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.
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2010
Interview
First, I get contact with Amazon recruiter and then followed by two phone interviews which lasted for 1 hr of each. On-site interview took place two weeks later after phone interview, which lasts for a whole day, seeing 6 employers in 5 groups (there were two Amanzonians forming a single group). Each group took 1-hr meeting, asking for technical and non-technical questions.
Questions include algorithms, design patterns, behavior questions, brain teasers.
You are given 3 chances to drop a non-biased dice (with number from 1-6). You can stop earlier, but the number of final drop is the money you can get. Give a strategy to maximize the money you can get.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in May 2010
Interview
I uploaded my resume on their website and got an email within a week to schedule an interview. Due to personal reasons, I had to reschedule a couple of times. Then on the day of the interview, I got a call exactly at the scheduled time. Interview was fine, but the interviewer was not clear with the questions himself. This got me a bit irritated.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2010
Interview
Was called by Amazon's recruiter after she had seen my resume on a jobs site. Set up a phone interview 4 days later.
The hiring manager was friendly and polite. Wanted to help me out. But I screwed up the interview. After reading the reviews here, these were very simple questions, but I'm not too good in algorithms and am afraid that my extensive experience in OO design and architecture gets short shifted in this type of an interview. I expect that people with strong Math background would do really well.
Anyway the questions asked were
1. Write the program to return a list of specified prime numbers.
2. Given two strings, determine if the two words are anagrams.
3. Compute the Big O of the solution.
Now, at least the first two seem simple (even if using just a brute-force algorithm), but while doing this on the phone with syntactically correct code, it was not easy.
I have about 20 years of enterprise application development. I think perhaps they need to have different type of phone interviews based on the background. But I guess it's one way to evaluate the thought process and given that this is Amazon, I guess algorithmic efficiency is probably in line with the scale.
Note that though I have selected that this was a difficult interview, it's primarily my own inadequacy in dealing with algorithmic questions.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write the program to return a list of specified prime numbers.