The "culture fit" interview process focuses on leadership principles, so lots of questions like " tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer". Being yourself will get you nowhere, you need to research the questions and the script that is expected of you.
> What service does your team work on?
I'm a partner-focused SA, so not a developer and not aligned to a particular service.
In my experience, they also give the toughest programming questions. It is a lot of prep overall.
Now I work at one of the slightly more sane FANMAG (to include $ms) companies.
Pretty sure I dodged a bullet, maybe the engineering manager spared me because he liked me more than I realized.
Maybe the service teams are less heavy on LPs due to not being customer-facing?
No offer, recruiter emphasized that they were halving the “cool off” period for me (so I could interview again soon), and maybe they do this for everyone, but it’s clear there was one interview making the difference here. Interesting that this is apparently a common problem.
So, when I used the example of designing and starting to build the replacement e-mail system for ASML for literally zero additional cost [0], I pointed them at the URL for the Invited Talk that I gave based on that work. And when I used the example of when I broke all e-mail across the entire Internet, I pointed them at the URL for the article that was published in The Register. When I talked about what I had learned about Chef and DevOps, I pointed them at the invited talk I gave in Edinburgh entitled "From zero to cloud in 90 days" and the accompanying tutorial I taught called "Just enough Ruby for Chef". And so on.
I really feel that having the URLs to backstop my stories helped me sail through that part of the interview.
In my case, I wasn't being hired as an SDE, so there wasn't much programming tests they wanted me to take -- one of their senior developers did connect me to a shared coding platform, which we really just used as a shared whiteboard. He asked me some questions on how I would solve some problems, and I used my 30+ years of experience with Bourne shell and bash to show him stupid first order solutions to those problems and then we talked about what some of the second and third order solutions might be.
The longer I work at AWS, the more convinced I am that everything depends on the people you're working with. There are good teams and bad teams. There are good managers and bad managers. And if you can find a good team with good managers, then you're golden.
In this respect, I don't think AWS is materially different from any other employer I've known.
[0] They had already bought all the hardware, including some stuff I scavenged from a closet where they had been sitting new-in-the-box for a couple of years; the OS was covered under their site license; all the application software was open source; and my time was free because I was already there under another contract)
What gets me is that every recruiter who reaches out (hundreds by now I estimate) wants me to complete their timed coding test to qualify to interview again.
I found Google’s interview process comparatively much more respectful (although more demanding), and have been happy working there instead.
Is "SA" systems admin here?
Broadly though it is a pre-sales role to help people get started, followed by ongoing guidance as the customer iterates (this is the part which often turns into free support).
Speaking of the research, the recruiters email you the principals and specifically mention to you to review them and to consider them during the interview process. They even send you a document about the STAR method of interviewing to help you have a smoother interview. To me as a guy from Baltimore who doesn't know anything half the people here do. I don't think the interview process could have been smoother.
