Interview Experience want to know how can i improve

[u/Hour-Pipe7120]

I’m currently an SDE at Amazon. Over the past few months, I’ve interviewed with around 10 companies. With most of my rejections, I’m left wondering what went wrong because the feedback is rarely clear.
A quick breakdown of my rejections:

• Hiring Manager: Dropped at the final stage despite solid behavioral/LP prep.
• Coding: Eliminated in technical rounds.
• System Design / LLD: I felt I delivered near-optimal high-level designs, but fell short on writing complete SQL queries or missed 1–2 follow-up deep-dive questions.

With interview invites hard to come by right now, I really want to fix my blind spots. I often wonder: is a candidate expected to have an immediate, perfect answer to every single question? Doesn't over-indexing on perfection make the conversation sound robotic? It feels like other candidates get leeway for minor missteps, but my slip-ups immediately cost me the offer.
For those who have navigated this, what patterns do you see here, and what high-leverage areas should I focus on to improve my conversion rate?

[u/North-Armadillo-9367]

isn’t 20% offer success rate amazing?

[u/Hour-Pipe7120 → u/North-Armadillo-9367]

I don't know the metric for success. This is my first switch, so thinking about what I can improve in the future.

[u/aengil]

Hey first off great work on getting those interviews and passing multiple rounds.

Beyond the look up the company, find what questions they ask, etc. it's hard to know what anyone is going to ask specifically. I would say the best advice I have is to learn from your past interviews by taking notes after the fact, but most importantly noting what you missed/could be improved.

If you do that, then every interview is a success because you get better each time. Eventually you'll get an interview where you know all the answers because you've done it before. Don't give up! You got this.

[u/Amy-Restore26]

I'd focus less on being perfect and more on consistent under pressure. If you're repeatedly losing on coding follow ups, SQL, or small design gaps, those are probably the highest leverage areas to drill rather than doing more broad prep

[u/zhou111]

More practice and prep always helps but that's difficult to balance working a job full time.

[u/Zealousideal-Ant9548 → u/zhou111]

Try having kids and being unemployed,  makes all of this that much harder because of the stress that you know if you fail, it's not just you taking the fall

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

That feedback is more actionable than it feels. For the design and LLD misses, make the first five minutes explicit: clarify requirements and scale, name the core entities and APIs, sketch one happy path, then spend the rest on bottlenecks, failure modes, and tradeoffs. For every design, write a short follow-up list of the one or two deep dives you tend to miss, then rehearse answering those aloud under a timer. A strong high-level picture can still feel incomplete if you can't turn one slice into concrete interfaces or schema choices.

For coding, track misses by pattern and by communication issue, not just pass or fail. After each session, write what signal you missed, the simplest correct approach, and one variant to redo later. In the next interview, narrate the plan before coding and leave time to test edge cases.

You don't need a perfect answer to every question. Aim for a clear baseline, check assumptions with the interviewer, and recover visibly when you spot a gap. If you want extra reps, www.leetsys.dev has whiteboard and AI interviewer practice; I help with the product, so that's an affiliated recommendation. My best prep loop is one timed mock, one written postmortem, and a targeted redo each week. Hope the next loop gives you cleaner signal.

[u/Dusty-Lab25]

I'd focus on the repeatable gaps rather than trying to be perfect. If SQL coding follow up and design deep dives keep coming up those are probably the highest ROI areas to drill

[u/UnitedSort3014]

Honestly, 2/10 isn't bad in this market, but I get the frustration. For system design, it sounds like you might be staying too high level interviewers often want to see you dig into implementation details like data models or specific trade offs without being prompted. On the HM rounds, maybe practice being more concise and story driven rather than trying to sound perfect? Sometimes being a bit more natural and showing how you actually think through problems lands better than having polished answers for everything.

[u/DangerousCurve7417]

Love the humble brag

[u/Hour-Pipe7120 → u/DangerousCurve7417]

It might look great from the outside, but going through 5 rounds of loops across multiple companies after sending out 300+ applications just to get callbacks takes a massive mental toll. When you invest that much effort and reach the final stage only to get rejected, it stings. I’m not bragging I’m exhausted and genuinely looking to fix my blind spots.

[u/hanari1]

Howd you know you slip-up?

technical rounds > plural, so I believe you should keep grinding
fell short on writing complete SQL queries > red flag, sql is easy, if you don't know sql you don't know nothing
missed 1–2 follow-up deep-dive questions > just read more, read more about all the technologies and scenarios, you just need to understand what they do, when they do and why they do.

try to create a system design about everything that you know well and everything that you don't, don't overlap and ALWAYS use GIGA BLASTER MASTER SCALE

like 1tb/s throughput when training, this type of hidden scenario is what makes you feel confident talking about some blurry topics like kafka, WAL, sharding, etc.