I had 5 sessions (60 minutes each) conducted on Amazon Chime.

My first session focused solely on Leadership Principles. The interviewer was very kind and professional, similar to the second interviewer who presented me with the first coding question.

The first 10-15 minutes of the second session also focused on Leadership Principles. The coding question was challenging and fun; the interviewer gave me helpful hints to optimize my original solution. In fact, this was my favorite session of the day.

The third session, after a 60-minute break, also involved a coding question with a similar structure to the second. However, the atmosphere was almost the opposite of the second interview. The relatively young SDE was not as kind or helpful. His behavioral questions were extremely vague, and he sounded irritated when I asked him to clarify. During the coding session, which I was told would be interactive, I spoke alone for most of the time, receiving no hints or comments. I managed to arrive at a working solution, but I missed some edge cases, which I corrected after the interviewer gave me a non-conventional input example. My overall experience for this session was quite disappointing, as I had hoped for a fun and engaging session. At one point, the interviewer sounded like he was speaking away from his laptop. He was the only interviewer whose camera was off (perhaps there was a reason). I could go on, but I think my energy levels dropped after this.

Now, for the fourth session, I had a very experienced interviewer accompanied by a shadow. They were both very welcoming and professional. The interviewer asked a few LP questions for about 20 minutes, and then we tackled a system design question. I believe this was my weakest performance of all the technical sessions. I found myself spending time on less important details and ran out of time before we could reach the core aspects of the system. My biggest mistake, I think, was trying to follow system design guidelines I had read online rather than approaching the problem using common sense. Regardless, this session was fun, challenging, and engaging as expected, and I learned a lot from the interviewer.

After a 30-minute break, I had my final session with the hiring manager. My experience in this session was neutral. While it wasn't as bad as the third session, it sounded like the interviewer just wanted to type my answers as quickly as possible and finish. Most of the time, he would hijack my answers and summarize them in his own way. I'm not sure if this is normal practice, but to me, it felt like he wasn't there primarily to listen. At one point, someone brought him food during the interview, and he almost started eating. I am not claiming this had any effect on the pacing of the interview, but...

Why did I fail? (Well, my guess is:)

• My answers to Leadership Principle questions were shambolic?
• My performance in the third interview wasn't 100%? I didn't consider the edge cases or mention the space-time complexity of my solution?
• My system design approach let me down?

Obviously, I'll never know the true reasons, because all you get from the recruiter is that you didn't make it.

Anyway, I really cherished this experience, especially the preparation stage. I do not regret spending hours preparing and going through 5 interviews in one day. Will I do it again? Well, time will tell (but it's highly unlikely!). I learned many things that I still need to learn as a developer, and my perspective on writing efficient code has completely changed. If anyone is planning to go through this process, I would advise you to give system design preparation as much time as you give to algorithms and data structures. Perhaps spend 75% of your time on these two and 25% on finding good examples or stories where you demonstrated leadership principles.

The majority of the questions, approximately 70%, were behavioral questions linked to the Leadership Principles. For example, "Tell me about a time you refused to lower your standards."