The Complete Interview Answer Guide Pdf Download
Floriana Grundy
Click here for the full series of Amazon interviewing related articles. In particular, I'll call out that I have a post on the Amazon technical / functional interviews, and a post on the overall Amazon interview and hiring process.
Update: 1/3/2023 - Amazon recruiters continue to send this article to candidates. I've even found recruiters at unrelated companies sending this article to perspective employees, in hopes that it will enable them to prepare for the behavioral interview process. I've had well over 100 employees now contact me, stating that this article was a major factor in being hired.
Update: 7/1/2021 - Amazon announced today that they created two new Leadership Principles. This brings the 14 leadership principles up to 16 leadership principles. The new principles document non-project related behaviors we expect from our leaders. I've updated this article to walk through these new principles.
There are plenty of web resources regarding how to pass the functional (job skills) part of interviews. In fact, when I have friends and relatives interviewing, I send them to the internet to figure out what types of questions to prepare for rather than spend my time explaining. This type of preparing is pretty straightforward. You need to be good at your job, and make certain that the functional knowledge about your job is pretty fresh in your head. Perhaps how Hashtables work, or a bit about K-means clustering.
The other half of this principle is the idea of simplification. The KISS principle is enshrined in our principles, because we all firmly believe that the simplest solution is the one you can maintain, the one you can iterate on, the cheapest one to build, and so on.
Minimal viable/lovable product is a concept firmly entrenched in how we do things, because so much about our ability to innovate, pivot, change our mind, build new things, is about doing things as simply as possible.
We like people with good instincts. But we absolutely require and love people to be open to being wrong. Right and wrong are a matter of knowing what you are trying to accomplish, what the options are, and how to compare the merit of the options. Right and wrong are never a matter of who is more senior or who talks the loudest. We need our leaders to recognize that every perspective and opinion needs to be valued. And someone disagreeing with you is wonderful. It gives you a chance to reexamine your viewpoint.
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
We strongly feel that making some decision is much better than making no decision. We assume that we hire smart people who are right a lot. We want those smart leaders to make quick decisions and move forward. You learn more from doing things and measuring rather than surveying or testing or projecting results.
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
Data based disagreements are great. We use them all the time at Amazon, and examples of when you gathered data to make an argument are great. What you have to be careful about is that people end up in the realm of disagree & disagree (instead of the commit part).
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
This is my new favorite leadership principle. Work at Amazon is focused delivery and project work. It is a fast paced culture, and emphasizes success over social cohesion. In the midst of the need to deliver value for customers, leaders at Amazon also need to focus on their co-workers. Delivering results is not the only measure of success.
It sounds like that was a stressful project timeline. How did you maintain morale on your team?
"I didn't need to worry about that. Our town doesn't have many job opportunities, so they weren't going anywhere."
We need leaders who recognize that they work with other humans. Too much of our days are spent at the office to allow that time to be unpleasant. Amazon has had articles written in the past about poor experiences employees have encountered while working at Amazon. These experiences are the results of leaders who didn't put the right emphasis on empathy in the workplace.
As a leader, you need to care about your employees. You need to care about their happiness on their team, their fulfillment in what they're doing every day, and their ability to grow their careers. By having leaders who lean in on their employees as well as maintain a high bar, Amazon can continue to build future leaders and grow.
It sounded like she was a strong leader on the team. Did you move her into management at that point?
"No, I didn't have any open management positions, and it didn't look like we were going to get any soon. I helped her update her resume, and a few months later she was able to get a position in another company as a manager. I'm thrilled for her. And I know as soon as I get an open position somewhere, she'd consider applying for the job."
Investments in people pay out in the long run. We hire leaders who mentor and manage for the long run, not just for short term success. We want people to boomerang back to Amazon when they've grown, and we want people who have left Amazon to still recommend Amazon as a great place to work. It is simply smart leadership to be a leader with empathy.
We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
Amazon has struggled over the years handling the transition from a niche software and retail company into a giant which can impact news, policy, and culture. A small technology company can change their headquarters location without attracting notice, but Amazon's choices impact whole communities. This leadership principle codifies the new situation that Amazon leaders must recognize that their choices have outsized impact, and they are responsible for that impact.
If we had a goal to increase the usage of our Kids Tablets, what might you look into?
"Most importantly, I'd be very careful. Kids technology usage is something we can support to a limited fashion, but I'd be afraid of researching ways of convincing kids to use devices more. Technology can be addictive. I think the first thing I would do is look into how we can make the time on the tablets more educational, rather than simply entertainment."
We want leaders who can look past our business goals and make certain that Amazon is doing the right thing. Doing the right thing can be particularly hard when it potentially conflicts with our calculations of what could drive business outcomes.
It is comparatively easy to drive financial success. You can explain how you could model an increase in subscriptions, and then test various changes in your product to drive increased subscriptions. It is easy to get support for a good financial model, because the math proves your point.
To display customer obsession, does the customer have to be end user or could it be internal teams using our services too? As software engineer 1/2, we don't get much involvement with end user to know/solve their pain points.
As a bar raiser at Amazon (a little googling will answer what that is if you\u2019re not aware), I\u2019ve gotten the opportunity to interview a lot of people. I\u2019ve interviewed both very senior and very junior folks. Bar raisers do interview across all job families, and I\u2019ve interviewed people for some pretty crazy positions. However, most of my interviews are for technical positions. Jobs like technical program managers, software development managers, quality engineers/managers, and of course the highest volume: software development engineers.
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