I applied through college or university. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2012
Interview
They were recruiting from my University. I submitted my resume online on Wednesday. Thursday they emailed me to set up an interview for Tuesday morning. Tuesday night they emailed me to setup 3 more interviews on Thursday. Friday I was notified I had been selected to receive a full time offer.
The recruiter was a little flaky after that, missing phone appointments. Eventually he followed through and set me up with a weekend trip to Seattle to meet some potential teams.
The interviews were mostly technical. Each one was 45 minutes. Each one asked two programming questions and a couple personality type small talk questions. "Why did you choose to study computer science," "what's your favorite/least favorite thing about school." I don't recall any behavior questions, you know the kind, "tell me about a time you failed miserably at something and everyone laughed at you."
Only one of the interviewers tried to make me write compileable code. I tried my best, but reminded how valuable a good IDE is. Know your algorithms and their big-o. Know how to find test cases. Know recursion, dynamic programming, all of the fun stuff.
Going through the interviews I made sure to constantly tell the interviewer what I my thoughts were and why. I gave a reason for everything and when suitable reasons against anything else.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a stream of characters and a set of characters, find the shortest sequence in the stream containing all characters in the set.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon in Jun 2013
Interview
I applied about one month ago. Then after two weeks, I got an email from recruiter in Amazon asking me to do an online assessment in 6 days. I've done it last night. The questions are relatively simple, people who have gone through data structures can solve it without too much thinking. It was 3 questions in up to 90 minutes. The hard part is for each question, I have to write down description of approach, assumptions, which data structures used and why, analysis on complexity, and code comments. It took me more than 10 minutes to get these documents done (one can easily tell I am not native speaker btw:) )
There was another session for behavior test after finished 3 questions. Things about whether you think you are creative, or what will you do if you find a minor bug near deadline. All self-selection questions.
I just finished the first-round. Long before I get a position. Since I have to select whether get offer or not. Better to select a yes for good luck :) Wondering if I can update later
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Writing documentation for 3 test questions took me a big way too long time.