I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2014
Interview
I applied online in Jan 2014. Received an email from recruiter about setting up two phone interviews, each of 45 minute length. The recruiter was supposed to send me a follow up email about which areas the questions will cover etc. but it was sent after the first interview started.
The interviews were back to back with 15 minute break between them.
The questions were purely technical and only one of the interviewers asked about why I would like to work in Amazon, I think it was more to do with starting a conversation than taking any notes from my answers.
Both interviewers for the first 10 minutes asked questions on some basic algorithms, their complexities and Maps etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions were something on the lines of,
- Given a tree, output levelwise nodes (Ans: It was actually the BFS algorithm, but I didn't realize it at that time)
- Find first unique substring (In O(n)) (Ans: Use counting sort variant)
- Convert an array into balanced binary search tree (Ans: First sort the array, then use recursive algorithm after splitting the array at mid, and using the mid as a node)
- From two arrays N and M find the combinations that add up to say X (Ans: I was drained by the time second interview started, so the only answer I came up with was of O(n2) complexity i.e. using two FOR loops)
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2014
Interview
My friend referred me, also I had applied online. I got email from HR asking for 3-4 time slots.
Then I was scheduled two back-to-back interview calls for 45-60mins duration.
Process was really nice and I liked the interviewers.
I followed Glassdoor and so far it has really been helpful (at least in this interview). Sometimes depending just on Glassdoor is not advisable, you should practice a lot because 45 minutes for a completely new problem is not sufficient.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basic data structure questions. LL, HashTable, BT
Given an array of ints, sum up all the even numbers and print it. Then return true if any number in the array is evenly divisible by 7, false otherwise.
Given a two words, write a function/method to determine if they are anagrams
Given a singly linked list, split that into two lists one containing just the elements in odd position and another containing just the elements in even position.