Amazon

I participated in Amazon HackON from my college. The selection process was slightly different from a regular Amazon hiring process. The first stage was an online assessment, but unlike typical OAs, the DSA questions were relatively easy. The main focus was on solving the problems correctly within the given time rather than extremely difficult competitive programming questions. After the OA, there was a repository debugging round where we were given an existing codebase and had to identify and fix issues. AI assistance was allowed during this round, which made it interesting because we could use AI to understand the repository, identify possible bugs, and reason about the implementation. However, the AI did not simply provide the complete code or solution, so I still had to understand the problem and make the required changes myself. The next stage was a work-simulation round, where I was given situations similar to what a software engineer might encounter at Amazon and had to choose or explain how I would respond. This was followed by behavioral questions focusing on situations involving teamwork, ownership, handling challenges, and decision-making. After completing these stages, I was shortlisted for the interview rounds. The interview process consisted of two rounds, each around 45 minutes. Both rounds were completely focused on DSA, with no OS, DBMS, OOP, or other core-subject questions. In the first round, I was given two coding problems involving arrays and trees. The interviewer focused heavily on my approach, complexity analysis, edge cases, and possible optimizations. In the second round, the questions were comparatively more challenging and involved graphs and dynamic programming. I was able to solve the graph problem after discussing multiple approaches, but I struggled with the DP problem and could not completely implement it within the given time. The interviewers were mainly evaluating how I approached unfamiliar problems, communicated my reasoning, and improved my solution based on hints. After the two interviews, I received the final update that I was not selected. Overall, HackON was a very different experience from a conventional hiring process because it tested multiple aspects before the interviews, including basic DSA, debugging, AI-assisted development, work simulation, and behavioral skills, while the final interviews were strongly focused on DSA.