I am glad to share that I have joined Amazon as an Intern.

In this article, I will share my first FAANG(MAANG) Interview Experience, so my resume was shortlisted after applying to Amazon through campus placements.

OA Assessment(Online Round): The first was an OA round conducted on the Cocubes platform

• The test contained five sections, each containing 5 MCQ questions, out of which there was one coding section with one question that had severe test cases. The other four sections had MCQ questions on DBMS, Networking, DSA, and Basics Computing Skills.
• I still remember the coding question well, and it was to convert infix to postfix. I attempted the question in Java.

On-Call Tech Round (First Telephonic Round): In this round, the interviewer introduced himself, and then he asked me to introduce myself. He asked a few questions about my project. He then asked politely if we could start with the interview. He gave me two questions (Medium and Easy Level). This round lasted 45 minutes. The first question he asked was to swap linked list nodes.

1. They were given a linked list and two keys, swapping nodes for two given keys. The nodes should be swapped by changing links. — Swap Linked List on GfG. I went on with the brute force approach and solved the question by explaining each step. The interviewer then asked me to optimize it using a single loop, and I could do that. I solved this question and interacted with the interviewer explaining to him which approach I was using in each step.
2. The second question asked was: To check if a string is rearranged can it form a palindrome or not. As the interviewer was running a bit late, he asked me to describe the approach I’d use to solve this question.

Behavioral and OS+Networking Round (LAST ROUND): So the interviewer was the best!! She was very polite. The interview started with her introducing herself, and then she asked me to introduce myself. The interview began with behavioral questions, and this depends on your answers. Make sure you go through the Amazon company policies before the round.

After the behavioral round, she said, let’s start with the technical part. The round lasted one hour, and the questions asked were mainly from Networking and OS.

A few questions asked were:

1. What are the HTTP and the HTTPS protocol?
2. What is the DNS?
3. What is the TCP protocol?
4. What is a thread in OS?
5. What is a process? What are the different states of a process?
6. What is the difference between paging and segmentation?

After the interview, She asked if I had any questions. I asked how was her experience in Amazon as a Support Engineer?

I got my offer letter after ten days of the last round.

At last, guys, I want to share that if you don’t have 500+ leetcode problems, you cannot crack a FAANG interview — that is so not true!!. It does not give any security to solve these many questions if you are not doing the questions yourself. Practicing 150+ questions are enough. If you set a target, let’s say you want to ace Google Interview, there are many sources from where you can avail of free leetcode premium, and there are the questions with company tags. Just practice those questions. When you solve leetcode, it means you have good knowledge about the basics of the DSA in whichever language you prefer. Practicing easy tag questions which will not be asked in the interviews is just for you!

So please don’t go around people who say if you want to ace these interviews, you should solve 500+ questions. That is not true. Practice questions for yourself; don’t only go after tags and stars!

I am planning free placement guidance for the students in need, and I want to help students without monetary support. I don’t wish to use any youtube channel to get any revenue; I will help them over Google Meets, Zoom calls, or even live linked-in sessions. I want more developers to come forward and help me give free education to needy students. We should realize that getting good placement support should not depend on what our parents have.

Remember: Education should not be about Money.

Please reach out to me @rubleen16@gmail.com or at my LinkedIn — https://linkedin.com/in/rubleenkaur2201.

My Amazon Internship Interview Experience was originally published in InterviewNoodle on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have been given a classic problem to solve the Reverse Linked List Problem.
I will be solving this solution using the concept of recursion.
I have prepared a section at the end of this article which defines what all is necessary to know before leaping in with the solution of this problem.
#recursion #linkedlist #leetcodesolution

Question : Given the head of a singly linked list, reverse the list, and return the reversed list.

Example 1:

Input: head = [1,2,3,4,5]
Output: [5,4,3,2,1]

Example 2:

Input: head = [1,2]
Output: [2,1]

Example 3:

Input: head = []
Output: []

Constraints:

• The number of nodes in the list is the range [0, 5000].
• -5000 <= Node.val <= 5000

Approach :

So Let’s talk about the proper apporach we will be using to solve this question.

