amzn_82582

Maybe I was just lucky, but I interviewed with google and dropbox recently and both companies gave me laptops to type in, did not ask me once about if my code compiled, didn't comment on my style, nor did I have to perfectly know the standard library (for google, they told me to just guess at the random library functions and I also forgot some of the functions names for a set. For dropbox, one of the guys re-explained to me semaphore functions and how they worked since I forgot since it had been so long since I used them in college). I passed both.

Granted, I will give you that optimized code has definitely been important. One of those interviews even had me use a bit array (at least I think it was that) to efficiently a store a list of booleans but at least they gave me the relevant function calls to use an already implemented one.

Well, when you first start your job, you won't really know the people you are working with so I don't see how it is that much different.

Most amazon employees now use ec2 instances as their development environment so using a x1e.32xlarge with 128 vCPU's (64 cores over 4 sockets), 3,904 GiB of memory, 2 x 1,920 NVMe GB drives, and 14,000 Mbps of EBS bandwidth is possible.

Granted, I don't know anyone that uses that much and you would probably get asked by management for using a dev desktop that big but you can if you need to. I myself use just a i3.xlarge with 4 vCPU's, 30.5 or memory, Up to 10 Gigabit of EBS storage and 1 x 0.95 NVMe SSD.