I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2016
Interview
I had been contacted by Amazon many times over the years. It finally aligned as I was looking for a new opportunity.
Amazon flew me out and put me up in a hotel in Seattle. Instructions for getting to Amazon were vague to non-existent. I definitely went to the wrong building and then definitely pissed off security since I had no idea what I was doing. Amazon is a very locked-down place.
When I finally get in, it was 15mins before my scheduled first interview. I waited about an hour before someone came down. It was not the manager who was supposed to be my interviewer.
See, that morning, the employee sexual harassment scandal broke at Amazon. My original interviewer was one of the whistleblowers.
The manager who came to talk to me was clearly flustered and out of sorts, which is how I would characterize the entire day. Everyone was nice and friendly enough though. The engineering interviews were just fine, pretty standard for a tech company. I did have one Indian interviewer who had the classic Indian custom of shaking his head from side-to-side for yes. Even though I knew, it did cause me some pauses as my brain had to process from the quick, "he's saying no, no good?" to, "oh yeah, he's saying yes."
After leaving and discovering about the sexual harassment scandal on the news in my hotel room, I questioned how much I would want to work there. All of my interviewers had been male. My original interviewer was female.
After flying home, I submitted my expenses and thanked Amazon for the opportunity. I emailed. Waited. Then emailed again. Waited. Then emailed again.
The company had gone dark for me. I never received any feedback on the interview. Not a single word from any of the interviewers who had interviewed me. Despite repeated attempts, contacts at Amazon tell me they cannot discuss the results of this interview.
Overall, a very odd experience.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (East Palo Alto, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
Phone call from recruiter and shoot me an online programming tests. Then got on-site interview. Four rounds of tech interviews, first behavior questions, most of them are how do you work the team, what failures have you made before,, etc.. every round had a white board coding section, they're easy though, comparing with leetcode hard one, and one of them is system design.
After 3 days I got phone call that they're considering giving me an offer but need relocation, I asked need WFH for first 6 months since family issue but they declined and recruiter offer me another option that I fly to Seattle every week, I took it but after they talked to hiring manager they told me this doesn't work out, people have to be on-site every day.
-- Following up story. After one month, one other team reached out me again, asking me to do another interview. I am so frustrated that their whole interview process since it just wastes my time. I told them no, I will never, ever,ever try their job again. Show some respect to the candidate, please...
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design a wishlist system with existing API
2. Serialization/Deserialization on tree
3. Look up in nokia phone
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2018
Interview
I interviewed with the Devices and MAKO groups. One thing I have to say, Amazon has been working hard to improve the interview experience and it shows. The interview process is greatly improved over what it was several years back when I went through the process.
I was on the "accelerated interview process" because of the amount of experience that I have. So, I first had to complete an online assessment, then an online phone interview, then an onsite interview with 4 engineers.
The Amazon recruiter told me that if I "mess up" with one of the onsite interviewers to not worry, just "shake it off" and go on to the next one. Because only 2 or 3 needed to be good interviews to get hired. I don't think this is true. I believe it was the one that didn't go well that didn't get me the offer.
So, the online assessment went great for me. The phone screen was successful. 3 of the 4 onsite interviews went very well and I felt confident in them.
The one that didn't go so well was the second interview. For one, the interviewer had a very strong Indian accent and I had to ask him to repeat himself frequently. The question he asked should have been simple and straight forward, but what threw me off was his behavior. From early on in the interview, when I would turn around and look at him, he would be dramatically shaking his head as if he was completely disapproving of me from the get go.
I can't tell you if he was pre-judging me over something, if he has a nervous tic, or if the head shaking was supposed to be part of the interview (testing me under pressure, so to speak). So, I'll include the question that I screwed up below.
I know I did well on the other interviews because when they called me to give me the news that they were not giving me an offer, they stressed to me TWICE that there were "many very positive" things about my interview, so they "strongly encourage me to interview again in the future". But they couldn't disclose why they were not giving me an offer.
Gee, thanks. Well, I'm not getting any younger and I'm off to interview with some other large employers in the area.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
So this is the question that I messed up on because the interviewer kept shaking his head throughout the interview which made me nervous and threw me off my game:
We are calling a web service method that will sometimes fail. The problem is to change the client so that if there are 5 failures in less than 10 seconds, the client should stop attempting to make the call to the web method and just return a failure right away.