Behavior Questions

The STAR format stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result:

Situation: An event, project, or challenge faced
Task: Your responsibilities and assignments for the situation
Action: Steps or procedure taken to relieve or rectify situation
Result: Results of actions taken.

Amazon leadership principles:

Leadership Principles
We use our Leadership Principles every day, whether we’re discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem. It is just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar.

Customer Obsession
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Ownership
Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

Invent and Simplify
Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Are Right, A Lot
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

Learn and Be Curious
Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

Hire and Develop the Best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

Insist on the Highest Standards
Leaders have relentlessly high standards — many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

Think Big
Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Bias for Action
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

Frugality
Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.

Earn Trust
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

Dive Deep
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

Deliver Results
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

Common questions:

Tell me about yourself/ Tell me about your background?/Introduce yourself
My name is Shiyu liu, a current graduate student in Columbia University. My main interests include full-stack development, cloud computing and big data analysis. I have a lot of experiences in web development using different technique stacks. In this summer I worked in test tools development team in huawei and developed a micro-service tesing web application using Angular and jQuery and my overall output codes are more than 2000 lines. (Job description and good fit). I believe that my previous experiences in software engineering and programming could help me succeed in this job.

Why Amazon/ Why you are interested in our company? /Why do you think you are a good fit to our company? /Why did you apply? /Why should we hire you?/What makes you the best candidate?
Firstly, amazon is one of the most impactful leading tech companies in the world. Amazon’s products are changing everyone’s daily life everyday. So it will be a great pleasure for me to join such a great company and make my small impact to the world.
Seconly, I used amazon’s products by myself, like amazon prime and AWS. They are easy to use and I always felt surprised by its creativity and innovation. I’m pretty sure that there are so many clever and creative engineers working in Amazon so that working with these smart guys would a great enjoy for me and I could also learn a lot from them.
Finally, My previous experiences have proved my stong background and ability in software development and programming. And I’m also confident that I’m a easy going and anbixious guy. THus I’m sure that I’m a good fit for the software engineer position in Amazon.

Why switching major?
In my undergraduate study, I have a lot of programming experiences in embedded system using C and C++. Those lower level programming experiences makes me love coding. My focus in columbia is electrical engineering in data driven which has a lot of chance to write web applications and mobile apps and I found they are very interesting and I really enjoy the feeling of creating my own applications. Thus I switch my direction and choose higher level programming.

Introduce one of your past project?
I’d like to introduce my project in my internship this summer. I worked in testing tools development team and our main job is to develop a micro-service testing web application for our hardware engineers. The main technique stacks we used are Angular, jQuery and Spring boot.
What I’m resiponsible for in my intern is one of the apps of our web application - test report App. Its main function is to provide the testing result report for different hradwares. The overall output code in production environment is over 2000 lines.
I also did some optimization for our web page and encapsulated some frequently used components in our angular framework.

Tell me about a time you had to deal with tight deadline and you were able/not able to meet the target? / What most challenging things in this project? /Tell me about a difficulties situation you ever meet?/ fast learing experiences/ learn something new by yourself

• I initially did backend jobs in my internship and then my supervisor wanted me to change to frontend part.
• I have no idea of Angular framework before and I have to learn fast and start to develop the web page as quickly as possible because the deadline is approaching.
• I used half-day to search for the imformation of Angular on google and blogs and I also discussed with my mentor and team members who are responsible for frontend part. They gave me many useful suggestions on how to learn angular fast and solidly. Then I decided to watch one of high-rating udemy Angular course combined with the inner quick-start documentation. When I watches the video, I’m not just watch it, I would like to type the code following the teacher and make my own notes. To speed up, I also watched and practise at night and at the weekend. On the next Monday, I told my supervisor I’m ready for doing some small features. So I started from small features to large features. When I met something I don’t know in my study and development. I would like to first to search online and also read previous code wrote by others and if I still can not solve it, I would like to share what I thought with my team members and after discussion, I can always solve the problem.
• Finally I developed the whole test report page by myself successfully and the overall code is over 2000 lines in production environment and used by many hardware engineers.

