Hello Reader,

I have interviewed hundreds of candidates as Principal Solution Architect at AWS. I see some common mistakes candidates make that cost them the offer. But I wanted to validate my findings. So I asked some of my peers at Amazon, who have collectively taken thousands of interviews! In today's newsletter, I will share all of our top findings:

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1/ Don't commit to an interview yet
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You never thought you'd get that interview call in your dream company. But getting an interview call doesn't equate to a great interview. If you are ready, then go for it. But if you are not, then you can't wing it, and in the worst case, if you get strongly declined, you will be barred from giving another interview for one year. I told the AWS recruiter that I was not ready and asked for extra time. She agreed, and as a result, I prepared and aced my AWS interview.
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As my fav musical character, Hamilton, says, "Don't throw away your shot."
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2/ Don't ignore the STAR format - What if you give a great behavioral answer but NOT in STAR format?
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Unfortunately, Amazon (and other big tech companies) are pretty clear about this. The interviewers are expected to take notes in STAR format, and recruiters are expected to set expectations for candidates to give the answer in this format. So, candidates who answer in this STAR format will be prioritized over others who don't.
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The rules of the game are laid out; you either blame the game and sit on the sidelines or jump in and win, which is what we will do.
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3/ Practice, practice, practice - Your willingness to win must match your willingness to prepare.
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Plenty of times, when observing a mock interview, my students say, "These questions are so easy, I know all the answers." But when they are in the hot seat, they mess up the answers themselves! Learning and speaking are controlled by different brain functions, and one isn't equal to the other. In an interview, you won't get all the questions you know, but you MUST knock out the questions you know the answer to out of the park!
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4/ Delight not meet!
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Competition is fierce, and you must separate yourself from the pack. For example, if interviewer asks "How will you scale your application for big traffic day?", EVERYONE will say about autoscaling group, and load balancer. But the candidate who talks about scheduled scaling, VM hibernation, lightweight AMI, RDS proxy and other, will pull ahead. So, think about other common interview questions, and think how you can add additional nuggets of wisdom.

5/ Fighting with or arguing with the interviewer

It is fine to state a differing opinion and to politely disagree. There is no benefit to pushing this further. Sometimes, during System Design interview, when challenged on a design decision, candidate acts very defensive and get into arguing. This gets you nowhere. Interviewers are judging how you would act during a disagreement with a customer - internal and external. It's one thing to be passionate about a solution, but another to argue, especially in an interview! Keep in mind, interviewer doesn't know you. Known good performers get far more tolerance than random interview candidates

6/ Good work doesn't speak for itself! How you present matters. Let's understand this with an example:

WEAK: "I optimized our cloud application"

STRONG: "Our marketplace was losing $50K daily due to slow response times of several critical microservices. I:

• Analyzed 50+ problematic queries across 3 critical microservices
• Scaled system to handle Cyber Monday traffic by implementing RDS Read Replica, and caching (20x normal load)
• These measures reduced P95 latency by 90%
• Increased daily revenue by $100K through improved conversion
• Documented and shared optimization patterns, helping 4 other teams"

Same work. Different presentation. 10x impact.

Check out my interview with Sundas Khalid from Google on switching careers from non-tech backgrounds to big tech, whether you should be a data analyst, data engineer, or data scientist, the impact of AI on data jobs, and a fun rapid-fire question-and-answer round. Keep watching until the end of the video for the Data Analyst roadmap.

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Question to readers: Have you made any of the above mistakes (I know I have!)? And what is one mistake YOU realized after giving an interview?

If you have found this newsletter helpful, and want to support me 🙏:

Checkout my bestselling courses on AWS, System Design, Kubernetes, DevOps, and more: Max discounted links​

AWS SA Bootcamp with Live Classes, Mock Interviews, Hands-On, Resume Improvement and more: https://www.sabootcamp.com/​

Keep learning and keep rocking 🚀,

Raj