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.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
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.