I am sharing the BIE phone interview that I just failed. I hope it can help everyone.
A senior DE interviewed me and brought along a junior AE.
Leadership BQ
They first looked at my resume and asked about projects I had done and about leadership.
The questions went very deep. After one A/B test, did I run any other tests? What kind of trade-off led to not launching? Which team did I work with? Was the number on my resume incremental lift? Exactly how much lift was there?
About 20 minutes came from extending one of my stories. They did not ask me to give several different stories.
But I had not specifically prepared this BQ section around Amazon's Leadership Principles. That is also why I think I failed. It is still better to read more material specifically about Amazon leadership BQs and prepare more.
SQL
There were three questions. None was hard, but the interviewer would ask, "Any other solution?"
The first question had two join keys. I missed one of them at first, then proactively asked about it. The interviewer said, "What do you think?" I asked about the definition of that column and then said, yes, I thought another join key was needed.
The interviewer asked a strange question. My answer was that a condition written in the WHERE clause could be moved into the ON clause.
Her feedback was that this was correct and was the answer she wanted.
I felt that this question was very strange...
The third question required a window function. I wrote many CTEs to keep it clear, and I said that they could be changed into subqueries.
The interviewer said that was fine and there was no problem.
Data Visualization
The question was about a sharing company that cared about three metrics, roughly duration, fee, and a survey result, where the result could only be good or bad.
I said I would use big-number displays and redefined the metrics.
The second part involved duration and fee. I said I would use a scatter plot, and the interviewer said that was correct. Then she asked what I would do with three variables, and then four variables.
At the end, it was my turn to ask questions. I asked what advice they had for me. The senior DE said some empty platitudes about learning more AI, then said the AE might be able to answer the question better. The AE was younger and gave me a lot of flattering praise.
Then the two of them rejected me...
I hope this can help everyone.
Discussion
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