[An applicant prepared] for an interview with Amazon, he said, by spending the better part of two weeks writing down episodes from his life that matched the company’s guiding values, known internally as leadership principles.
Does Amazon actually test for these "leadership principles" [0] for undergrad internships?
I wouldn't be surprised Amazon did have questions along those lines for its internships, but I don't get how you could spend 2 weeks on solely this portion of the interview prep unless you were procrastinating hellaciously.
I've gone through the full-job interview with Amazon recently (right as they were laying off thousands, so weird timing) so I can relate my experience.
They want you to have stories prepared for each of the principles. That's 16 anecdotes you have to prepare. They all have to follow a certain format as well: the STAR method. Situation/Task, Action, Result. You have to describe the situation and tell how it relates to the principle, what you specifically did and how it reflects the principle, and finally the results of your action.
Each anecdote needs to be about 5 to 10 minutes long. So you have to prepare roughly two hours of material total. I can see it taking two weeks.
Also some people need more practice and memorization than others. And some people are way more apt to shit talk their former coworkers, while others realize that you can frame any negative as a challenge for the future.
If you're reserving 10 hours a week to set up distinct dog-and-pony shows for, say, 10 companies, that's 1 hour per company per week, so in this case it's 2 hours to write down about 16 "leadership principles," so 7 1⁄2 minutes per principle. That's not a lot of time per se, though it's certainly wasted if you ask me.
This is what bugs me sometimes about today’s interns. It seems everybody wants to do “leadership” and is less interested in doing actual work. I guess it makes sense because the modern workplace usually rewards administrators more than people who do the work. But it’s a bad trend in my view. Too many bullshit jobs and too little doers.
Yes, just about every interview will have 1-2 star style interview questions looking for an example of one of the leadership principles. In a tech interview that might be 7-20 minutes of an hour. The non tech portions will focus on the lps more. These questions are a great way to do focused experience questions.
It's definitely harder for really junior people to have lots of examples here than someone with 5 years but I scale my expectations way down for interns. But having any experience helps. I'll take examples from anywhere. I actually find the sheltered rich kids are worse at this. Some of them can literally only list their student projects when I ask for a disagree and commit example. But if you worked retail like target or Wendy's you'll have many examples. One of my mentees put themselves through college working the alumni guilt we donations line. We got solid examples across the board in a few hours.
I do also find going and finding these examples also helps you for other job interviews as they're just your interesting experience points
Those sheltered kids spent their whole lives Disagreeing and Committing to their schooling and arts/athletics training regimen. They just didn't see it in that light.
Those would be good examples if they had them. And many do. There's many opportunities to show individual response to situations through highschool, on sports, etc. Run the bake sale, organize tshirts, etc. I just want folks who have taken ANY initiative in their lives really at the intern level. Or had ANY real world experience. Where they've come up with an idea, talked to people about it, tried it and seen the results.
But in general the expectation I have for experience that a intern will have is pretty low. Basically if they have one relevant experience they're at average. If they've done anything else they're going to ace that section.
Less experience... I'll lean more into the code. Generally take it really easy on interns as it is their first real job.
Now for the LP questions on people with 3/5/10/15 years of experience, I've had folks with 10 years of experience with literally no examples of disagree and commit. I had one who was apparently a professional yes person. They straight up told me they would be uncomfortable bringing up any issues to their bosses with any of their boss's ideas. I ended the interview early.
I was offered an Solution Architect internship at AWS after my 3rd year at uni which involed some online assessments and two interviews.
The OAs consisted of a technical quizzes and a weird "work simulator" where you had to apply the leadership principles. The interviews had a similar setup where one was focused on technical questions/experiences while the other was with a manager where I had to relate my experiences to the leadership principles.
My interview prep really only took an hour or two. They sent over some tips regarding the STAR method and leadership principles, etc. I have no idea what this person was doing for two weeks.
It did hurt to turn them down in the end as the pay + housing stipend was really good, and I would have liked to have a FAANG on the resume. However, I had already accepted an offer from a smaller company and preferred a SDE role in a potentially less stressful work environment.
Interviewed for an internship at Amazon years ago and there was a multiple choice questionairre about Amazon leadership principles/values and that was about it. The rest of the online interview was Leetcode questions.
Imo the bigger issue is that at non-target schools there isn't any mentorship or advice on what to study and why, which leads to a negative reinforcement cycle of kids at non-targets not getting an alumni network at good programs.
