I applied through college or university. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2012
Interview
Applied for the position via my school's career services site. Nearly 4 months later received a request to complete two phone interviews. After scheduling the interview, I was never called then received another email to reschedule the next month.
The interviewers are generally very helpful, guiding you along the write track as you answer - the first began by telling me a bit about the company and his position specifically. Be prepared to talk about your past experience, as well as answer questions about fundamental OO concepts and data structures. I was given one programming assignment in the first interview and another in the second, the second problem a slight variation of the first - be prepared to dictate your code over the phone (must be syntax-correct). I would suggest practicing by writing code on a notepad/paper instead of using an IDE. I would suggest reviewing data structures, algorithm analysis (you will be expected to analyze the time/space complexity of the functions you write). Received a response 1 week post-interview.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given two int arrays, write a function which returns their intersection as an int array; analyze the time/space complexity of your function.
Standard LC mediums, nothing too crazy. Interviewer was pretty chill and was helpful in pointing me in the right direction when I needed as well. Only thing I would probably change was to study more on graph problems before hand.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given an 0-indexed integer array weights, where weights[i] represents the weight of the i-th marble, and an integer k.
Your task is to divide the marbles into k bags such that:
No bag is empty.
Each bag must contain marbles from a contiguous range of indices. That is, if a bag includes marbles at indices i and j, then all marbles with indices between i and j (inclusive) must also be included in that same bag.
The cost of a bag that includes marbles from index i to j (inclusive) is defined as weights[i] + weights[j].
The total score of a distribution is the sum of the costs of all k bags.
Return the difference between the maximum and minimum possible scores among all valid distributions.
Applied online and received an Online Assessment. It consisted of two LeetCode-style coding problems with a time limit . The process was straightforward and fully automated with no human interaction at this stage.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Solve a coding problem involving array manipulation under a timed online assessment
There were 2 rounds- one DSA round and one HR round.
In the first round they asked me a DP + trees question which was of medium to hard difficulty.
In the second round the interviewer asked me about my resume, my projects, some computer fundamental questions.
