I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2012
Interview
I applied for an internship at Amazon for last summer and they contacted me this past November to set up an interview in January. I believe they kept my application to be reconsidered once I was a junior in college. I had two 45-minute interviews on the phone, separated by a 15 minute break.
During the first interview, the interviewer asked me first to talk a little about myself since he had not read my resume yet. He was very kind and understanding. He told me to write a program that reverses the words in a sentence string. I wrote it in Java and read him back the code when I had finished. While I was writing the code, he asked me to talk through my logic and explain what I was doing. He was more concerned with the algorithm than the actual semantics and he said it wasn't a problem if I forgot some of the names of the java functions on strings, etc. Often, when I noted something important for the problem, he'd say it "sounds reasonable" or "makes sense to me." He was very reassuring and it was nice to talk with him on the work we did. After I finished the code, he asked about what kinds of strings I might use to test this and he also asked me to consider how the program might be improved, e.g. how the program would handle a semi-colon. Also, he asked me to evaluate computational and memory complexity in terms of the number of characters in the string. At the end he asked if I had any questions, and I didn't really have any at that time.
The second interview consisted of a couple more questions, and the interviewer was female. She asked me to go to a code sharing website so she could see the program I wrote. First, she had me write a program that compares if two binary trees are equal. I wrote it in Java. She was also very helpful, and helped me figure out an issue if I was a little stuck. Many of the methods I called were hypothetical, in a sense, using a previous java implementation of a binary tree I had implemented as a reference. After I completed that task, she asked me to explain the difference between an array and a linked list and when you might use either one. At the end, I asked her about the male:female ratio at Amazon and what her experience has been, being a female, as I attend a women's college.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write a program that reverses the words in a sentence.
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2012
Interview
After contacting by a recruiter, he set up two 45 minute phone interviews for me.
They are just like two technical interviews.
(1) Both interviewers are from India and they all got strong accent, especially the second one. I have a hard time in understanding their words.
(2) One of the interviewer refused to use an online editor together even I suggest it. He actually ask me to write a "complete" java codes on a paper first and then read "every letter" to him line by line. Seriously? Some how I believe he wanted to waste our time, why? Anyway, I only have to answer two problems.
(3) Following (2), I believe the second question he threw to me was both an algorithm but also a brain-teaser one, which I don't like. I ask him for hint but he refuse to disclose the optimal answer (I will post question below).
(4) The other interviewer, he asked all tech coding problems, which are mostly short and intuitive. But after answering five questions correctly and quickly. We still have about 15 minutes left and then we chatted until the end. I think this is good sign for me because it means that I'm doing well. But honestly I prefer someone push me to the limit and give me a compensation then based on my skill level. I feel that I was treated like a under but actually I'm almost complete my PhD. Other company send manager / PhD to beat me (everyone can be beaten eventually), but somehow I think the interviews are too easy so that I don't think they will gauge my skill level clearly. Thus, I an worry that they would NOT give me a PhD-level pay. (Probably I apply for the wrong position)
Anyway the overall feeling is okay. The question are all coding & problem solving types. No O/S questions or DB questions.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
You got some baby bottle samples. You would like to know the max height you can drop it without breaking the bottle. Let set the unit as 1 foot. And the highest height you can reach is at N feet. So how would you find the (max) safe height?
(following the previous one) You got only ONE baby bottle sample. You would like to know the max height you can drop it without breaking the bottle. Let set the unit as 1 foot. And the highest height you can reach is at N feet. So how would you find the (max) safe height?
(following the previous one) You got only TWO baby bottle sample. You would like to know the max height you can drop it without breaking the bottle. Let set the unit as 1 foot. And the highest height you can reach is at N feet. So how would you find the (max) safe height? (This is the one I think is kind of brain-teaser one.)
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2011
Interview
I was contacted four months after applying online by email, and they selected an hour and a half block from my provided list of time I had available. The interview consisted of two 45 minute phone interviews, one after the other with a 15 minute break in between the two. Both interviewers were very personable even over the phone and kept a good pace with the interview. They both spoke highly of their jobs, Seattle and the company, but couldn't tell me what they worked on specifically other than they both worked on the Kindle.