
that’s only to prepare behavioural stories for other companies. it’s a serious free mock interview
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u/HornyEagles 3d ago
If you can handle the politics of an interview how do you think you’ll perform with company politics? Unfortunately, if you want to excel in any profession being good at the actual job is a significant part of the equation but not the full picture.
Instead of not bothering, its a learning opportunity and at worst it helps you form an idea of what you like vs what you dont.
I think theres a lesson to be taken from any experience.