Amazon Software Engineer interview questions

An external recruiting consultant put me in touch with the company and suggested 2 positions that matched my profile. I had phone conversations both with the recruiting consultant and with the actual Amazon recruiter. The questions were generic about the kind of work I was doing and why I wanted to leave, why I was interested in Amazon, if I needed a work permit, etc. Then I had a first technical interview via phone with a dev from outside the hiring teams. Apart from questions about Java, she asked me to code some graphics algorithm - to display a certain pattern on the screen. I found it funny that I had to write the code on paper and read it out loud, for her to write it down !? (Maybe these days they have some form of shared editable document such as collabedit). The second technical phone interview asked questions related to the position applied for, trying to assess if I had the right background and if I was familiar with the problem domain. We finished with some OO design - I was asked to design the elevator system for a building. Finally, I had 2 on-site interviews, with the teams I was interested in. In both cases I had discussions with the hiring manager about the specific charge of the team and the current/future projects and plans. The 1:1 interviews with the devs were not directly related to the team's area (with the exception of one request to design a "Subscriber - Broker - Publisher" architecture (a) running on a machine; (b) running on a cluster) but rather design and implementation of "real" (or realistic) problems (resolve a puzzle; analyze the patterns usage of a parking area; find contradictions in a person's set of statements about a drag race). So the problems were very practical and required some design, as well as implementation or sketching of an algorithms, rather than "textbook problems" such as traversing a tree or reversing a linked list. The place looked quite frugal (the desks were cheap wooden desks) and chaotic (I was told that each team decides what language and environment to use, and what versioning system.