We will be considering the base case as when head is null or when head’s next is null.
Then we will be stroring the next node(second node in the linkedlist) in a new variable and setting the value of head’s next to null.
After doing this we will simply call the recusrive function through a new ListNode variable left(nodes which are left) which would be used to call the reverseString and pass the next node(second node as the head). At the end our function would simply return left(left nodes).

I hope the approach was clear and it is understood.

Solution in Java Language :

The time complexity of this solution is : O(n)
It is not the only approach we have for this particular solution.

A few things you should know before moving on with the solution to understand the concept better :

1. What are Linked List in Java ?
   → Linked List are designed to give better performance when you insert or delete elements from the middle of the collection.
   Linked List is a data structure which is used for storing collections of data. A linked list has the
   following properties:
   ● Successive elements are connected by pointers.
   ● Can grow or shrink in size during the execution of a program.
   ● Can be made just as long as required (until systems memory exhausts).
   ● Does not waste memory space (but takes some extra memory for pointers). It
   allocates memory as the list grows.
2. What is Recursion?
   → Recursion is one of the most important topic in programming whether you want to go for Competitive Programming or you just want to crack Company Interviews you will always be in need of this concept.
   So an easy explanation of Recursion is :
   Recursion is a process in which a function calls itself.
   now that won’t be an answer your interviewer is hoping from you.
   A more professional defination of Recursion is,
   Recursion is a concept in computer programming in which the answer of the problem relies on the subproblem of the question also, the process is repeated until a desired condition is met(base case).

I have started practising for my interviews on Leetcode and thought of sharing each problem and the approach i use for solving them through these blogs.

The first problem I chose is Valid Mountain Array and is an easy problem as compared to the one’s i’ve come across on leetcode.Each and every problem has an algorithmic approach one needs to understand before moving ahead with coding the solution.

The problem we are going to discuss is

VALID MOUNTAIN ARRAY

Given an array of integers arr, return true if and only if it is a valid mountain array.

Recall that arr is a mountain array if and only if:

• arr.length >= 3
• There exists some i with 0 < i < arr.length - 1 such that:
• arr[0] < arr[1] < ... < arr[i - 1] < arr[i]
• arr[i] > arr[i + 1] > ... > arr[arr.length - 1]

Approch :

I solved it using two variables which were used to check the given conditions.

Do go through the above images to get a detailed approach and alogirthm how the problem was solved.

SOLUTION IN JAVA :

I hope the solution was easy to understand !If you still have any doubts feel free to reach out to me at Linkedin! I am attaching my linkedin id below, connect or follow to support and asks your doubts there !
Happy Coding! 🐱‍💻

Connect and Follow on Linkedin and Github to show support !

JIGSAWMINDZ

How it all started?

One fine afternoon I received a call from Rutuja as she was onboarding campus representatives for a technical community, I was visiting a religious place so I couldn’t talk to her at that time and told her that I’ll give her a callback.

After an hour as I reached home I got a call from Kabir Singh — well the name got me and I thought let’s give this a try and have some exposure.

The foundation!

After a month as a campus ambassador in a technical community, I, Rutuja, and Kabir build a really good bond with each other and went on with the idea to make our own community which would help the audience to grow in both technical and non-technical aspects.

Coming up with the name

We were really out of ideas when it came to deciding names for our community and simply went with Kabir's idea to name it JIGSAWMINDZ.

Currently

After 6 months we are at 5500+ Youtube Subscribers and around 2500 followers on Linkedin.
We had great banger sessions on different technical subjects.
I mentored around 13000 students and had an opportunity to help students learn to code the C++ language.

So I registered for local hack day and was really curious about how it will go.
The first day was really happening, I was in a guild called Programmers Universal Group and the lead was Pulkit Singh, it only had a few members who were active and participating in the Local Hack Day.

While I was regular in attending daily events, I came across Sashrika Kaur’s stream and got introduced to the famous BLAHAJGANG. I’ve been competing and submitting my projects on time since then being a happy and lucky participant of the BLAHAJGANG.

Adam and Jack have been really helpful in making me feel welcome in the guild. I’m happy to share that I am at Position 37 on Day 4 with a total of 59 points.
I learned many new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Ruby on Rails, how to use a weather API in a project, and created a mobile application using Flutter.
Currently, I’m working on my guild’s website and will host it by Saturday!
Happy Coding guys!