I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2010
Interview
Was called by Amazon's recruiter after she had seen my resume on a jobs site. Set up a phone interview 4 days later.
The hiring manager was friendly and polite. Wanted to help me out. But I screwed up the interview. After reading the reviews here, these were very simple questions, but I'm not too good in algorithms and am afraid that my extensive experience in OO design and architecture gets short shifted in this type of an interview. I expect that people with strong Math background would do really well.
Anyway the questions asked were
1. Write the program to return a list of specified prime numbers.
2. Given two strings, determine if the two words are anagrams.
3. Compute the Big O of the solution.
Now, at least the first two seem simple (even if using just a brute-force algorithm), but while doing this on the phone with syntactically correct code, it was not easy.
I have about 20 years of enterprise application development. I think perhaps they need to have different type of phone interviews based on the background. But I guess it's one way to evaluate the thought process and given that this is Amazon, I guess algorithmic efficiency is probably in line with the scale.
Note that though I have selected that this was a difficult interview, it's primarily my own inadequacy in dealing with algorithmic questions.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write the program to return a list of specified prime numbers.
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Sep 2010
Interview
Initial communications started after I applied online. Took them 20 days to set up the first interview. Then it took them another 30 days to set up the 2nd telephonic interview. I am still waiting to hear from them regarding the status of my application
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2010
Interview
Had 2 phone interviews. I passed the first one so they scheduled the second phone interview, which I did not do well. Perhaps because I this is the first time I do online coding while the interviewer is watching. I jumped on coding too quick before coming up with a clear solution.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Given k number of sorted arrays, describe an algorithm to merge them into one array with each element remain sorted. Analyze the complexity.
Given a series or integers, write a program to print them out in random order in equal probabilities. In other words, each time your program runs the output should be different, but each output has equal probabilities.