I got Amazon's OA and started it one day right after waking up from a nap. I wasn't in a good state though, and I ended up getting a rejection.
Question 1
Coding, 40 minutes. I wrote one version and only passed 4 cases — the other hidden cases threw some memory errors. It wasn't until after it ended that I realized there must have been a space constraint, which is why I was getting those memory-related errors. I used a prefix sum, but a prefix sum takes O(n) memory.
This problem had shown up on the forum before, but I hadn't come across it (because I don't grind LeetCode much). The gist of it: find the maximum sum of a subarray of length k. But the array is given in segments — for example, an input like [[1,3,4], [6,7,1]] means indices 1-3 have value 4, and indices 6-7 have value 1, with everything else 0. The problem statement was really long, with a ton of background that ended up feeling pretty useless.
If you don't already know this problem it's hard; if you have an idea for it, it's maybe medium-leaning-hard. I had ChatGPT write a solution, and even it didn't get it fully correct.
Question 2
This was an AI-assisted real-project-style question, 60 minutes. There were supposedly six test cases failing that I needed to fix. I picked Node.js. It should have been simple, but I got stuck on one thing — I probably could have used the debugger, but it didn't occur to me that debugging was even possible in that interface, so the time just slipped away. I tried printing out some variables and kept tweaking things, but since I wasn't familiar with the mongoose library, combined with not being in a good state, I never got it working.
Lastly there were some multiple-choice questions, which have already been covered on the forum, so I won't go into them.
A couple of days later I got the rejection letter — not moving forward.
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