PlaceKode with Yash Kodesia placed at Amazon
Success is a journey and not a destination and on this journey, we encounter stop signs, roadblocks, breakdowns etc. These are times we need some sort of direction and motivation to propel us to keep moving forward until we attain our own definition of success. So, PlaceKode by Uthaan, the Official Journalism and Recreational Club of ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior is here again with another successful interview of Yash Kodesia who is placed at Amazon. So let’s take an incentive from his journey.
Many of us dream of securing a job at a company like Amazon. Can you tell us about your Job Profile a bit?
After the interview, we heard a rumor that they were hiring some people full time and others for internship-based placements. Each second felt like years when I was waiting for the results to come out. Finally, I had the job profile in my hand that states SDE 1 (Software Developer Engineer 1) which is an entry-level position at Amazon, a full-time job that I am going to join directly in July. As for results, three more people were hired for FT (Full time) and one for internship-based program.
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world and is one of the top Fortune 500 companies. How did you prepare for this monumental interview?
I arrived pretty late to the college when placement season began, many students returned at around mid-July but I had a long internship which restricted me from doing so. I arrived just a few days before the interview and wasn’t prepared at all. Many students were busy studying problems on GeeksforGeeks but I, personally, had never opened it. I trusted my experience in competitive programming and my preparation for the GATE examination. So, I just shuffled through my GATE subjects, concepts and my internship topics. Basically, that was all the preparation I took for this interview.
Sitting for an Interview like this must be a nerve-racking process. What went through your mind the night before? Were you nervous about the day to come?
I felt like this interview was a good opportunity to evaluate myself. I have studied well for the past 4 years and now it was time to check what all of it was worth. I was just a little worried about them asking me standard GeeksforGeeks questions as it involved topics rarely used in competitive programming. Fortunately, that was not the case, upon seeing my CV they asked me tougher questions, something I was more comfortable with.
I wasn’t particularly nervous the night before because I don’t believe in worrying from beforehand. I am a believer of “Let’s see what happens”.
Many of us do superstitious things to calm our nerves before going for a big day, had you done something alike before setting foot in interview hall?
You can always associate me with the category of people who don’t think too much about what’s going to happen in the future at all. Throughout the years I knew that I had studied well and I had developed a philosophy of “Let’s see what happens”. I choose to live in the present and utilize it to the fullest. Hence, I don’t believe in superstitions and didn’t do anything superstitious either.
Can you tell us about the entire procedure of the interview and the various levels you had to clear in order to get this job?
So, on 5th August we had an online round which was roughly an hour and a half long, if I remember correctly. There were 28 MCQ questions which revolved around basic C++ like Output, Errors and those types of things. One or two were Programming Questions, which were very easy. Someone with 3 or 4 months of rigorous practice can easily solve them, for people in Competitive Programming, it was a cakewalk.
However, they had a weird glitch, for the lack of a better word, in their coding environment which was: Anybody coding in C++ had to dynamically create variables and return them, something which was not mentioned anywhere. So, quite naturally, a lot of very capable people got stuck there including myself. Fortunately, I decided to switch to Java and my code got accepted. So that was a quite intense moment for me in the Online Coding round.
Then, around 20–21 students got shortlisted and interviews began the next day. We were told that there were going to be 4 rounds in the interview. They were calling every candidate individually and we were all waiting anxiously.
Three out of the 4 rounds were of a similar nature, but the 3rd round had two interviews instead of one. They asked us questions mostly related to OS, other core subjects and our past internships without much focus on coding.
A few coding questions in the earlier rounds were:
Technical Round-1:
Q 1. A person is compiling Java libraries and each library has certain dependencies, like if he is compiling A then he needs B and C compiled beforehand. So, there was a vector of strings given which stored the dependencies and I had to tell if it was possible to compile the libraries or not.
Now, in this problem we can imagine a directed tree being created and one just needs to check for cycles created in the tree. That is, if library A needs library B, library B needs library C and library C needs library A, then it is impossible to compile these 3 libraries.
Q 2. This was a continuation of the previous problem, I was asked how to remove certain dependencies, the lesser the better, such that all the libraries can be compiled and the order of compilation.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-the-ordering-of-tasks-from-given-dependencies/
Technical Round -2:
Q 1. I was asked to design a data structure that supports a minimum of insertion, searching and get random in O(1) that is constant time
Q 2. I was asked a string manipulation Problem. Given a vector of strings I had to print all the anagrams in lexicographical order.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/given-a-sequence-of-words-print-all-anagrams-together/
Technical Round -3:
I was asked a good Dynamic Programming Question. Given a map of strings and a normal string. One must find if the entire string can be formed using strings only from the map of strings.
Technical Round -4:
Given a matrix find all the monotonically increasing paths.
What were the changes in your thoughts, like were you feeling confident or pressurized while passing through different levels of your interview?
Yeah, I used to ask my seniors from Amazon about their whole interview procedures. As for me, my first round was the best, since he asked me about my internship project at yahoo, going through my resume he handed me a question, which I solved pretty much accurately and that instilled confidence in me. In the second round, the term data-structure-design caught me off guard initially but I managed to clear the round without much effort. Although the third round which I was dreading the most diminished my confidence a bit, I was selected for the fourth round. They mainly asked me about my internships and start-up affiliations. After the entire interview process, I was sure to be offered an internship at the least but to my amazement, I landed the full-time software development job.
You have successfully completed a phase of life which many of us are just beginning, do you have any tips for us, something to help us along the way?
Enjoy College Life! Don’t worry about placements. In our college everyone gets placed and that is a fact. If you study well, you will of course get placed!
Many people who haven’t focused on academics have also secured extremely good jobs. It is my personal opinion that a student should balance all the aspects of college life appropriately. If you enjoy your stay at your college, you won’t have much stress to deal with in the first place. Me and my friends we enjoyed a lot during our years. You should find the thing you are passionate about, and then strive to excel in that field, be it open-source development, competitive programming or machine learning. Find your spot.
The work life is somewhat mundane, people do enjoy their work but at the end of the day it is work! College life on the other hand gives you a lot of freedom. You can do anything you want or be anyone you want, all without the fear of failure, so utilize that support. So, enjoy college life and also maintain your academics, but try to enjoy more if possible.
Interviewed by: Debaditya Pal and Harshita Agrawal
@geeksforgeeks, Some rights reserved
