[mandeepj]

> Of course, Amazon's behavioral interview is probably the easiest to game, as you essentially know most of the questions in advance

The devil is in the details. Once they will start probing, the candidates who had made up stories would start floundering.

[BeetleB]

Easy to handle this:

1. Pick an example from work where a coworker exhibited the behavior and you're intimately aware of the details

2. Pick an example from work that didn't go the way Amazon would have wanted it, but fantasize about how it could have. I think those who've worked long enough have plenty of tales to tell that didn't quite happen that way in reality, but make for a better narrative. Just adopt one of those. Do you think most of the comments people post on HN with experiences from their workplace are 100% accurate? Do you think they needed to spend a lot of time crafting that narrative? No.[1]

Both of these don't even require much prep.

[1] Edit: Heh - see sibling comment - written while I was writing mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983353

[sp527]

There's a magical escape hatch for this known as "I can't quite recall". The truth is most interviewers don't know how to properly evaluate the authenticity of a story and won't accord it much weight relative to the coding challenges anyway. You'll probably get through if you can pass the Leetcode portion and just bullshit well enough on the behavioral.

[cyanydeez]

All the police procedural propaganda makes people over estimate how well they'd discern fact from fiction.

[BeetleB]

> There's a magical escape hatch for this known as "I can't quite recall".

Indeed. I don't know how Amazon would evaluate that, but one probably should be wary if the candidate knew much of the details.

Except they shouldn't, because Amazon forces you to come prepared with these stories, and penalize you if you don't come prepared with these stories.

[cyanydeez]

You know you're in a hacker forum, where people "make up" solutions to imaginary scenarios all the time.