just cheated my way to a 6 fig amazon job with interview coder
I used interview coder for my amazon sde2 loop last week and I accepted the offer yesterday, base plus sign on plus rsu comes out to just over 190k total comp first year. before anyone tells me I'm ruining the industry or whatever, I don't care because I still did a lot of work and just needed that extra help, and I believe if you don't use all the ressources available you can than you're stupid.
I have 3 yoe at a mid sized fintech, decent engineer, but I am terrible at live coding interviews. I always lose my train of thought when someone is watching me type code, like I forget how a hash map works and stuff. I had already bombed meta and stripe earlier this year on questions I could easily solve in my own ide with no one watching, so when amazon came up I search for tools to help me cause I was defintely not wasting another loop.
Seen this sub a couple times and finally just bought the subscription the weekend before my loop (did the monthly one with the discount code from this sub). And the setup was stupid simple so I decided to use it, tried it in some calls with my friends to make sure that in the interview it wouldn't show. And it work, my interviewer saw exactly what I wanted them to see.
The two coding rounds were a graph problem and a variant of lru cache with a twist. I used interview coder during both of them, mostly to glance at the approach when I was mid thinking, and it helped me stay on track when I would normally start second guessing myself. I still talked through the approach, wrote the code myself, handled the follow up questions and complexity and edge cases. on the system design round I used it to sanity check my api contract before I committed to it on the whiteboard, which was also useful because I could see the tradeoffs laid out while I was explaining them.
the behavioral rounds I prepped normally with star stories and leadership principles.
amazon is running interview loops where they ask you to solve algorithmic puzzles that have almost nothing to do with the infrastructure work you are actually going to do on day one, and they are also internally pushing their own engineers to use copilot and q developer for every pr they ship. the idea that using ai assistance in the interview is some moral line while using it every day on the job is fine just does not hold up for me anymore. if companies want to test raw problem solving they can bring back in person whiteboards, until then the rules of the game are whatever gets you through the door.
if you have a loop coming up, interview coder definetly helped me, so would reccomend. just try the monthly subscription for your loop and see how it goes, thats what I did and I manageed to get the offer.
happy to answer questions about the amazon loop specifically or the setup.