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Comment by mloop | Hacker News Reader

hmm, considering to land a job on amazon, is there a good hackernews advice on how to prepare yourself? classic leetcode grind or things changed since then?

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I have interviewed and done interviews for Amazon, I'd say leetcode easy with the occasional medium is to be expected, but Amazon is special in that it feels like a bunch of small team with different expectations and requirements so YMMV.

I know Amazon gets a bad reputation these days but I really enjoy working there so if you are considering applying I'd say go for it.

What's the work life balance like for you? The companies I've worked at expect 40 hours per week but in practice are more like 30/week. Amazon has a reputation of 60-100 hours per week depending on who's telling the story

At AWS most team are pretty independent so it's hard to give a definitive answer. That being said I never met L4 SDEs working a lot more than 40 hours. Some team will experience crunch before reInvent but even then more than 60 hours (or even 60 hours honestly) would be unheard of for me.

There is OnCall duty which can be a pain from time to time but it really depends on your product.

TLDR: Your team's work-life balance usually defines your work-life balance. Never met anyone working 60 hours but that anecdotal.

> There is OnCall duty which can be a pain from time to time but it really depends on your product.

In India, on call expectation is to be available for 24 x 7. Is that the same?

Can't comment to the expectations (I'd guess it's 24/7 across Amazon), however in a reasonably size team you should not be on call more than a few days every month and Sev2+ event (the ones you have to wake up for) are somewhat rare so it's not like you find yourself fixing bugs in production at 3AM every month.

Very team dependent and dependent on the scope of your production systems (E.g. is Amazon.com dependent on it or is it some random downstream system). There are countless teams at Amazon that get paged 20+ times a week.

I would recommend 1 hour of leetcode and 1 hour of hackerrank every day, plus a 30 minute “programming koan” every morning, for 6 months leading up to when you expect the interview. You should also read “Cracking the Coding Interview” at least once.

Familiarise yourself with the STAR recruitment method, alongside amazon's leadership principles. You won't only be judged based on your skills, but how well you seem to suit their work culture.

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