A couple of people have pinged me asking for tips about how to pass an Amazon loop, I'm an L6 'bar raiser' in AWS network engineering who does some interviews, so these are my tips;
- Obviously, the first thing you see and hear about when researching tips for an Amazon interview is leadership principles. They are important and the interview is structured around them, but overall understanding them will enable you to answer the questions, so it's always best to learn them. If your starting position is - "Leadership principles are a load of BS, I don't need to know any of that" you probably won't get very far, or do well at Amazon - it's not for everyone.
- Understand the job 'level'. Everything at Amazon is based around levels. L4-5 tends to focus mostly on craft, that is - doing day to day work, writing code, doing actual implementations or fault finding and so on, whatever the day to day work is. When you go for an L6 role or higher, the leadership element is much more relevant. Amazon are not hiring someone who does 'day to day work' at L6 or above, they're looking for someone who can lead, go out and find the problems and not be told what to do all the time. So if applying for L6 or above, look to demonstrate how you actually make decisions around leadership, don't focus on technical craft.
- Some of the questions are very difficult, don't afraid to ask for more time. On my loop I had 8x interviews and I asked for extra time, asked them to repeat questions numerous times - it's fine. Amazon looks for people who go slower, think and give better answers - don't rush through.
- Some of the questions are scenario based; "Tell me about a time you did XYZ". Make sure you focus on the outcome. It's not enough to say you did your job and worked 9am-5pm or whatever. Everything at Amazon is based on impact - so in the answer, make sure you focus on the impact of whatever you did for the customer. "I designed XYZ, and this led to improvements in ABC for the customer" everything at Amazon is customer focused.
- If you do a technical interview, don't be afraid to go really deep. Amazon likes people who dig right down into the heart of something, to figure out how it works, or what the problem is. Amazon hates people who think "Oh it's close enough" or "It looks like it's 10 feet long". They want the person who gets the tape measure and actually measures it, rather than someone who eyeballs it.
- Don't be afraid to reuse scenarios, if you have a really good example of a time you did something awesome and you use it to answer a question in interview 1 - feel free to use it in all the interviews, don't feel like every single answer has to be unique to every interviewer.
As for working at Amazon, what's it like? I'm a year in as a Net Engineer III.
- The first thing is, it's really ******* hard. I've got over 20 years experience, worked for Juniper, Cisco, did a bunch of CCIEs and JNCIEs back in the day, most of the ISPs in the UK and a 5 year stint in the games industry (esports) and I honestly thought I was l33t. When I got to Amazon, it's like starting again, I felt like I was just starting out - the whole ecosystem is so utterly enormous, it's like going back to the beginning.
- The first 6x months for me were doing no work - only training, it takes on average around 12 months before you start to feel like you're doing any actual work. For me, my first project was a colossal data centre migration (3-4 thousand routers, and 30-40Tbps of traffic), I had to design the entire thing then run the project, and it was so difficult to be simultaneously learning and trying to deliver at the same time. But it worked - and I learnt so much in the process, it was worth more than gold to me, in terms of knowledge.
- Joining in Covid (end of 2020) was extremely difficult, everybody else is so busy that people tend to just silo and work on their own stuff. Getting help from people in the beginning was very stressful, people have a tendency to just link you an out of date doc you already read, rather than actually give you any help. There is an element of 'sink or swim' and you have to go out and make your own network of people, otherwise you'll feel lost.
- The things I get to work on are the absolute bleeding edge of technology, so in a way - Amazon is paying me way more than just money, they're paying me with knowledge that can't be gotten from anywhere else, because Amazon has to solve problems that nobody else would ever have - due to it's size. From spending a few years or more at Amazon - from a future employment perspective, I'll feel very very strong indeed, certainly far more ahead than I would have been, if I hadn't had gone to Amazon. I think of myself as a stock market commodity - I was worth a certain amount before I joined Amazon, a few years down the line afterwards I'll be worth more.
- Things change very fast here. In 12 months I've had 3x different managers and that's totally normal. There are constant reorgs and restructures, people being moved. It's quite easy to change teams too, or relocate to another office/country if you're L6 or above. If you're the type of person who likes everything to stay the same for years at a time - you'll hate Amazon, I actually like it.
- There's a lot of scope to innovate, if you find a problem - it'll likely involve some sort of home-grown solution, we have lots and lots of patents and in house designed tech, everybody and anybody can innovate and it's generally always funded and supported, several team mates have patents and I have a few ideas.
- I would say - if you want to work at Amazon, treat it like some sort of boot-camp, it's very hard, it's relentless, but if you you can take it for a few years - you'll be significantly elevated, especially if you're involved in the tech side.
- Lastly, Amazon is a machine - treat it like so, it's not an emotional person with a heart of soul, it's an enormous machine, and you'll get back whatever you put into it, but it's certainly not for everyone.
Urgh, I wrote way too much, sorry
I did think it took a bit longer than that to get through BRIT!
