How I Got a Software Engineering Internship at Amazon (after taking just one CS class)

[Music] two summers ago I traded in my organic chemistry textbooks and lab goggles for a tech Pro hoodie and a generous paycheck after it competing just an introductory computer science course and man chilled on an internship at a big for Fang tech company Amazon looking back I'm still amazed that's possible for someone with no experience in tech and very little CS coursework to let a top tech internship and of course it doesn't come easy for me II required numerous weekends of leak coding hundreds of rejections and several failed final round interviews and of course it also required a generous sprinkle of luck I know there's a lot of hype surrounding getting into these top companies but to be honest interview process is very similar between the big four and any other tech company most companies follow similar steps for recruiting and most interviews tests the same basic topics data structures algorithms recursion dynamic programming etc so let me share with you my journey of cracking the software engineering internship interview in this video I'll be going over the spiced technical experience I had before going into the recruiting process how I leveraged my network and the internet to find jobs what the interview process was like for me and how I ultimately landed that Amazon internship so without further ado let's get to it a big misconception is set to land a job at Google Facebook or Amazon he had to have started coding in high school completed a few internships exhausted the CS curriculum at your top engineering school and probably have started to a million dollar app now let's look at what my profile looked like when I was applying for these jobs I was a junior at a small liberal arts school had just started my CS major had only completed one CS course and had never worked a tech job in my life my proudest technical achievement was making a static website for my mom before college for someone like me getting into the big four would be a long shot but that's really why I wanted to make this video the first step to achieving any goal regardless of how intimidating or difficult or daunting it may seem is to just put yourself out there I could have looked around at my classmates who had previously intern at Google had done tech research at MIT and were TAS in the classes that I was taking and told myself that I had no chance but the tech recruiting process is actually incredibly forgiving all you need to do to get a job is to get your foot through the door and then nail the technical interview everything else is just kind of fluff I tried to cast as white in it possible when applying to jobs so I applied everywhere I used sites like Glassdoor indeed and Google jobs to find every company that was hiring for interns then I used sites like CrunchBase and Angeles to find those smaller startups with a niche where my non-traditional background in pre-med would be relevant but this definitely wasn't the most efficient way to find jobs what I could have done was leveraged my school's incredibly strong alumni network and my seniors to ask for referrals in their respective companies and here's why referrals are so ideal typically a recruiter is gonna have to weed through thousands of online applications and would probably spend at most a few seconds looking at my resume but with referrals a recruiter is leveraging a trusted employees Network to find the best candidate so my chance of getting that first interview would be so much higher but of course I was too shy and too proud to go out of my way and ask for help but maybe if I did this process would have been a lot simpler and this video would be a lot shorter regardless after sending those applications in October which was a bit late in the process I finally heard back from the first company Google and with that I drove into the completely foreign world of technical interviews first things first I ordered cracking the coding interview and a whiteboard and asuna classmates what in the world a technical interview is since I had just started taking data structures I had some catching up to do so I read every single page front to back of cracking the coding interview and completed a bunch of hacker ranked courses after that was done I started conducting mock interviews by myself with a white board in hand or using coder pad I pick a randomly code question and code my solution out loud my homies probably thought I was a freak talking to myself and sometimes I do mock interviews with a friend this helped me practice performing under pressure and analyzing a good versus bad answer about two weeks after starting in you prep I had my Google interviews and they were back-to-back and since these were my first-ever technical interviews I was incredibly nervous to say the least and the idea of having to write code on the fly without looking anything up was still bonkers to me the first one went pretty well another one was just okay about a week after that I heard back from Facebook which was my dream company at the time so again I spent the next two weeks cramming for the interview but to my dismay it was actually quite difficult in fact I don't think I even completely understood the question by just kept coding my half-baked solution so it wasn't a surprise that a week after that I received my rejection in the email and my facebook dreams were in the dumps after this initial period of hype I kept applying to as many companies as I could and naturally I only heard back from a few and I definitely was improving but the thing is I would need something else look I could spend an entire weekend studying up on trees and DFS but then get a question on dynamic programming and be at a complete loss but without giving up I kept marching along and I'm really glad that I did by February I had completed several more interviews but was usually rejected the final round either because I need to practice more on my fundamentals or because I wasn't the best fit for the company at this point I started to lose hope I asked myself if I can't even get one job offer how will I be a good engineer and just around that time I heard back from Amazon nearly four months after submitting my application I received a friendly email asking me to complete a two-part coding challenge half about syntax rules and half a hacker ink style challenge I had nothing to lose at this point so I gave it a shot a speedy week after at that I received an email from the team to find a time for the next and last hurdle the technical phone screen by this point I thought that if I had failed every other interview I probably failed this one too so instead of going through the usual routine of leak coding and whiteboarding over the weekend I decided to just wing it in fact the day off I want cancel the interview because I didn't want to waste another hour of my time and the interviewers time but luckily with some coercion of my friends I still attended the interview and I'm very glad that I did I was asked one question to some and of course I was incredibly lucky to have gotten this question which also happens to be the first question listed on leaked code by this point in my preparation I had thoroughly understood what the question was asking all the various possible approaches to solve it the edge cases and was able to articulate my answer pretty well so by that Friday I received my offer letter and West Seattle bound and the point of the story is that nothing comes easy and there's no secret sauce to cracking the coding interview wherever you're applying so my lesson learned was to get as much practice in as possible from a variety of resources and start preparing well in advance of applying even by doing one the code question a day in the months leading up to the recruiting season can help instill that confidence in your technical skills to help you knock that interview out of the park and that's it for this week's video please feel free to share your own experiences applying for tech jobs or maybe your own struggles that you're facing right now in the comments down below and you know the drill by now if you liked this video please give it a big like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: harshibar

Views: 1,532,073

Rating: 4.9000425 out of 5

Keywords: amazon, how to get into amazon, how i got into amazon, how i got an amazon internship, how to get an amazon internship, how to get into faang, cracking the coding interview, wellesley college cs, harshibar, amazon internships, interview at amazon, amazon sde, faang, amazon internship, amazon interview, amazon interview process, amazon software engineer, amazon software engineer interview, amazon interview tips, sde, faang internship, faang interviews, harshibar amazon

Id: fD9b6nV7IMY

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020