Amazon Discover: Spring Insight Participant Review

Day 1: Intro to Amazon and Q&A, Panel: day in the life of a Software Development Engineer and technical workshops (including coding exercises to improve efficiency of code) Day 2: Overview of recruitment with interview and Amazon online assessment workshop, soft skills workshop, interviewer panel, Q&A with recruiters and interviewers and technical workshops (debugging and algorithms) Day 3: Technical workshops (including pair programming), Panel: Amazon culture and affinity groups, mentoring program and internship application process

Learn a variety of skills which include: - developed and enhanced existing coding skills - learnt the importance of testing code as you go along when writing code (i.e. unit tests, integration tests) - went through debugging exercises and the different kinds of bugs that a program can have - graph traversal algorithms that can improve the efficiency of the code, and make a real difference and impact to the computation speed - the use of cache as a way to store the most frequently used data - pair programming

The insight program focused on the role of a software development engineer at Amazon. This included discovering tasks they do in their day to day life, and also what skills are required to do well in such a role. It also included sessions on Amazon's culture and affinity groups, as well as an overview of Amazon, thus allowing me to learn more about the company and its values. I learn about the importance of the leadership principles and how it is essential in any of the roles at Amazon.

General atmosphere was welcoming and inclusive. Diversity is an important part of a company, and Amazon showed this. Amazon incorporates a diverse and international community, where people from all around the world can share their ideas to learn from each other, and improve each other's skills. Technical workshops were inclusive, everyone had the opportunity to talk and share ideas with each other to find solutions to problems that are discussed with the mentor during those workshops.

Overall I enjoyed the insight experience since it included all the aspects that I was interested to learn about Amazon, including its culture, its principles and values, diversity, and problem solving to make an impact. Customer obsession is key to Amazon, and this is somethig I learnt during the experience. Additionally, technical workshops were ideal to improve and build on existing coding skills, and learn other new and useful aspects of programming software and applications.

Yes

The advice I would give to students applying to Amazon include looking at their leadership principles. Everything Amazon employees do is guided by those leadership principles, for example the focus on customer obsession. Furthermore, before applying it is important to look at the culture and values at Amazon to see whether it fits theirs. Additionally, particularly for technical roles such as software development roles, it is important to have a good grasp of algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented programming.