u/captainrushingin

Disclaimer : Please do not ask me about my interview experience or roadmap or any other thing unrelated to the question I've asked.

Last month I went through 2 rounds of Interview for AMAZON SDE 2, one round was LLD and second round was DSA. DSA Problem was hard, I came up with some weird brute force solution and could not optimize it. I spend entire time on one DSA problem only so I knew I had bombed it.
And as expected I never heard back for 3rd and 4th Round.

Last week I received another OA from Amazon which I just completed.
First Section was DSA and 2nd Section was AI Assisted Codebase debugging and then the typical workstyle assessments.
I solved both coding questions completely. 15/15 test cases passed in 1st question and 6/6 Unit Tests passed in 2nd Question. I had chosen SpringBoot as the backend.

What i'm not sure is am I really under a cooldown period ?
And is this common receiving OA within the expected cooldown window ?

I am pretty sure I did very well in this new Online Assessment so what are the chances of getting another interview opportunity at Amazon ?

Last month I went through 2 rounds of Interview for AMAZON SDE 2, one round was LLD and second round was DSA. DSA Problem was hard, I came up with some weird brute force solution and could not optimize it. I spend entire time on one DSA problem only so I knew I had bombed it.
And as expected I never heard back for 3rd and 4th Round.

Last week I received another OA from Amazon which I just completed.
First Section was DSA and 2nd Section was AI Assisted Codebase debugging and then the typical workstyle assessments.
I solved both coding questions completely. 15/15 test cases passed in 1st question and 6/6 Unit Tests passed in 2nd Question. I had chosen SpringBoot as the backend.

What i'm not sure is am I really under a cooldown period ?
And is this common receiving OA within the expected cooldown window ?

I am pretty sure I did very well in this new Online Assessment so what are the chances of getting another interview opportunity at Amazon ?

Disclaimer : Please do not ask me about my interview experience or roadmap or any other thing unrelated to the question I've asked.

Last month I went through 2 rounds of Interview for AMAZON SDE 2, one round was LLD and second round was DSA. DSA Problem was hard, I came up with some weird brute force solution and could not optimize it. I spend entire time on one DSA problem only so I knew I had bombed it.
And as expected I never heard back for 3rd and 4th Round.

Last week I received another OA from Amazon which I just completed.
First Section was DSA and 2nd Section was AI Assisted Codebase debugging and then the typical workstyle assessments.
I solved both coding questions completely. 15/15 test cases passed in 1st question and 6/6 Unit Tests passed in 2nd Question. I had chosen SpringBoot as the backend.

What i'm not sure is am I really under a cooldown period ?
And is this common receiving OA within the expected cooldown window ?

I am pretty sure I did very well in this new Online Assessment so what are the chances of getting another interview opportunity at Amazon ?

Last month I only went through 2 rounds of interview which was DSA and LLD and never heard back for 3rd and 4th Round.
Now I don’t know if cooling period is applicable on me or not but just in case it is, then shall I create a different candidate profile by changing only my contact details ?
Will it work ?

Also I received another OA yesterday, Is it common to receive OA after you have already interviewed previously ?

Last month I only went through 2 rounds of interview which was DSA and LLD and never heard back for 3rd and 4th Round.
Now I don’t know if cooling period is applicable on me or not but just in case it is, then shall I create a different candidate profile by changing only my contact details ?
Will it work ?

Also I received another OA yesterday, Is it common to receive OA after you have already interviewed previously ?

Last month I only went through 2 rounds of interview which was DSA and LLD and never heard back for 3rd and 4th Round.
Now I don’t know if cooling period is applicable on me or not but just in case it is, then shall I create a different candidate profile by changing only my contact details ?
Will it work ?

Also I received another OA yesterday, Is it common to receive OA after you have already interviewed previously ?

why is it that posts in this reddit are more about random unrelated stuff than InterviewMan software itself ?

As the title says, I gave up on honesty and bought interviewman.
Prepared my ass off for BigTech interviews. I prepared for a year and been interviewing since 1.5 years now and nothing materialized.

When I finally cleared the loop at one of the financial banks they went into hiring freeze and blocked my offer. Now they want me to interview again for same team and same position. Which is a big risk for me because any random question can lead to rejection for me.
Before this I interviewed for the notorious rain forest company, I was confident that i'll clear the DSA round but I was asked a random DSA which ended my loop and now i'm serving a cool off period which ends next year.

That round became the metaphorical straw that broke the back. I failed for 1.5 years straight and I always thought my hard work will be rewarded in due time but the last Rainforest interview broke me completely and I realised no matter how much I grind, there will always be a random question which will end up ruining my chances.
I didn't want to lose one more year to this interviewing madness so I decided to level the playing field by having InterviewMan by my side.

I haven't gotten an opportunity to test it as I just bought it today, but I hope InterviewMan gets me the results that have eluded me so far.

Earlier I could apply to atmost 50 applications, and just now I couldn't apply anymore as I got an error stating "Cannot have more than 10 active applications".
I currently have 20 active applications. This is so not done man.

