Amazon Software Development Engineer interview questions

It was through the company's HR division that I got the phone interview call. Because of unforseen circumstances, I had to reschedule and this was done fairly quickly. I was interviewed by one of the tech leads and initially I was asked questions about projects on my resume. Following that the person asked various questions about the details of Java, such as "how is the Java garbage collection implemented?" Since I was not familiar with the implementation details of the garbage collector and only knew about the general working of it, I really couldn't answer that. Also, I was asked questions about data structures, which if you hadn't seen before, you wouldn't be able to piece together the answer anyway.

My resume was submitted via a friend to an internal recruiter with Amazon.com. The resume was then picked up by a department seeking an SDE. The department's recruiter contacted me via email to set up a phone interview, which was scheduled in short order. At the appointed time, I received a call from the interviewer who turned out to be a SDE in the department (as opposed to the hiring manager). She provided me an overview of the responsibilities of her team and then asked me to say a little about myself, which I did. Then the interview got technical. She asked me a data structures/selection algorithm question followed by an object question. After I was done with those, I had an opportunity to ask questions, which I did. The entire interview took an hour. While I get that amazon.com deals with large quantities of data and efficient evaluation of that data is necessary, I think they may be eliminating very good candidates with excellent capacity to learn (like myself, of course) by asking for answers to questions that the CODE IS ALREADY WRITTEN FOR. This is a commentary, of course on the data structure/algorithm question. Object design is a more obvious way to see how I think and approach problem solving.