Amazon Discover: Spring Insight Participant Review

Every day there were sessions with people that work at Amazon giving us advice about the application process, telling us about their daily life here. We also had sessions presenting the diversity of Amazon and the values respected there. We also had technical workshops with our mentors (we were divided into groups of 6-8 people each having a mentor). We debated ideas for various coding problems, debugging existent code, have a good understanding of existing code and took into consideration ways of improving it.

My problem solving skills improved since I had to analyse quite complex problems in a limited time and then to discuss my ideas. I can also affirm that my communication and pair programming skills increased as well. I learnt how to pay better attention to details and see a problem from different perspective. Working in pairs also allowed me to be more flexible and dead with situations that can occur to the job in reality.

All the speakers that showed up in the 3 days event came with the story of their journey in Amazon. It helped us to have a better understanding of how to choose the positions that suits us the most. It was explained how to be a successful applicant and, even more important that this, we were told what are the company's role values and what matters the most for the internal policy. With this experience, it was a great opportunity to learn about the roles available

Amazon is a very diverse company that values everyone's cultural background. You can easily find your place in such a diverse team. It is really good that teams are diverse because in this way everyone can come with different approaches thanks to their different backgrounds, so, more ideas can be built. This inclusive atmosphere is beneficial for both employees and the company: the company can see more approaches of the same idea picking the best ones and everyone feels included and seen

These 3 days were really helpful for my future career because I have seen in reality how it feels to be part of a big and diverse team. Everyone was friendly and supportive and the mentor was kind and came up with really good explanations for the problems provided. It was enjoyable to be able to affirm myself and to express my ideas openly and to debate other ways of approaching everything that I had in mind.

Yes

Everyone interested into a big and diverse company should apply to Amazon. I would recommend them to pay attention to the large group events, to listen to the speakers and learn from their experiences and also to be involved in the mentoring groups. They should try to approach all the problems provided by the mentors and ask for clarifications if they do not fully understand the requirements. It is important to interact with their colleagues as well