By Maryam Iman Binti Norhashimi
GOMBAK, 10 September 2020: A webinar held by the Center of Excellence for Cybersecurity (CoExCyS) on Facebook to discuss what it takes to pursue a career in a unicorn company like Amazon and how Computer Science builds it all up, was really insightful.
Among the panels invited were IIUM alumni from KICT who already had experiences working with huge companies like Amazon and Grab – Zarir Abdullah, Amirul Ashraf and Sohieb Ibrahim.
Zarir Abdullah (an Amazon Vancouver employee) said that working in an established company such as Amazon takes one to work with smarter people and get along with the bounding process. He added that it is a good opportunity to grab and learn important things from many experienced people there.
œI think the biggest perks of working with such big companies are that you get to see how they manage such software at such scale and how they manage it for the scale of thousands of engineers, said Amirul Ashraf who is now serving for the Amazon London.
To be part of this remarkably extensive company, even as an intern, gives a big impact to many people, said Sohieb Ibrahim who was previously an intern at Grab.
The three of them provided a walk-through of their journey to working with Amazon.
Zarir Abdullah said that each company has its way of hiring their people. It is best to align all the interviews side by side so that we only need to prepare once but can attend all the interviews at the same time.
Amirul Ashraf also mentioned that the interview for Amazon is usually held in one day.
A useful tip from Sohieb Ibrahim, that it is much of a help if we have a connection with the seniors who can guide and command us for such interviews.
How to stand out and be prepared for the interviews?
According to Amirul Ashraf, employers tend to look at those who have experience working with other similar companies with high traffic and heavy workload such as Google, Facebook etc. Nevertheless, the three of them highlighted that the most important requirement for them to pass the interview is leadership skills.
œNegotiation skill is crucial in convincing your team members when running a project together. Even if your point is wrong, you should push yourself farther, added Zarir. On the other hand, Amirul stated that what we discuss today is going to be a planet-scale deployment.
Meanwhile, Sohieb has a unique way of preparing himself for the interview. He practised solving problem questions daily so that he would not have to prepare himself when the time comes. Hence, there shall be ample time to prepare for Amazons leadership principle.
How to start?
- Improve your programming skills
- Think in computer science way “ master all the core courses; database, operating system etc.
- Be able to learn from many sources to strengthen your foundation in computer science
- Learn to think structurally and be a critical thinker
- Think about how things build up from scratch
What to improve in our classroom session?
- Lecturers to provide the students with a strong foundation of computer science and not only learn from any particular tools.
- Learn how the basic construct works in terms of learning languages.
- Lecturers to introduce projects earlier.
- Implement the most important concepts learned in the classroom into project-based activities.
- Every course to highlight the real purpose of learning the courses.
- Provide more practical projects within the course rather than writing reports, to improve the efficiency of learning.
- Build and introduce something from scratch such as reading codes on daily basis.
- Lecturers to teach how functional programme works.
Overall, it was a very neat webinar to look upon especially for those who are seeking to be interns and employees under such exceptional companies.
Computer science students are very much welcomed to attempt this opportunity because it is never a waste of time and energy to strive to be worthy of things we dream of being.***