项目进展的很慢怎么办？ /队友坑，队友不contribute怎么办? /帮同事，同学分担任务的经历

• I think that happens sometimes and I do meet this situation. I will use one of my experience to show how I will solve this problem.
• In my big data analysis course work, my team members always can not finished their jobs which we have planed.
• So I firstly have a relex talk and discussion with my team members to know their reasons why they can not make a good contribution to the project, it’s because they have other deadline or they are not familiar with the topic. After talking, I know that they indeed have some other deadlines and they are not familiar with some part of their content. Secondly, I together with them made a more specific and suitable plan for us. I arranged the harder part jobs for my own because at that time I do not have other deadlines, but that did not mean I would do all the part of the project because I know it is a team project. One’s strength can never beat three’s. I also appointed to meet with them three times a week to see the update of all our work. Finally, I just try my best to do my part well and in our meeting, I would like to share my thoughts and also listen to their suggestions to revise my part. I also helped them on where they get confused woth their parts.
• We three graduatelly worked more like a team and after a final night’s job, we finished our project and get a high estimate from our professor. This is really an unforgetable memory for me.

Tell me about a project that you had failed

Tell me about a time you had conflict with your manager/peer/colleagues

• As a software engineer, I think this situation always happens. There are always some trade-offs between different solutions and it’s very normal to have conflict with team members. I think the key point here is that we are a team adn we all want to create great software for the company. So maybe choosing a relax environment and have a deep talk with whom has a conflit with me is a good choice.
• In my internship, I have confilct with my manager whether we should choose to use synchronise or asynchronise way to load resource tree. My manager is a litter busy and I did not want to waste our time. So I make a concret detailed comparation for these two solution and invite my manager to have a lunch. At a very relax environemnt, we just share out thoughts and discussed the pros and cons of different solutions.
• And after the lunch, we reached an agreement and finished that application well. We choose to use asychronised way since it is better for customer user experience.

Your strength

1. learn new things fast
2. good communication skills and a good team member. Always willing to share my thoughts with other colleagues and discuss with them. I think I can always learn from others’ ideas.
3. make plan and split large problem into small pieces

Your weakness
Compared many computer science students, My foundation may not as good as them. However, I have proved to be a fast learner and I learned a lot of Computer science courses in Columbia. Whenever I found I lack some knowledge, I would like to do a fully search and read materials and lean it.

Tell me about a time you took risk and succeed/failed

Tell me about a time you come up with a simple solution to a complex problem
Tell me about a time you come up with a new approach to an old problem

Tell me about a time you received negative feedback from your manager
Tell me about a time you made a decision without your manager’s approval
Tell me about a time you had to make a decision when there is not enough data or information
Tell me about a time you were assigned a project with unclear responsibility
Tell me about a time you had to sacrifice short term gains for the long term goals
Tell me about a time you were 50%/75% on a project and found you have made a mistake and have to change direction
Tell me about a time you came up with a solution that customer didn’t ask and they end up like it
Tell me about a time that customer tell you they want something but you know that’s not really what they want
Tell me about a time you had to convince the team/convinced by the team
Tell me about a project that you have to overcome big obstacle
Tell me about an experience that you have to earn trust/gain buy-in from another group
Tell me about a time you step outside of your job scope and solved a problem
What is your proudest/biggest innovation
How do you select metric to measure your project success
Have you ever learn something new by yourself and end up using what you learn to solve problems at work
If you have conflicting goals, how do you make trad-off
Tell me about a time you have to seek outside help to dive deep on a problem to find the solution
Tell me about a time you decided to take on a project instead of being assigned to you

Experiences

1. Huawei Intership:

   Situation:

   I worked in Huawei Technologies this summer and my team developed a micro-service testing web application for our hardware engineers and the main technique stacks are Angular and Spring boot.

Task:

The main job I did is to develop the test report module which shows the users test report for different hardwares.

Action:

The first difficulty for me here is that I have no idea of Angular framework before and I have to learn fast and start to develop the web page as quickly as possible. Thus I used half-day to search for the imformation of Angular on google and blogs and also discussed my supervisor on how to learn it quickly. Then I decided to watch one of high-rating udemy Angular course combined with the inner quick-start documentation. When I watches the video, I’m not just watch it, I would like to type the code following the teacher and make my own notes. To speed up, I also watched and practise at night and at the weekend. On the next Monday, I told my supervisor I’m ready for doing some small features. So I started from small features to large features and finally developed the whole test report page by myself.

