In an unexpected but very welcomed turn of events, I was offered a role as an associate Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services’ office over at their Arlington, VA headquarters. This is within their Tech U program, which lasts for approximately a year.
On a Fateful Day
On August 30, I got a message from a coworker at my barista job, and she asked if I could cover her shift that Sunday. I told her yes, eventually, since I had nothing else planned for that day. About thirty minutes later, an AWS recruiter on LinkedIn messaged me. A campus recruiter—alright!
She forwarded me a position on Amazon’s job website for a role within this new grad program and despite having no professional experience with any of the tools listed, and just a little bit from school, I decided to apply. It wouldn’t hurt. I’ve had about a hundred companies reject or ghost me about my job application. I wouldn’t feel anything.
However, it looked like they were keen on hiring people early, and fast. I moved onto their online assessment part, which frankly, I did not prepare for, since I didn’t know how technical the questions would get. Some of them stumped me, but I tried my best to “logic” my way through it. After being satisfied with how much faith I had in passing the assessment, I clicked submit. That was on the 31st of August. I got an email the following Tuesday that I’d be moving on.
I was expecting a phone screen, but I suppose everyone was just moved along quickly. On the 5th of September, I hopped on an interview prep call. An Amazonian interview is well-known for its focus on the company’s leadership principles, so they emphasized those, as well as having enough breadth, depth, and the ability to speak simply about technical topics.
I ran into a small problem though. Their availabilities for hosting the final interview rounds were limited, and for their November start date, all of them seemed to need to be completed within September. I was going to be out for a week that month. I could either do it a week from that interview prep call or do it the final week.
So naturally, you would think that you should prepare for weeks for a big interview like this. No. I chose to do it the Thursday after that call, just seven days away. I would grow too anxious if I waited until the final week, and perhaps miss my chance if I didn’t do it early on. I had work on Friday mornings so I couldn’t do it on any of their Friday slots.
Preparation
Honestly, it was a lot of Googling the leadership principles and what questions were commonly asked. I reflected on every single experience I’ve had since I was in high school, which involved yearbook, my Percy Meets ArcheAge blog, and jobs within food service. Since the Solutions Architect role was customer facing, I was absolutely confident that all of that would suffice. It was difficult at times trying to align a certain event with a question or principle, but in the end, I got a nice list of events.
For technical questions, I actually copy-pasted the list of topics given in the interview prep email into ChatGPT and asked it to give me “medium-level” difficulty questions for me to try and answer. After ruminating on those, and those on the blog posts on AWS’s website tagged with Tech U, I did my best to keep those in mind. To put it broadly, they involve all the components that make up a distributed system, as those translate into the cloud.
And for the Interview?
I felt like vomiting before I started. Anxiety made me tremble and I couldn’t eat anything.
It was a series of four people, one hour each. Each asked about different leadership principles and slightly different topics for the technical portion. But as I yapped tremendously, I felt my body put at ease. They weren’t intimidating. They were people I could potentially work with. With that in mind, I progressed more comfortably and confidently.
I thought they all went well. When they handed me the microphone for questions, it felt like a genuine conversation instead of an interview. I liked getting to know about them. That might’ve been the big thing: getting to know them as a person.
Unexpected Results
I did the interview on September 12, from 11am to 3:30pm. I had a half hour break after the first two people.
Around 10am on the day after, after some small talk with a customer, I told him that I had a tough interview with AWS and he told me if the people I interviewed with seemed to like me, then I should have no doubt whether or not I passed or not. I thanked him, but I still was skeptical.
I got a call around noon.
There were two calls; I missed the first one since my phone was on mute since I was working. I saw a voicemail and listened to it, and realized it was another person from HR that wanted to chat with me about my interview results, and she had a positive tone. It couldn’t be, right?
I asked my boss if I could step outside the store for a couple minutes to chat. I felt overwhelmed: the group I interviewed with loved chatting with me and the recruiter was willing to extend a job offer. Jumping for joy, literally. I was hopping by the benches at the mall, in full barista uniform, including the apron.
She sent the offer letter in an email and man, that salary was incomprehensible to me (in a good way). It was more than I made my whole time I worked in food service.
Next Steps
The shock still hasn’t left me. And sometimes when I hop on the new hire preboarding calls, I ask myself, “How did I get in? What am I even doing here?” since everyone had internships or technical professional experience under their belt. I know I shouldn’t assume that’s the same for everyone, since not everyone that got in joined the call.
Side note: I had doubts whether or not I could get in, so I looked for Tech U people on LinkedIn. I saw one person that had background in mostly food service, and it was their job prior to starting Tech U. I thought to myself, “well, if they got in, so can I!”.
It’s a strange coincidence, though. Both of my manuscripts, Saviors and Konvert, involve the narrator being whisked away into an entirely new environment almost on a whim since opportunity crossed them; they were there at the right place and the right time.
Is that the same for me?
A couple new preboarding tasks popped up today for me so I’ll have to finish those soon.
I start in November, so that’s only a month away. I’m excited to learn a lot, and meet tons of new people.
Prepping for Work
I’ve bought some of Stephane Maarek’s courses for the Solutions Architect, Associate exam. As this program’s going to build the skills to become one, it’d be good to study for that exam too.
What I found odd was that the account I usually used with Udemy did not work. It was one with a custom domain I originally purchased through Google, it wouldn’t let me log in. I’ll look back at it later, but since these courses I just bought aren’t the ones that I purchased previously, I didn’t think it was too big of a deal.
I’ll be looking over the material in there and then hopping back onto the AWS console to try the things out myself. I picked up a copy of Designing Data-Intensive Applications as I thought it would be a good supplement to more about distributed systems.
There’s so much change as I step forward, and at times, I don’t know what I’m doing or where exactly I’m headed, but there’s fun in that. I’m absolutely grateful for this opportunity, and I will keep you all updated as I begin my professional journey within the tech field.
