[throwaway9191aa]

Current FAANG. Most of the folks I work with give terrible interviews. You really can do these questions correctly, but most don't.

My AWS interviewer (I got super lucky) asked me a really basic question about linked lists. Then expanded to a double linked list. Then we talked about inheritance. Only then did we attempt to find the nearest parent of two nodes in a tree. It was a great example of determining knowledge, and whether that knowledge can be applied to problem solving.

When I shadow interviews I usually hear folks ask candidates something like "find repeating k-clusters in a string" and then just silently wait for the code. Or even worse, design a filesystem. Then critique the candidate for not thinking of weird symbolic link ownership edge cases. Unsurprisingly, this is just what it is like to work at AWS :(

The question needs to have multiple solutions that you can discuss with the candidate. The question needs to have some follow up like "What if you were writing this on an embedded device? How would that change your solution?". These situations DO arise every day. Here is a simple problem, with annoying institutional requirements. Can you still come up with something? Or did you just memorize the algorithm?

[__derek__]

I used to be an Amazon BR and agree with this.