I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2012
Interview
The interview process consisted of two phone interviews. Each phone interview lasted about 45 minutes and include about 20 minutes spent coding in a chat room. The first interview began by asking me to describe my background for a few minutes. Then there were questions about basic object oriented programming concepts. Then they ask about concepts specific to whatever language you're most comfortable with. Then they asked about concepts dealing with a secondary programming language. Then they ask about data structures. Then they asked me to design an algorithm dealing with a particular data structure and to analyze the time complexity of the algorithm. Then I had to code the algorithm. The second interview was very similar to the first, except it was quite a bit more difficult because the interviewer wasn't as helpful in guiding me using the coding portion of the interview.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
what is the average case and worst case time complexity for mergesort?
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2012
Interview
It consisted of 2 phone interviews each lasted about 45mins.
The questions I could remember are:
Assume you have an array A of n numbers (non-zero real numbers, not sorted), you need to create an array B, where the ith element of B equals the product of all elements in A except A[i]. In other words:
B[i] = A[0]*A[1]*....A[i-1]*A[i+1]*....A[n-1]
Do not use divisions. Only use addition and multiplications. Minimize the time complexity(use as few as multiplications as possible).
The solution is easy:
use helper array A1, A2:
A1[i] is product of A[0] to A[i-1], use dynamic programming to calculate gradually and save multiplications
A2[i] is product of A[n-1] to A[i+1], use same technique as above only in another direction.
B[i]=A1[i]*A2[i]
The third interview is from a SDET team asking me if I'm interested in testing and some testing questions. I feel that I went on well.
However I got declined a week after. Probably they have people interviewed before me fill in the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
given non-zero number array A, create array B where B[i] = product of all elements in A except A[i].
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2012
Interview
the phone interview. The interviewer poped up serveral brain teasing questions. And i thought i did good in two of them while not good in the last one. It's weird that they still ask brain teasing questions for experienced candidates.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
how much would you charge for washing all windows in Seattle.