Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 61.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2012
Interview
Got a phone interview. Basic CS questions on code optimization and a couple of quick runs through search time with big O notation. I did the online collaborative programming section in VB as that was the language for most of my programs in my course of study. Interviewer said that I was the only person he had ever seen use VB in the interview (this was said in such a way that I took it as not good). As I am a CIS major, this interview was more difficult than I anticipated because it covered more of the code optimization aspects of the discipline that are not stressed on the CIS side of the house.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the difference between an interface and an abstract class?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Boston, MA) in Dec 2011
Interview
This was a recruiting drive. I was contacted by email and asked if I wanted to participate in a recruiting drive in Boston. I had 4 hour long interviews one right after the other at a hotel. Amazon had rented out a suit of conference rooms for the event. The interviewers were pleasant, and seem to have a set of questions (or types of question) that they asked. Each interviewer seem to focus on different things. The interview process was very STAR (situation, task, action, result) oriented. Look this up in the web, it's worth it.
After the question, you were given a problem to work on. The problems are not difficult, just take your time and talk it out. Talking through the problem is really important since it can save you from going down the wrong path.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was nothing especially difficult. I'm not allowed to discuss the specific problems but I will give some general answers. There were a couple of cute problems, but mainly the problems were related to searching some space. I had 2 problems that required breadth first searches. A problem which looked more difficult than it was. This is probably the hardest type of problem, because it requires that you think about it and play with it until you see the simple solution. Think out loud, this is important.