I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Cambridge, MA) in Jan 2012
Interview
They were building a new site in Cambridge so they had the interview in Boston at a hotel. I waited in the lobby for the interviewers, who arrived in an elevator and then took you to be interviewed. Others also waited in the lobby to be interviewed. I was told there would be either 2 or 4 1:1 interviews, each about an hour.
The interview itself was primarily what my experience was, followed by questions about things I had done, followed by coding problems. Then I was asked if I had any questions for them.
I was already happily employed and would not have looked forward to driving to Cambridge. That day it took me 1.5 hours to arrive. Also I had read about carrying a pager here on glassdoor.com, and asked the interviewers about that. One said you carry it for a week every month; the next said you carry it for a week every 2 months.
I was told at the end of my 2nd interview that there would be just 2 interviews that day. I responded, "That must be a bad sign" with the response that it probably wasn't a good sign. Sure enough I did not get the job.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Given the word "HEAD" and the word "TAIL," write code and/or describe using computer science algorithms how you would transform from the word HEAD to the word TAIL. Each change must be by only one letter, you cannot change the letter in a given position twice, and each new word must be a valid word.
Given a binary tree with the usual left and right pointers on each node, and additionally a parent pointer, make an algorithm to discover the closest ancestor to 2 nodes on the tree.
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Hyderabad) in Jul 2010
Interview
I got shortlisted for interview via university placement programme. I was called to their office for interviews. I had 4 rounds of an hour each. All rounds focused on skills like Problem Solving, Coding, Data Structures and Algorithms. There were some puzzles in one of the rounds. One thing i want to highlight about coding is they take it seriously. You need to avoid any logical error with even the minutest of edge case and the code needs to be what they call "production ready".
The questions were pretty standard and a quick google search would tell you most of them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked to explain my masters thesis work in detail