This feels like a kick in the nuts 😰

Till February I used to get so many chances at microsoft as I had so many active applications. and now chances are drastically reduced.

Disclaimer : Please do not DM me or comment here asking about Interview experience because i'm not going to respond to those. I've queries of my own which I need answered. If you can't answer them then kindly do not engage.
For interview questions, i've already answered to one of the comments and I won't elaborate any more than that because there's honestly not much I can mention.

I may sound bitter, that's because i'm currently bitter. Market has been extremely rough and i've been trying for more than a year while I see everyone else getting in with half my effort.

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I had applied for an SDE 2 opening at Bangalore

I was invited for 2 rounds of interviews on same day last week.
First was LLD, second was DSA. This was on 11th June.

I bombed the DSA round completely. Just 1 question was asked and I couldn't solve it. Somehow managed a brute force solution and that's it, interviewer asked for optimization and I gave up because I didn't know and there was no time. Terrible Luck.

LLD i'd say I did well, met all primary requirements in LLD round. But i'd not be so sure as i'm having a genuinely terrible luck. From the interviewer's perspective I may not have done well at all.

So my feedback could be either of the follwing cases:

• LLD : Inclined, DSA : Not Inclined
• LLD : Not Inclined, DSA : Not Inclined

While I am not expecting any callback for 3rd and 4th round, but I still expect a closure.

I have received no feedback, no update. I'm in a kind of limbo. The recruiter doesn't respond at all.

What I do want to know is will the cooling period period be applicable on me ? and for how long ?

I feel like I should start applying from separate email id, but is that worth the effort ?

I had applied for an SDE 2 opening at Bangalore

I was invited for 2 rounds of interviews on same day last week.
First was LLD, second was HLD. This was on 11th June.

I bombed the DSA round completely. Just 1 question was asked and I couldn't solve it. Somehow managed a brute force solution and that's it, interviewer asked for optimization and I gave up because I didn't know and there was no time. Terrible Luck.

LLD i'd say I did well, met all primary requirements in LLD round. But i'd not be so sure as i'm having a genuinely terrible luck. From the interviewer's perspective I may not have done well at all.

So my feedback could be either of the follwing cases:

• LLD : Inclined, DSA : Not Inclined
• LLD : Not Inclined, DSA : Not Inclined

While I am not expecting any callback for 3rd and 4th round, but I still expect a closure.

I have received no feedback, no update. I'm in a kind of limbo. The recruiter doesn't respond at all.

What I do want to know is will the cooling period period be applicable on me ? and for how long ?

I feel like I should start applying from separate email id, but is that worth the effort ?

I had 2 rounds of interviews yesterday.

Round 1 DSA

This round left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

The interviewer asked [this]([https://leetcode.com/problems/largest-palindromic-number/] . It wasn't a problem I had seen before, and I was completely blank initially. I spent the interview working through the problem and eventually came up with a brute-force solution. I explained my reasoning, walked through examples, and validated the approach with a dry run.

The interviewer acknowledged that the logic made sense, but then asked me to optimize it further.

At that point, I had already spent most of the interview arriving at the brute-force solution. I genuinely could not see the optimized approach and I admitted that I couldn't optimize it further.

We then moved on to Leadership Principles questions, but mentally the interview was already over for me.

What frustrates me the most is that I had prepared extensively for this opportunity. I had solved hundreds of LeetCode problems, covered the commonly recommended DSA SHEETS along with last 6 months question.

I won't pretend otherwise, I am really angry about this round.

This Interviewer only has 4 YOE, some 2022 graduate. I found his leetcode profile and he has only 213 problems solved. He had posted his interview experience on Linkedin and some well known problems were asked to him which can be found in any DSA sheet. He had it easy and he thinks it was okay to rob me off my opportunity.

Round 2 LLD

Probably the better round, was asked to design an Auction System.
I'd say I was able to meet all the primary requirements that were laid out. No complaints here.
This round ended with another Leadership Principle question.

Conclusion

I'm fairly certain the DSA round will prevent me from moving forward to the remaining rounds. Hence i've rejected myself already even though I haven't heard a response since yesterday.

What makes this rejection particularly painful is that it comes after a very long period of effort. I've been interviewing for around 1.5 years. I have solved more than 570 LeetCode problems. I've studied System Design, LLD, DSA, and behavioral preparation. I've had opportunities where I successfully cleared interviews, only to lose them later because of hiring freeze.

That's why this one hurts.

I genuinely believed I had prepared well for Amazon. I had covered NeetCode, Striver A2Z, company-specific questions, and spent countless hours practicing. I wasn't expecting an easy interview, but I did hope for a fair opportunity to move forward, Instead, I walked away feeling that one interviewer and one difficult problem ended up negating my entire effort.

I'm really displeased with the DSA interviewer, it is because of him that I have to suffer through a 1 year cool off period now. He really had it easy, he was asked Course Schedule 2 and Number of Islands 2, both of which can be found in any standard DSA sheet. He could have done the same thing, ask something from the standard sheets, but no, he had to be creative. Easy for him to do because his career is not on the line, but this opportunity meant a lot to me.

