I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Dec 2012
Interview
Initially Amazon came for recruitment through campus placement. It then conducted a online skill test for shortlisting students for 1:1 personal interview rounds. I had 4 personal 1:1 interview within 4 hrs. In interview I was asked to implement basic tree algorithms. Stress was given on how correct algorithm is.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How will you find lowest common ancestor of 2 nodes in a tree??
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2013
Interview
I can't say much, because I'm still at the second step of the process. I just received am email telling me that I need to schedule the second interview. So here is my experience with the first phone interview.
The interviewer started by giving me some information about his work and his devision, then I asked me to talk about my background and some of the projects that I was involved in. Surprisingly, the man was very friendly and he gave me all the time I needed to express myself and I was speaking to him I could hear him typing something on the keyboard (most probably comments). Then he said I'm going to ask you some conceptual questions. He showered me, if I may say, with questions about polymorphisms, passing values by variables vs actual values, sorting algorithms, binary search trees and their efficiency in terms of time and space.
In general I answered them mostly right, but he grilled me a little bit in the explanation of the binary tree searching algorithms to the point I thought I just blew the interview off. After that he asked to write a code using an online editor where he can see what I write listen to me walk him through the code. He asked to write a code to find the intersection between to lists. I made my assumptions that these lists are integers saved in arrays and he said OK. I wrote the code under pressure, but as I was moving through I kept creating methods and consider optimum solution. I guess that's what got me to the second interview (my programming skills not my knowledge about binary search trees complexity.
I'm waiting for the second interview and I will definitely share my experience here after it is done.