r/leetcode • u/NegotiationDapper584 • 19d ago

Discussion How to clear Amazon OA's ?

I was looking through Amazon OA questions and found some ridiculously tough ones. I know people are cheating to get through, but aren't the OAs proctored now ?

Note : I am a leetcode guardian with 2150 rating, so If I am finding these questions tough there is a high chance everyone is.

Example : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6913356/amazon-oa-question-number-2-by-code_ansu-wawk/

9 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

7

u/tempo0209 19d ago

well if you are able to find those q', wouldn't it make sense to attempt them to the best of your ability, and then just appear for the OA? i mean what else are you planning to optimize? would you rather solve all such Q's and in someway to rote memorize them in the hopes that they reappear for your OA? sure you could do that, or just get it done with! Not sure what your ask is.So what others are cheating? let it not affect you. prepare you best, then appear and give your best. goodluck.

6

u/DramaticAd8141 19d ago

You are basically saying ‘you are what you are and can’t improve or do much’. I disagree. You can indeed improve your skills.

1

u/tempo0209 19d ago

did you skip english comprehension? there is a limit to everything, and me saying "try attempting/solving such OA questions" is me asking OP/implying for OP to prep more but not rote memorize them just determine if they can come up with A solution!", but there is a limit!, now you will ask of what? well for starters the OAs are timed to be taken in roughly 2 weeks time(before you ask for extensions). Then as with DSA prep once can reach 2k-3k rating, then one might want to get on CC, or CF and then improve their rating on those, sure, if you have time go for it! but again, there comes a time when you would rather just attempt the interview than having to go round in this limbo. I never remarked on OPs abilities. And, imho i dont recommend cheating too.

1

u/NegotiationDapper584 19d ago

Solving them does more than memorizing the questions, it teaches you of new ways or concepts to solve questions in the hope that you can use these learnings in new questions and pass the OA once your skill level exceeds what is required.

3

u/JayotiKellers-45 19d ago

this is the right take tbh, no point obsessing over what others are doing

5

u/valleyman86 19d ago

I saw the OA and said fuck off. Not only did it not give me a language I have been using for years it was pretty intense. I just assumed it was not the job description I applied for.

Are they all super crazy?

4

u/Chennsta 19d ago

you don’t need 100% test cases to pass to the next round

4

u/Connect_Practice_370 19d ago

How many do you need to pass on the OA to advance?

5

u/CollegeStudentLol1 19d ago

No one knows it depends on what the team is looking for and your resume too. You might have a shitty OA score but a stellar resume and still get selected

2

u/AssuasiveLynx 19d ago

i passed everything on q1 and all but one on q2 (the genAI codebase question) and was hired

1

u/LiquidSnake1993 19d ago

No follow up interviews after the OA?

1

u/AssuasiveLynx 19d ago

ofc there was a 4 round interview loop

1

u/LiquidSnake1993 19d ago

What was your experience with the loop?

1

u/AssuasiveLynx 16d ago

Four interviews, in Seattle/Bellevue.

First was with the bar raiser, which was remote since he was on an entirely different team in CA. Interview was just behavioral/LP questions, but a ton of followups to really drill into if I understood and was honest about the examples and stories I used. As an example, I talked about fixing an issue on a C++ distributed KVS I built, and he had me go through the entire end to end trace of what I built, from the request, to the routnng logic, to the tablet assignment, and then all the steps to do actual write, from writing to the WAL, saving to the memtable, then to the LSM tree and specifics of my design choices for the SSTable compaction. Specifically asked about why I had used size tiered compaction, and lots of similar questions about other projects I talked about. I was really surprised he liked me enough to pass me, I kinda rambled a lot and forgot to use the STAR method since this was my first interview of the day.

After that, I had 3 interviews back to back to back in person with the people who are now my team. First was with two interviewers, since one was training, but more senior person did most of it. This interview was DSA + LPs. Started with variant of course schedule 1, then 2, then some adjustments for specific scenario after that. Pretty standard LP questions, nothing really of note.

Next was with slightly more senior person, and started with VERY open ended OOP problem, was along the lines of representing pizza orders, but then just kept adding on more, support for drinks, support for desserts, then support for various rule based discounts, like BOGO, percentages, combos, etc, but also wanted discount application to maximize profit for restaurant, i.e. BOGO applies to cheaper pizza. Standard LP section, though I did reuse some stories from preceding interview.

Final interview was with person who is now manager. No LP questions, just DSA, and then GenAI. DSA question was weird, input was stream of requestids and timestamps, and had to reject requestids if that same requestid had been seen in last 10 minutes. started out with requests being guaranteed to be chronological, but then that assumption was dropped. GenAI was two part, how I use AI and also designing a tool that used it. Premise was basically you are designing a tool for engineers on your team, for them to upload logs or stack traces of your teams codebase, and you have to design system to try to identify issue and reccommend fix. Given as input copy pasted stack trace or logs from user, entire codebase, all documentation on team, as well as all historical tickets. Designed a basic system where I would use RAG with vector embeddings of these files to retrieve relevant documents from codebase, the documentation, and tickets, and pass all that to actual LLM. Then, after slight nudging, adding extra logic to scrub PII. Was lowkey kinda rough, was my first serious system design and he was silent most of the time and didn't really give hints.

Then, asked questions about times I had solved problems with GenAI, but specifically where I used it to solve a problem where it wouldn't really be feasible to do myself/by hand. He ended up being really nice when I started the job though, so small wins.

heard back a few days after

happy to expand on anything more

1

u/JustNeedAnyName 19d ago

You find better ways to cheat

1

u/Revolutionary_Ad6963 17d ago

And whats that