I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2013
Interview
Phone interview:
Questions on basic data structures and algorithms. Search and sort. Basic time complexity. Hardest data structure I had to work with was a LinkedList. If you know your stuff you can write code to solve all this on-the-spot. Interviewer was cool. Suggest practicing on Project Euler.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pull a random integer from the range 1, ..., N. Shuffle. Find missing integer, without re-sorting. Solution is to used closed-form sum of first N integers.
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2013
Interview
Coded with a team of 2 other people for around 7 hours to complete a project. The project was to code a sequence of advertisements in the most efficient manner possible given a list of advertisements.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
Recruiter moved very fast. Heard back day after I applied, had first phone interview within a week. Phone interviews last 45min - 1 hour and are mostly technical - for 2/3 of them, I coded using an online collaboration tool for most of the time. Interviewers were very clear and explained things well, and were willing to give assistance in cases where I got stumped. Make sure to know a lot about time and space tradeoffs, big O notation, etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing unexpected, everything seemed pretty standard stuff that a CS major should know