I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Walmart in May 2012
Interview
@WalmartLabs hosted a recruiting event for onsite interviews in downtown Seattle.
Prior to the onsite interview, I had one phone interview for about an hour. It was a typical phone interview; the interviewer asked some coding questions for the string manipulation, design questions for singleton (with threading) and so on. It was a standard phone interview.
After that, I was invited to the onsite interview with 5 different engineers. @Labs invited all interviewees to a social event to show what they have been up to, the challenges they are facing and some possible approaches. Better yet, I got to meet with interviewers, so the experience would be like a breeze.
The onsite interview was also a standard one. From what I discussed with other candidates, our first three questions were the same, and the rest were up to the interviewers (so it seemed). I was asked for questions like LRU(design/implement) and so on with some design questions and math/probability. From my experience, it's very similar to Amazon interview with less design question (perhaps that's because many interviewers were from Amazon).
Couple of days later I received a phone call from the recruiter about the result. They needed to do a "bar-raiser" (yes, the term is borrowed from Amazon if you know what it is) before extending the offer. I complied accordingly and received an offer couple days after that. The offer negotiation was, well, you know how the offer negotiation would be. I had other opportunities from other companies at the time, but @Labs eventually gave me an offer I can't refuse.
Overall, I think the experience was positive. I wasn't as interested before the social event and just wanted to hear them out. "Walmart?" Right? I am a software engineer all my career, and I am not going to wear the blue vest and code. After the social event, I was impressed with the ambition and the determination that Walmart has to put in to turn their e-commerce around. I mean, you've read Amazon couple times in my comments (the recruiting event happened in Seattle, go figure..), and Walmart surely is trying really hard to catch up with Amazon. I found people I talked to, no matter during the social event or the actual interview, are genuinely passion about what they do, and they believe they can make some changes.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
What's singleton? How to design a singleton class with multi-threaded access?
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Walmart in Aug 2011
Interview
I just had a initial phone screen. The HR person called me but he had set of questions to ask me...I answered 2 questions wrong...which were pretty basic....my bad !! But what pissed me off was, the interviewer was expecting exactly same answers as he had...which was silly....coz when he asked a conceptual kind of ques, you can frame it in ur own way, though the underlying basis would be same.......at the end of the interview, he went on to say that they hire only bright & excellent ppl..which was very rude.......walmart ppl indeed have very low standard communication skills.......
sry...this is meant to only technical division ppl.....or specifically to HR of that division...
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
how to do measure ur software efficiency? I said time complexity and memory efficiency. He told me he was looking for algos and data structures ! Can you believe it he actually told me that.......Thank god I'm not right fit for them !