The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2011
Interview
Passed Phone Screen since they basically asked OOP ("What is encapsulation?") and Algorithms ("Name an O(n log n) Sort")-kind of questions. They love Bucket Sort, so understand it. Breezed right through.
I took time off my current job and flew to Seattle. Got in late on puddle jumpers. The job I was interviewing for had advertised they wanted J2EE, Oracle DB's, XML, standard stuff for a Senior Java guy. However, I was asked about none of that. Instead we emarked on a masturbatory exercise whereby developers one after another propsed what Einstein called "Gedanken Experiments", all of which had to be coded by hand on a whiteboard resulting in compilable code. You are allowed to ask questions of the interviewer and have 60 mins to solve.
Here are my questions:
1.) "Given an NxM matrix, with some cells black and some cells white, code an algorithm to find all the black cells."
2.) (This one was from one of the senior developers, an older gentlemen who had been pretty much since the founding). "A road has a traffic counter on it and results in an array of durations since the sampling began. Code and algorithm to find out how many cars have passed, keeping in mind that there may be 18 wheelers, cars towing trailers, pickup trucks and passenger vehicles"
3.) "Given two arrays of floats, not necessarily of the same size, write an algorithm to merge them in ascending order." This was the only one I got completed and correct.
4.) "Given a log file spanning multiple days, and given a page transition A -> B -> C, find all the unique users who made this page transition in the logs"
Needless to say, I spent a great deal of time preparing, reading Bertrand's Object Oriented Software Construction and Lafore's "Data Structures and Algorithms in Java". It didn't matter. Could have went in cold and done almost as well. The people were pleasant, but the experience wasn't good.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
(This one was from one of the senior developers, an older gentlemen who had been pretty much since the founding). "A road has a traffic counter on it and results in an array of durations since the sampling began. Code and algorithm to find out how many cars have passed, keeping in mind that there may be 18 wheelers, cars towing trailers, pickup trucks and passenger vehicles"
"Given a log file spanning multiple days, and given a page transition A -> B -> C, find all the unique users who made this page transition in the logs"
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2011
Interview
I had 3 phone interviews and then a full day of in-person interviews. On the full day of interviews, I met with 5 different people for 45 minutes each.
1) Design file system
2) Design database tables for Books, Authors and Publishers
3) Print BST
4) Given a file with integers on each line, parse the file and return the overall sum of all integers
5) A website has 2 log files for two days ( a log file for each day) with customer information in it. Find all customers who visited the website on both days?
5-a) what is the complexity of the algorithm?
A website has 2 log files for two days ( a log file for each day) with customer information in it. Find all customers who visited the website on both days?
5-a) what is the complexity of the algorithm?
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (New York, NY) in Mar 2011
Interview
they contacted me based on my resume and asked me to apply if i was interested. They asked me about OO concepts, data structures, and some questions. What is the different between final, finalize, and finally. Explain how the garbage collector works. Write a function that takes an input of a string and convert it to a an integer, convert the integer to its binary representation.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
What is the different between final, finalize, and finally.