Java Interview (Amazon)

Java Interview with an Amazon engineer

Watch someone solve the what are my friends buying problem in an interview with an Amazon engineer and see the feedback their interviewer left them. Explore this problem and others in our library of interview replays.

Interview Summary

Problem type
What are my friends buying
Interview question

  1. An online retailer is releasing a new feature called "What are my friends buying?". The feature lists a set of products that you have not already purchased from the things that your friends have bought, in order of most bought to least bought.

To help with this, we have the following 2 APIs. Complete the function that takes in a person and returns the items that the person's friends are buying.

  1. Instead of your friends, what about your social circle? A social circle of a person is defined as the person's friends and their friends.

Interview Feedback

Feedback about The Incredible Squirrel (the interviewee)
Advance this person to the next round?
Yes
How were their technical skills?
4/4
How was their problem solving ability?
4/4
What about their communication ability?
4/4

Context is an on-site interview for an entry-level software development engineer.
You meet the requirements for an entry-level software development engineer. You clarified requirements well and used the interactive text editor well to share them. You coded correctly and can appropriately use and trade-off data structures. You stepped through an example well. You gave a good time and space complexity explanation that is plausible. We moved onto an extension question and ran out of time. We had a good DFS vs BFS discussion.

Suggestions for improvement:

  1. Be explicit with smaller examples, e.g. (friend 1 has items 1, 2, 3, friend 2 has items 2, 3, 4). Smaller examples that still test your code will be faster to walk through thoroughly line-by-line.
  2. I think it's OK to be granular with time and space complexities, and then clarify with the interviewer their expectations.
  3. You seemed nervous and there were many syntax errors in your code.
  4. You asked about behavioral interview preparation.

Feedback about Orange Malamute (the interviewer)
Would you want to work with this person?
Yes
How excited would you be to work with them?
4/4
How good were the questions?
4/4
How helpful was your interviewer in guiding you to the solution(s)?
4/4

Interview Transcript

The Incredible Squirrel: Um, hi there.

Orange Malamute: Hi can you hear me?

The Incredible Squirrel: Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Orange Malamute: I can hear you. I apologise for running a few minutes late.

The Incredible Squirrel: No worries.

Orange Malamute: How are you doing?

The Incredible Squirrel: I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Orange Malamute: Good thank you.

The Incredible Squirrel: So, before we start this practice interview, I wanted to ask you a few questions, just to make sure that I ask it gives you the right kind of interview preparation. Is that okay?

The Incredible Squirrel: Yeah, sure.

Orange Malamute: Is this the first time that you're using interviewing.io?

The Incredible Squirrel: No, I've already had like, three previous sessions yeah.

Orange Malamute: Cool. What job position and experience level are you interviewing for?

The Incredible Squirrel: So I recently graduated with a degree in computer science, and I'm looking for my first in software engineering position.

Orange Malamute: Great. Have you had any interviews so far?

The Incredible Squirrel: I've done online assessments and phone screenings. But I haven't had a real interview yet.

The Incredible Squirrel: An online retailer is releasing a new feature...

Orange Malamute: Exactly yep...

Interview coding continues...

Conclusion

Instructions for Final Submission: