I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2013
Interview
I had applied several times through Amazon's career page but never heard back using that method. I obtained a recruiter's Amazon email through my University's career adviser and sent out an email explaining my love for Amazon as a company, and genuine desire to be a part of the expanding giant. I heard back two days later, was quickly invited to two back-to-back 45-minute phone interviews scheduled one week after I had first sent out the email.
This all just happened today. Will update as I move along in the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The interviews were very technically oriented thankfully. There were no behavioral questions besides the usual: "Why do you want to work with Amazon?"
I was given only one problem in every interview, which surprisingly takes the greater part of the interview to solve. We communicated using CollabEdit.com.
Question Number 1:
//Write a method which takes an array input and returns true if the sum of any two elements is equal to the sum of the corresponding indices.
// Concretely if for an array the sum of values at any two indices i and j is equal to the sum of i and j.
Question Number 2:
// Write a method to reverse a linked list.
// State any assumptions and write any classes/structs that you will need.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2013
Interview
I was contacted after an employee referral to schedule a phone interview. Two back-to-back 45-minute long technical interviews were conducted. The interview started off with a couple of behavioral questions, and then moved on to verbal questions to gauge my understanding of algorithms and data structures. Some code-writing was done through a collaborative online editor. Received the offer about a week later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a function to tell whether a BST is balanced
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2013
Interview
I met the recruiter at a college job fair. They flew me out for day-long interview. You worked in groups of 3, and the programming task had 3 parts to it, so each person picked a part. The parts were conceptually related, so teamwork was a benefit (bouncing ideas off each other), but in the end your code is your own; you could use any language you want (independent of team members). Halfway through the day there was a 30 minute session where you were expected to walk through your algorithm design choices and code with 2 of the proctors.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
"What would be a disadvantage to using recursion in this case?"