Its not easy, grinding away for 2 years only to have these opportunites taken away because some covid graduate decided to ask some random problem for fun.

https://preview.redd.it/xu28tz3s6u6h1.png?width=1700&format=png&auto=webp&s=b2a28cfe40f80941ffdfda33b89f10010114b809

I have been working extremely hard towards getting a decent job opportunity. I started interviewing in Jan 2025 and 6 months have already passed in 2026 and I am still struggling a lot. Luck is not on my side. I finally cleared all rounds of a decent company in March 2026 but that organization freezed hiring before I received my offer. After that I again cleared rounds at another company but they cancelled the position and again I got nothing.

When I do well, I don't get the offer due to reasons beyond my control, otherwise I just keep on getting rejected everywhere. Its extremely hard for me to maintain my sanity now because it looks like god is punishing me for some reason. I see my peers getting ahead with least amount of effort, but for me nothing is really going my way. I have worked really hard, I have prayed and yet i'm being punished.

https://preview.redd.it/xctsaed0ms6h1.png?width=1700&format=png&auto=webp&s=b72835ab9839ce05ec495e95bb1f5db5d02edae1

I have been working extremely hard towards getting a decent job opportunity. I started interviewing in Jan 2025 and 6 months have already passed in 2026 and I am still struggling a lot. Luck is not on my side. I finally cleared all rounds of a decent company in March 2026 but that organization freezed hiring before I received my offer. After that I again cleared rounds at another company but they cancelled the position and again I got nothing.

When I do well, I don't get the offer due to reasons beyond my control, otherwise I just keep on getting rejected everywhere. Its extremely hard for me to maintain my sanity now because it looks like god is punishing me for some reason. I see my peers getting ahead with least amount of effort, but for me nothing is really going my way. I have worked really hard, I have prayed and yet i'm being punished.

I had applied to Amazon SDE 2 positions all In India.

I cleared Amazon SDE 2 online assessment and this was during February ending. 2-3 days later Recruiter asked for availablity on 5th and 6th March.
I requested for Mid march dates as I was traveling during first week. The recruiter didn't respond at all. All communication was over email and I never received any communication back.

I had applied to lots of SDE 2 openings and neither on Assessment or even on Recruiter's availability email there was any specific Job ID mentioned.

All the jobs that I had applied to at that time are now in archive. and I have now applied to fresh SDE 2 jobs.

I'm not exactly sure if I'm under a cooling period or not given that all previous jobs I had applied to closed out without having interviewed for them.

All I know is that my OA scores are still valid in case there's no cool down on my application.

Am I in a cooldown period ?

I did withdraw from some old application to make way for fresh applications.

If I unknowingly withdrew application for the job for which I received the OA, will I go into a cooling period ?
I just withdrew one old application as the status on that was "We are no longer accepting applications for this but your profile is still there...." something like this

Will I get a callback for the fresh set of jobs I have applied to ?

I cleared Amazon SDE 2 online assessment and this was during February ending. 2-3 days later Recruiter asked for availablity on 5th and 6th March.
I requested for Mid march dates as I was traveling during first week. The recruiter didn't respond at all. All communication was over email and I never received any communication back.

I had applied to lots of SDE 2 openings and neither on Assessment or even on Recruiter's availability email there was any specific Job ID mentioned.

All the jobs that I had applied to at that time are now in archive. and I have now applied to fresh SDE 2 jobs.

I'm not exactly sure if I'm under a cooling period or not given that all previous jobs I had applied to closed out without having interviewed for them.

All I know is that my OA scores are still valid in case there's no cool down on my application.

Am I in a cooldown period ?

I did withdraw from some old application to make way for fresh applications.

If I unknowingly withdrew application for the job for which I received the OA, will I go into a cooling period ?
I just withdrew one old application as the status on that was "We are no longer accepting applications for this but your profile is still there...." something like this

Will I get a callback for the fresh set of jobs I have applied to ?

Exactly a month after I wrote this post I received verbal offer from Morgan Stanley.
They made me wait a month for the offer letter and went into hiring freeze and I ended up receving nothing.
A month later I received callback from Visa, cleared tech rounds and reached Hiring Manager round. On the day of the interview HM didn't join the call, interview got cancelled and I was rejected without even getting a chance to interview.
I am back to zero and honestly I don't know where else I can apply. I get rarrely shortlisted. I'm cursed by sweatshop companies on my resume and I'm desperate to wipe out that name.
My career is stagnated heavily. I want to move forward but no one seems to give me a chance. My luck itself betrays me. I see everyone else around me getting offers but not me, even though I have given my everything to prepare and move further in life.

I apply daily at every new opening that I see and I have been doing it since June last year.
I apply to SWE 3 java roles.
I have never been shortlisted ever, I see rejection mails daily.
I've sent DMs to recruiters on LinkedIn, i've tried referrals but nothing works.

So what's the catch here ?