I posted my resume on Monster.com and one of the recruiters contacted me for a Senior Software Design Engineering position. I've been working in software design industry for a few years and I had prior college internship experience as well. I didn't need the job, but I thought it would be interesting to interview. My skillset is primarily front end web technologies and Java. I proceeded to glassdoor.com to discover what the interview process. After reading numerous postings, I saw that Amazon.com works you like a dog and its just not a fun experience, so I had my doubts going into the interview. Reading online, I discovered that Amazon.com has some of the hardest interviews in the world. So I coded up answers to some of the questions to give myself a refresher in algorithms and the skillset they are looking for. My first round interview ask me some basics of Javascript and Java and then the rest of the interview (30 -40 mins) focused on a single design question. The interviewer was pleasant and steered me in the correct direction so I could answer it properly. This question was about designing a movie services system that involved front end, middleware, and backend technologies. Specifically, they wanted to know how I would implement it and store the data in the backend and some GUI choices up front. This interviewed last for an 1 hour and 15 minutes. Overall, I enjoyed this interview. They contacted me two days later and set up a second interview for the following week. The second interview was given by someone who clearly had no interest in my joining the company. I think his involvement was more along the lines of his manager saying 'Hey, go interview this guy and see if we want to bring him in' and the employee groaning all the way to the phone. I could hear him typing the responses into a computer after he asked me questions verbatim from his computer screen. He asked questions like 'Why did you contact Amazon.com about this position?' when they clearly contacted me. This guy had no clue. This interview was completely technical. As I proceeded to answer questions about binary search trees and maps, the interviewer would ask me the run time performance of the algorithms I presented him. Not only was this something I don't do on a daily basis, its something you spend lots of time on in the field tweaking for good performance. He also asked some other questions about palindrome reversal and finding a 3 page sequence for a particular user by parsing a log file. Overall, I was able to answer about 60% of the questions he asked and the others I had good idea how to answer but when pressed for time I couldn't come up with them. This interview lasted 40 mins. A few days later, I was informed Amazon.com was looking to pursue other candidates of the position. The second interview is a clear indication that Amazon.com just wants code junkies and they are not looking for the overall person. In my organization, I'm one of the most valued software engineers. Do not waste your time interviewing, there are better companies.