Student entrepreneur uses AI to beat Amazon interviews
By Nicolas Casey
On March 3rd, Roy Lee got an email from Columbia University. Figuring it was just another college newsletter, Roy, the creator of Interview Coder, was shocked at what he saw when he opened the latest message in his inbox. It was a notification from Columbia University’s Center for Student Success and Intervention (CSSI) that his case would be reopened following an initial Dean’s Discipline Hearing on February 17th, where he avoided potential suspension or expulsion. The Columbia College sophomore spoke with The Pennsylvania Post about the saga that has catapulted him to virality on X, caught the attention of the global media spanning from the Hindustan Times to CNBC, and raised vital questions about the viability of current paradigms surrounding digital assessments and formal education.
Roy launched Interview Coder in February: a tool designed to solve LeetCode problems, the software engineering industry’s standard in applicant technical assessment. Long the bane of computer science majors applying for entry-level positions and internships, LeetCode has been subject to a great deal of criticism for being unrelated to the day-to-day reality of programming roles, posing a substantial barrier to entering the industry, and exacting substantial tolls on the mental health of applicants, who typically spend hundreds of hours preparing for career-defining technical interview problems that last around 20 or 30 minutes.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) changed everything. Consumer facing LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude challenged the continued relevance of LeetCode interviews, as these tools persistently improve their ability to code. Leveraging this technology and the concepts he was learning in computer science courses, Roy set out to demonstrate this point, publishing a video of how he used Interview Coder to get a summer internship offer from Amazon at their headquarters in Seattle.
Two days after uploading the video to YouTube, which has since garnered over 100,000 views in a month, an Amazon executive fi
