I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Apr 2012
Interview
2 phone interviews + onsite. The phone interview questions were more difficult than those asked onsite. Mostly, design question were asked onsite. There is a cargo cult mentality amongst the developers which I didn't like. It was not clear how much code needs to be written on the board. One guy asked me to skip the design and dive straight to the code. Another guy asked me just to write the pseudo code.
They are in a hurry to finish the interview within 45 minutes and move on to the next candidate. In real life nobody designs a object model in 45 minutes. So, expecting candidates to finish the design within that timeslot is not just unfair. It is also useless since it doesn't tell you much about the candidate.
I am skeptical of the whole interview process and employee turnover tells me that the current interviewing style at IT companies is broken.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions are not difficult when compared with what is asked in Silicon Valley companies.
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.