I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. But the Amazon interview process is terrible on multiple fronts. The recruiter was fine. The technical interview was fine. The amount of prep Amazon asks of you is significant, but okay, fine. The people during the virtual on-site (oxymoron?) were bimodally distributed. - Everyone you talk to is either a ten-year vet or two weeks in. This is a huge red flag, but we already knew Amazon had burnout problems. - I thought the Bar Raiser would be the most insufferable part, but he was actually the most interesting part. He seriously embodied at least three of the LPs, and he actually knew his stuff and was actually interested in talking about the work. - The people you talk to who are actually Doing The Work (in the DC, as a SWE, whatever) will be interesting to talk with and you can see yourself working with them. - The management you talk to will be exasperating. A PM unironically told me the best thing about Amazon is also the worst thing, to wit: everything is Priority 1 all the time, so you have to set your own priorities and defend them and even Andy Jassy can't say no (I highly doubt this). What I didn't say to this was "you...are a PM. If you aren't setting priorities for your pod, what on earth are you even doing?" - The further up the management spectrum you go, the more interested they will be in checking their box of "I interviewed this candidate the STAR way." They will not be interested in talking about the work. They just want you to parrot back a STAR at them. It's a STAR cargo cult. A question I was asked was how I increased visibility into the business - the interviewer was not interested in how I figured out most of the 40+ dashboards available were wrong or redundant. He only wanted to know how I added to the problem, what new metrics or dashboards I created. "I added minus 39 dashboards and enabled the COO to actually see what is going on in the business" was not satisfactory. God help me but I don't want to be managed to n(new metrics) per year. Immediately after this they passed on me on the basis of "we want a L6 and we think you're a L5". Sure, fine, whatever. My recruiter then loaned me out to a different recruiter, who consistently missed the scheduled calls (four times!) and then tried to act like it was my fault for not picking up the phone when she called out of bounds...in an email written by ChatGPT. How do I know? She left the prompt and the after-response in.

Interview focused on analytical thinking and case studies. Main focus was on the leadership principles. First interview was a phone interview that covered a few basic questions and SQL coding. The loop had 4 rounds.