I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2012
Interview
Once my resume was @ amazon I was asked to choose 4 dates for phone interview. The interview was scheduled 7 days later. And I was instructed to go over basic computer science material. I read all glassdoor interview questions and got the hang of it.
The interview was by phone with a “none native English speaker” from Seattle, it was very hard to understand what he was saying during the interview. I had to login to an online code editor to write my code answers.
The interviewer asked me 1 question: how to validate a binary tree. I validated the tree using the min/max solution, but then the interviewer wanted a clean answer with no min/max. So I did it again, but then interviewer wanted a none balanced tree validation. So I did it again, but I was so frustrated that it took me a while to accomplish this simple task.
All n all the interview took no more than 30 minutes. Not including the 5 minutes in the beginning to see if the online code editor was alive and to ask me about my past (with no real interest to hear the answer, it sounded like the interviewer was obligated to do so).
After 4 hours I got an email stating they have decided to go with other candidates.
The only thing that’s bothered me is that I was asked only 1 question. I have more than 12 years’ experience and still was asked only 1 question. I replied to HR with this issue and never got an answer. I even asked the interviewer at the end of the interview whether he has any other questions for me, but he replied “no, just the tree”.
Well, great for you amazon. This is way not the way to conduct an interview. I really don’t care about the job since I am employed but still this is very frustrating interview. But then again, this is the same guy I’ll have to work with if I did got the job :)
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
