# I Took Amazon’s SDE II OA After 2 Weeks of Prep — Here’s How It Went

# **The Prep Phase**

I hadn’t touched any serious LeetCode-style prep until **a recruiter reached out about 3 weeks ago** with the Amazon OA. The last time I studied Data Structures and Algorithms seriously was back in **2016**, during my CS undergrad — second year, some foggy lectures, and probably a lot of “this’ll never be useful in real life” vibes. Fast-forward to 2025, and boom — time to rekindle that long-lost romance with Recursion, DFS, and their chaotic friends.

Once I got the OA invite, I did what any rational human would do:  
**Panic slightly. Then full send into LeetCode.**

For two straight weeks, I went full try-hard mode. Woke up early, brewed an aggressively large coffee, and started knocking out the Blind-75 list. Covered all the hot topics: Priority Queues, BFS/DFS, Trees, Graphs, Greedy, HashMaps, DP, Sliding Window. It was like boot camp, but for brain cells.

I even started seeing LeetCode problems in real life.  
“Find the optimal seat in this bus” — classic greedy problem.  
“Why is this checkout line moving faster?” — sliding window optimization.  
“Why is my brain melting?” — probably recursion with no base case.

I felt… *prepared-ish*.  
But deep down, I knew — **this is Amazon. This isn’t a chill walk through a tree traversal. This is LeetCode Extreme Edition**

# **The Online Assessment**

\*\*Q1. Search-style Optimization Problem  
\*\*It looked familiar — classic Min-Max search range thing, just like [Koko Eating Bananas](https://leetcode.com/problems/koko-eating-bananas/)… Except this Koko was armed and hostile.

\*\*Q2. Binary Search + Sliding Window  
\*\*You know the kind of problem that **looks medium**, maybe even friendly at first… Then turns around and \*\*roundhouse kicks you in the face?  
\*\*It turned out to be a **hard-level** combo of **Binary Search + Sliding Window** — the kind of tag team you’d usually expect to see deep in a LeetCode Hard dungeon, not casually tossed into an OA.

\*\*System Design, Working Style Survey & LPs Section  
\*\*A much-needed breather. No code, just multiple-choice questions about system design, collaboration, ownership, and leadership.  
Honestly? Felt like I crushed this part. I mean, I do work well with others… especially if they bring snacks.

# **The Aftermath**

The assessment didn’t go well.  
Was it humbling? Yep.  
Was it also super educational? **Absolutely.**  
Amazon’s OA isn’t just about solving problems — it’s about solving them fast, accurately, and without any fluff. No IDE-level debugging, no mercy; just you, a blinking cursor, and a clock ticking down.

**Brutal**

But here’s the thing:  
I **learned a ton**.  
My **DSA instincts have improved dramatically**.  
Time pressure turns even simple problems into psychological warfare.  
The OA isn’t the goal. It’s just a checkpoint in a longer journey.  
And surprisingly, I’ve started to **genuinely enjoy the process**.

This wasn’t a loss — it was a **training arc**.  
(Okay, maybe a loss, but one with XP gain.)

This isn’t a failure story. It’s just a **progress checkpoint**.  
We move.

Amazon, let’s reconnect after 6 months.