For what it's worth, my Amazon interview was probably the hardest one I ever did -- much harder than my Google interview. At Amazon, every single one of the 7 or 8 people I interviewed with asked me a coding question, including the guy that had done the phone screen, and he'd asked me a coding question in the phone screen too. I also got a coding "homework" problem in the phone screen. I don't have any problem with coding questions in interviews, but it seemed like total overkill.
I had a phone screen with Amazon where the interviewer asked me a coding problem (don't remember the problem). He had a text editor open and wanted me to tell him exactly what to type, not pseudocode, the actual characters. If the program didn't compile and run, my answer was incorrect. I actually got it right, but it (along with the rest of the interview) was such an abnormal experience that it really turned my excitement level for Amazon off.
I was called back to come in for face to face interviews, so I apparently passed the phone screen. I declined to continue pursuing Amazon after that experience and took a job with a different startup I was talking to.
I'm also OK with coding questions, including on a whiteboard, but caring about exact, compilable syntax of code entered in a way you'd never do is worthless.
> For what it's worth, my Amazon interview was probably the hardest one I ever did -- much harder than my Google interview.
Same here.
One of the interviewers asked me to name a software I used and liked. I said emacs. He then asked to draft a design of emacs on the whiteboard. First, a high-level design, then refine one of the modules, etc.
In my experience, the only other interview that was about as hard as Amazon's was at Jane Street Capital, which is also on the list. However, the Jane Street interview was a much more interesting experience -- after the interviews I felt I'd really like to work there.
One of the interviewers asked me to name a software I used and liked. I said emacs. He then asked to draft a design of emacs on the whiteboard. First, a high-level design, then refine one of the modules, etc.
That's a fantastic interview question. Much better than the usual "solve this tiny problem in 20 lines of code on a whiteboard". After you've reversed the words in a string more than twice it gets a bit boring.
Were the coding questions themselves extraordinarily difficult? It just doesn't seem unusual to be consistently asked coding questions during interviews for a software engineering position (assuming that's what you were going for).
No, it's not unusual for all your interviewers to ask you coding questions. It is, however, a lot more work to have 7 or 8 people do that rather than 4 or 5, which is the point I was getting at. That was just a really long and tiring interview.
The hardest one I ever had was to make word ladder perform in linear time. The only time I saw anything similar was in an old ACM-ICPC competition problem set. It's not just that they ask coding questions, it's that they demand you wring ever optimization possible out of them even when you might not see any other way to do it.
My interviewing experience was much different. I found my Amazon interviews to be much easier than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Maybe it changes with different teams?
