Developer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 33% positive. To compare, the company-average is 63.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied through an employee referral. The process took 9 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2011
Interview
My interview process at Amazon started when I was referred by a friend who worked there. I was then contacted by the team lead who kindly took me out to coffee and a lunch to discuss the team. To further encourage me to interview, the team lead allowed me to come in for a few hours to pair program with a couple of the developers on the team and see how their agile development process worked on a typical day.
The next step was for me to do a technical phone screen. The interviewer was very nice and asked one technical question and one design question.
The last step was the day long in-house interview which consisted of two one person interviews, two pair interviews, and a lunch interview. Half of the people who interviewed me were nice and patient, making the interview a conversation more than a grilling. However, the other half definitely made it feel like more of a grilling by becoming impatient (even turning red) when I wasn't giving a good answer.
The team lead called me personally to tell me they decided not to hire me.
Overall, I have mixed impressions from this interview. I am very grateful for the personal touch of the recruiting process and the opportunity to see the team on the inside, but I was a little taken aback by the interviewers that were a bit aggressive and frustrated when I wasn't doing well on the interview questions.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
What is the difference between arrays and linked lists?
A part of developing a good search algorithm is determining how close the query terms are to one another in a document. Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between query terms in a document.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Jun 2011
Interview
1. what’s link list, array, hashtable, the difference between each other and their search/create time complexity
2. How to implement a hashtable, what if there’s some collision in hashtable?
3. coding problem: given two strings, find the duplicated characters in these two strings
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Should be very familiar with each data structure: link list, array, hash table. Know very detail about how they work.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2011
Interview
Difficult interview. Definitely be prepared with and revise all basic knowledge.
Don't be nervous and blackout. Practice phone interview with a friend.