Status: Software Engineer
Location: Seattle, WA
Date: Apr 2019
The overall experience was very negative. Very rude interviewers and very unprofessional.
The onsite interview was in Seattle with the AWS API Gateway team.
Please note: all interviwers asked behavrioral questions at the start of the interview. These can be found on Glassdoor.
Onsite (6 rounds):
Round 1:
The first interviewer was rude. He asked and I told him I preferred writing code on the whiteboard and he insisted I write code on a piece of paper (recruiters told me whiteboard will be allowed). They lied. His phone was buzzing and making noises the whole interview - it was horrible. He has his phone on the desk while it was buzzing and it was shaking the whole desk while I was writing code on a piece of paper. I am not even exaggerating. Completely unprofessional and he never turned his phone off or put it on mute. He was on-call and was working on his laptop (checking email, etc). I could see what he was doing on his laptop because he was sitting beside me. He couldn’t care less about the interview. It was a complete waste of my time. He didn’t leave any time at the end to ask him questions.
Questions:
- Counter number of islands in a matrix of 0s and 1s.
- Do pow(x, y) where y is very large.
Round 2:
Second interviewer came in late and was acting like I was offending him everytime I asked him a question. His technical question was vague on purpose so I had to ask him a lot of questions. I asked him clarifying questions and he would say “Why would you do that!?” acting offended. I didn’t feel like asking him any questions and so I started working on the algorithm without much information. It was mental torture for me. I hated every minute of it. Incredibly unprofessional and inhumane. He didn’t leave any time at the end to ask him questions.
Question: Alien dictionary
Round 3:
Third interviewer (lunch) didnt even want to speak with me. All of his answers were vague and most were one word. Highly frustrating and unprofessional. For example: I asked him “How do you like Seattle” and he replied “yes”. Another example: I asked him “What is your teams tech stack?” and he replied “We use lots of stuff”. It was hopeless.
Round 4:
Fourth interviewer was the systems design. He was typing everything I said verbatim on his laptop and kept telling me to stop so he could ‘catch up’ as he was typing everything I was saying. Many times he told me to repeat myself and also to stop in the middle of my thought. Highly unprofessional and disgraceful way to treat an interviewee. It was frustrating to repeat myself over and over again. He also didn’t know what consistent hashing was which was a red flag.
Question: Design a service that returns book cover images for book products on Amazon.
Round 5:
Fifth interviewer was the Hiring manager who also kept interrupting me. Which was a minor inconvenience but very rude. He only asked me behavioral questions.
Round 6:
Sixth interviewer was the bar raiser and was the only interviewer that was polite and profressional. His questions were open ended. I quite enjoyed talking to him.
They didn’t even turn on the lights in the meeting room where the interview was being conducted so that I could see properly. They turned it on during the 5th interview.
Overall, horror of an interview. Will never consider Amazon again.