Comments
Does Amazon actually test for these "leadership principles" [0] for undergrad internships?
[0] https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
I wouldn't be surprised Amazon did have questions along those lines for its internships, but I don't get how you could spend 2 weeks on solely this portion of the interview prep unless you were procrastinating hellaciously.
I've gone through the full-job interview with Amazon recently (right as they were laying off thousands, so weird timing) so I can relate my experience.
They want you to have stories prepared for each of the principles. That's 16 anecdotes you have to prepare. They all have to follow a certain format as well: the STAR method. Situation/Task, Action, Result. You have to describe the situation and tell how it relates to the principle, what you specifically did and how it reflects the principle, and finally the results of your action.
Each anecdote needs to be about 5 to 10 minutes long. So you have to prepare roughly two hours of material total. I can see it taking two weeks.
Also some people need more practice and memorization than others. And some people are way more apt to shit talk their former coworkers, while others realize that you can frame any negative as a challenge for the future.
If you're reserving 10 hours a week to set up distinct dog-and-pony shows for, say, 10 companies, that's 1 hour per company per week, so in this case it's 2 hours to write down about 16 "leadership principles," so 7 1⁄2 minutes per principle. That's not a lot of time per se, though it's certainly wasted if you ask me.
This is what bugs me sometimes about today’s interns. It seems everybody wants to do “leadership” and is less interested in doing actual work. I guess it makes sense because the modern workplace usually rewards administrators more than people who do the work. But it’s a bad trend in my view. Too many bullshit jobs and too little doers.
Yes, just about every interview will have 1-2 star style interview questions looking for an example of one of the leadership principles. In a tech interview that might be 7-20 minutes of an hour. The non tech portions will focus on the lps more. These questions are a great way to do focused experience questions.
It's definitely harder for really junior people to have lots of examples here than someone with 5 years but I scale my expectations way down for interns. But having any experience helps. I'll take examples from anywhere. I actually find the sheltered rich kids are worse at this. Some of them can literally only list their student projects when I ask for a disagree and commit example. But if you worked retail like target or Wendy's you'll have many examples. One of my mentees put themselves through college working the alumni guilt we donations line. We got solid examples across the board in a few hours.
I do also find going and finding these examples also helps you for other job interviews as they're just your interesting experience points
Those sheltered kids spent their whole lives Disagreeing and Committing to their schooling and arts/athletics training regimen. They just didn't see it in that light.
Those would be good examples if they had them. And many do. There's many opportunities to show individual response to situations through highschool, on sports, etc. Run the bake sale, organize tshirts, etc. I just want folks who have taken ANY initiative in their lives really at the intern level. Or had ANY real world experience. Where they've come up with an idea, talked to people about it, tried it and seen the results.
But in general the expectation I have for experience that a intern will have is pretty low. Basically if they have one relevant experience they're at average. If they've done anything else they're going to ace that section.
Less experience... I'll lean more into the code. Generally take it really easy on interns as it is their first real job.
Now for the LP questions on people with 3/5/10/15 years of experience, I've had folks with 10 years of experience with literally no examples of disagree and commit. I had one who was apparently a professional yes person. They straight up told me they would be uncomfortable bringing up any issues to their bosses with any of their boss's ideas. I ended the interview early.
I was offered an Solution Architect internship at AWS after my 3rd year at uni which involed some online assessments and two interviews.
The OAs consisted of a technical quizzes and a weird "work simulator" where you had to apply the leadership principles. The interviews had a similar setup where one was focused on technical questions/experiences while the other was with a manager where I had to relate my experiences to the leadership principles.
My interview prep really only took an hour or two. They sent over some tips regarding the STAR method and leadership principles, etc. I have no idea what this person was doing for two weeks.
It did hurt to turn them down in the end as the pay + housing stipend was really good, and I would have liked to have a FAANG on the resume. However, I had already accepted an offer from a smaller company and preferred a SDE role in a potentially less stressful work environment.
Interviewed for an internship at Amazon years ago and there was a multiple choice questionairre about Amazon leadership principles/values and that was about it. The rest of the online interview was Leetcode questions.
Imo the bigger issue is that at non-target schools there isn't any mentorship or advice on what to study and why, which leads to a negative reinforcement cycle of kids at non-targets not getting an alumni network at good programs.
For SDE internships, no. It’s strictly coding. For non-tech they do.
I think it varies a bit on the interviewer. I've had interns who did only leet code, some that did a mix. A few actually got design questions.