The second difficulty for me is that for the Harware Polymorph test report page, I need to make request to Hardware Polymorph API because different polymorph of a single harware may have different test results. However, for this API, the company does not have a good documentation and colleague responsible for this interface only provide me a simple example but the usage is actually very complex. So I make a inner phone call with this colleague and discussed with him. But since this API is only one of thousands API of the hardware testing result. He can not give detailed infos. So the colleague can not give a huge help. Then I visited our old version testing website and found that this API is also used in old version. So I contact the colleague responsible for old version website and discussed with her and she told me the one who wrote this part has left the company, but maybe I can use the old version website to call API and see the backend log file. So I together with her examined and clicked the old version website and analysed relationship between log and behouvior and finally summarize the usage of this API and finally finished Polymorph test report part.

Result:

The overall code is more than 2000 and they have been deployed to our production.
Make a note for this API, give it to the colleague resipnsible for this API and also uploaded on inner blog of the company.

这个project 是你自己发掘的还是被指派的 怎么发掘的
THis projoect is assigned by my supervisor. But When I developing this test report module, I also discovered some addtional tasks. For example, when I write the share to user component of web page which can share select information to other team members, I found that this function also exists in many places in our whole application. So I discussed with my supervisor and decided to encapsulated it into huawei’s angular framework which wiil be a good benefits for future work.
过程中有哪些人参与, 他们的反应如何, 如果反应不好你怎么说服他们 他们对你的说服反应如何
除了你的解法以外 有没有想过其他解法 为什么选你这个解法
这个project 除了你提到的immediate results 以外 对公司整体的帮助是什么
The components added into the huawei’s angular framework and it helps to improve the work efficiency when someone else meet the same requierment. They can use them easily and directly.
你如何判断这个project 成功了/完成了/失败了
比较难的follow up, 叫你讲一个跟刚刚完全相反的故事 例如刚刚问你 “Tell me about a time you took risk and succeed” 就变成 “Tell me about a time you took risk and failed” 或者我遇到的 “Tell me about a time that you convinced a group to follow your idea”变成 “Tell me about a time you were convinced by the team and gave up your idea”

2. Restaurant Reservation Serverless Website.

   Situation

   This is the coursework of our cloud computing courses and our goal is to utilize AWS tools to design a serverless wev application.

   Task

   We have three team members(One for recoomendation and crawl, one for front end) and my main job is for the backend of this serverless website.

   Action

   The first dilemma I meet is we want to use many tools in AWS and the communication between them are a kind of complex. The way I solve it is to firstly draw a detailed flow chart to make it more clear. Secondly I read all the related documents of tools we want to use on the AWS and write small demos of each tools to understood their usage because some of them are not easy to learn(like API Gateway) and finally use the result of last two steps to build our application and debug.

Result

We finally design a very beatiful websites. I learned a lot from this process, like mant tools in AWS. I also learn a lot from my teammates, they are patient, smart and collaorative. We finally get A score in this course.

3. Movie Recommendation Web Application.

   Situation:

   This is the course work in our database course. Our main mission is to develop a website with relational database - postgres from scratch. Each team has two people and I collabrate with my parter for the whole project.

   Task:

   So the first step is to design the ER diagram, then turn them into realtional tables in postgres and finally develop a beautiful website to utilize the database we created.

   Action:

   The first problem we met is when we inserting our data into database, the real world data are not so optimized, our realtional databse has a lot of constrains and they may not have a good match with our table we designed. So it is very hard for us to insert the real data into our database perfectly. So we discussed and hesitate whether we should give up and just put fake data into it because the course does not reauire us to do that and the main point is to teach us how to use a relational database. But both of us did not want to give up because we hoped we can finally develop a pratical and real website but not something useless. So we continue refining our table and dataset and worked until very late and finally succeed.
   The second problem we met is that both of us do not have expereinces builing web application using falsk and jquery. We need to learn fast and finished the project in a few days. So we divide the job and I mainly focus on the backend and he focuse on frontend.

   Result:

   We finally designed a very beatiful website and get A in this course finally. TAs said they really like our web because it uses the real-world data and is a real application.