I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2012
Interview
I initially gave my resume to Amazon during a career fair during which they took me aside and asked me a to write a simple program with pen and paper while standing beside their stand.
Two weeks later I was contacted and told I had been selected for an on-campus interview. During the interview I was asked some technical questions and told that if I was selected to move-on I'd be contacted as to schedule another interview the following day.
Sure enough I was contacted and had the next interview scheduled for the next day. I'd say the first interviewer was friendly, helpful, and definitely helped me relax unlike the second interviewer.
The guy came to pick me up in the lobby a full 10min late; he didn't bother with small talk and straight-up ignored my "how are you?". He then proceeded to present me with a problem and before he was done explaining the details of what he wanted his cellphone began ringing, and, he picked up.
He then excused himself from the closed cubicle the interview was being held-in and I might have overheard a "sorry I'll be right back". So here I am standing in front of a puzzle who's full definition I have yet to hear and only 35 out of the 45min left because the guy was late. Might I add at this point that he was not behind schedule as my position whilst waiting in the lobby allowed me to see the previous candidate exit the cubicle well on time. A minute later he comes back in and complains to me of how bad the reception is "down here" to which I respond that he might want to step outside of the suite to get a better signal, which he does.
At this point I'm really frustrated and trying to start working on the problem while not even having it's entire definition. Finally he comes back and explains to me that the phone call was from another candidate that seemed to have had troubles finding his way to the building. Seriously!? Why didn't the guy just plan ahead..... well, it didn't matter. I was the one directly suffering from another candidate's incompetency.
In the end I solved the problem and whilst checking my solution he pointed out that he was surprised of a particular aspect of my solution and that he would've solved it doing that particular thing differently; to which I point out that his solution was less space-efficient than mine whilst having the same time complexity. At this point I think I offended him and tried backing out of my statement telling him how his solution probably was better as it was less complex and allowed for more clarity, which is important I pointed out. He then went on a rent about how new hires at amazon recently all had bad coding habits....
As a final note, on top of all this, the guy kept burping. His burps had a disgusting smell, he acted like nothing happened every-time and me, seating right beside him had the utter pleasure of finding out what he had ate for lunch.
He ended the interview (on-time, i.e. I only got 35min - the phone call attempts) and told me that I'd be contacted for either a third-interview the next day or that I'd be sent out to seattle.
I overall had a bad experience with amazon and I am very disappointed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions weren't hard.
A slightly tricky one was: given a sorted array that's been circularily shifted an unknown number of time, return the index of the smallest element.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.
First round is just leet code coding which screens through AI before going into live coding. Pretty simple and straighforward. Not too tough. Recruiter walks through it pretty nicely. Not sure how many rounds there are exactly
After submitting my application for the Software Engineer position, I received an invitation to complete an automated Online Assessment (OA). The assessment consisted of standard coding challenges, primarily focusing on algorithmic and data structure problems. Unfortunately, a few days after submitting my solutions for the assessment, I received an email informing me that I would not be moving forward in the interview process and was rejected.