I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Apr 2012
Interview
2 phone interviews + onsite. The phone interview questions were more difficult than those asked onsite. Mostly, design question were asked onsite. There is a cargo cult mentality amongst the developers which I didn't like. It was not clear how much code needs to be written on the board. One guy asked me to skip the design and dive straight to the code. Another guy asked me just to write the pseudo code.
They are in a hurry to finish the interview within 45 minutes and move on to the next candidate. In real life nobody designs a object model in 45 minutes. So, expecting candidates to finish the design within that timeslot is not just unfair. It is also useless since it doesn't tell you much about the candidate.
I am skeptical of the whole interview process and employee turnover tells me that the current interviewing style at IT companies is broken.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions are not difficult when compared with what is asked in Silicon Valley companies.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.