I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2013
Interview
Some HR questions about my problem solution abilities. A few questions about my background and CV. The interviewer got the idea that I am not as technical as he would wanted, so he ended the interview after 30 minutes into it. I guess I became insecure about my skills and did not get the offer.
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2014
Interview
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter in a mass email, with a schedule to sign up for an interview on campus. I had the interview about 5 days later. Two back-to-back 45 minute interviews with just an Amazonian and I (in adjacent rooms, another student and I just swapped places. First one was pretty relaxed, talked about data structures, what he did at Amazon, he asked me a couple simple fast questions typical of a intro CS class exam, and an OO design question. Next person asked me a long question that took me about 40 minutes to complete, and we talked a bit about what she did.
I had another offer deadline imminent, so they got back to me with an offer on that Monday (the interview was Friday). Very fast and surprisingly simple process, I'm still surprised that there was really only one (kind of two) interviews. Good experience!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Finding out if there is a palindrome inside of a string I think? It's been a while, but I hadn't seen it before and the interviewer helped me out a bit.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
One screening interview and then 3 back to back technical interviews. The screening was done by a seemingly fresh developer who didn't understand some of my answers, so i had to give him another basic algorithm. The technical interviews discussed my resume (thank goodness somebody cares about prior experience), had a graph problem that is solved by BFS, and finally there was a question that was much more complicated than the person asking it realized. Overall, I was frustrated by the level of preparedness of my interviewers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A question about finding anomalies in a stream of data. I couldn't code an answer because I could think of so many ways the data stream can gradually deviate from its expected distribution. The interviewer ended up giving me the algorithm and I coded it then showed him how it is not a general solution. During my though process I asked for clarification question that he wasn't prepared to answer.