I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Jun 2012
Interview
Recruiter reached me with a schedule in a weekend for f2f interview. I think around 20 candidates were there. Had 4 rounds of technical discussions in a day. Each took 45minutes to 1hour. Mostly targeted with 2 major questions per round. If you totally mess up in one round, don't worry you might get another round as a chance.
Think in broad way. Avoid brute-force approach and give the best solution u think in the beginning itself. If you think about multiple efficient solutions explain all of them briefly. And explain the complexities (time/space).
Practice writing code in a paper. Interviewers will need it for reference and they'll take notes during your interview (they might be typing while you explain). You can ask them to stop it if it disturbs you. Its easy if you practice data structures and algorithms.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
You have a list of sentences/words. How to find out the sub list that consists of a specific prefix?
Ex:
input: prefix="he", list = ["hello", "world", "hello world", "hey dude", "galaxy"....]
output: ["hello", "hello world", "hey dude"]
Imagine a sequence like this: a, b, c...z, aa, ab, ac...zz, aaa, aab, aac.... aax, aaz, aba, abc... (Its same as excel column names).
Given an integer (n), generate n-th string from the above sequence.
Ps: Don't generate the full list of sequence till n. It'll be definitely bad approach :)
Design a system and API that should support 50 instances of custom designed Queue. Basically the question is about how you'll make use the given block of memory, to achieve the above requirement.
How would you design a "recommended products for you" module of amazon.com. Design a zoo.
Find whether the strings in a file are anagrams
Write a program to check whether a binary tree is a binary search tree
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jun 2012
Interview
I found the position and applied through my school's online job board. Was contacted a few weeks later to schedule a phone interview. First interview was pretty straight forward, they give a little intro and go straight to the technical questions, pretty simple data structures and run time questions. 2nd interview was asked to design a class. Received formal rejection few days later. Both interviewers were very nice and gave hints when stuck. Good experience.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Velur) in Jul 2012
Interview
It was in-campus recruitment. Initially there was an online round consisting of 20 multiple choice questions and 2 programming questions. The MCQs were mix of aptitude and technical.
17 students were shortlisted, out of which top 5 scorers advanced to interview round. The others had further technical round and one of the questions was on doubly linked list. It was an elimination round and those who passed, joined the top 5 for interview.
The interview was mostly technical (no HR interview) and there was one interviewer in each interview round. Questions were asked related to project work we have done in the past(as mentioned in resume). Besides, we had to write code (on A4 sheets) regarding trees and lots of question on time-complexity.
No. of interviews varied from student to student. I had two.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The question on finding time-complexity of a recursive function was the hardest.