Amazon Discover Review

The first day started with an introduction to Amazon's culture and Leadership Principles and then we got into workshops to deal with problems relating to Algorithms and Data structures and Coding. On the second and final day we covered BFS and DFS as well as participated in pair programming. Then we asked a recruiter questions about the internships and we were offered a following mentoring program.

I have learned how to properly use HashMaps and their applications. I learned how to discover quick and powerful solutions to seeming complex problems. I learned how to properly work together in a paired programming environment and the ability to talk through and explain my code concisely.

It was very interesting and informative. The insight mainly discussed the software developer and systems developer roles but it taught me much about Amazon's culture, through it's Affinity Groups and it's business practices, through it's leadership principles.

The culture seems to be very welcoming and diverse. It challenges each of it's employees to constantly grow by giving them work that is above their skill level, while allowing employees to learn new skills to face those challenges. The Affinity groups have a lot of support for various minorities of different backgrounds and also has support for neurodivergent people.

I greatly enjoyed the insight, there were many problems that I haven't seen before in my studies that I was guided through by my mentor. Despite the high number of overall participates in the insight, the workshops were small enough to freely discuss the problems and our various ideas of how to go about solving them.

Yes

Study various forms of data structures and algorithms. It will help if you know the one that you will be dealing with beforehand, but if you don't you can always ask your mentor about it if you don't. I used Java in my work but in the workshops they allow you to chose from other languages. I remember JavaScript and Python where options, but there were others as well.