A recruiter reached out to me via email but would only speak to me after I completed the online assessment (OA). The OA consisted of a coding piece and a workstyle simulation.

The coding piece had two LeetCode-style questions: one medium and one hard. The workstyle simulation was straightforward.

I passed the OA well enough to be moved directly to the final onsite, which consisted of four interviews over five hours. Each interview had a technical half and a behavioral half.

• Three of the technical interviews were coding (with syntax highlighting, but no code execution).
• One technical interview was system design.

One interviewer didn't like my behavioral answers and proceeded to undercut every approach I took to the coding question, resulting in me not getting any code down in the allotted time.

I had a total of four points of contact from HR, which was quite messy. My main recruiter was exceedingly disorganized. She sent me novels regarding how to prep for the onsite, but much of the information she provided was inaccurate or outdated.

For example, Amazon recently added two new leadership principles, which were covered in a module on the jobs site but not in the PDFs sent to me by my recruiter. Additionally, she initially described the onsite technical interviews as though all four were going to be system design with no coding. I had to correct her on this, as that didn't seem to make any sense.

Give me an example of a time when you tried to accomplish something and failed.