I believe everyone knows about the interview process at Amazon. It is long, tiring, boring and simply a waste of time.
I am proud to withdrew my application after the first round. Details are given below. I hope this will help someone.
In my personal opinion, asking a candidate to code during the interview is useless because in the real scenario no one codes in that limited time. Secondly, if you want to test the coding skills then give a take home test or ask for something like a GitHub account.
I fail to understand that the so called ‘Geniuses’ sitting in Amazon overlooking this process simply don’t get it that anyone can code...what really matters is the logic behind that code...so ideally they should be testing the candidates on that.
In my case I refused to code during the interview. Unfortunately the interviewer was so inexperienced that he had no clue what other questions to ask. It was both frustrating and funny. The interviewer went silent for few minutes and then abruptly ended the call. This happened not once but almost 4-5 times with me. I did write my concerns to the HR who came back and told me that they cannot change the process so I humbly told her that I am not interested in Amazon. For me it is a waste of time and energy.
Advise to the Amazon team -
1. Kindly treat the interviewers as equals. You do not own their career. It is always your loss. Amazon is not the only company with jobs in the world
2. Good companies do not take more than 2 to 3 rounds. If you need more rounds then your team is clearly inexperienced to judge candidates quickly
3. Train the interviewers to ask smart questions and not the text book questions
4. Coding is not the real skill...logic is. Anyone can copy paste a code if they understand the logic behind the problem
5. You have a 6 months cooling period. Your interview process is 6 months long so it is precisely 1 year
The interview is about 30 minutes long. First describe your projects that are written in your cv and ML experience and even though these are very common projects you dont need to worry
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2021
Interview
The interviews are virtual due to Covid-19. So the normal call interview was more like an in person interview.
The interviewer went over my CV and asked for every project I worked on. He also asked about my PhD thesis, which was not related to the job at all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding question (Python):
Assume you have a file containing data in the form of
data = [{"one":a1, "two":b1,...},{"one":a2, "two":b2,...},{"one":a3, "two":b3,...},...]
How could you split this data into 30% test and 70% train data?