First emailed on September 15, 2009. Rejected by email on October, 15 2009. I had three phone interviews with the Customer Returns area and the Ops area.
The first interview was with a younger, male developer. It had a "get to know you" section and two technical questions: Find the first common element in two sets (implement the code), and design the objects needed to run a jukebox.
The second interview was with a senior male developer. It also had a "get to know you" section and two technical questions: Given a time-ordered log of user visits to web pages find the most common 3-page sequence (implement the code), and design a poker application.
The third interview was with a foreign, younger female developer. She jumped right into the technical questions which were: Find the deepest common ancestor of two nodes in a tree structure (implement the code), and layout the fundamental objects to build a restaurant reservation system. This was probably the worst interview of the lot because it felt like the interviewer didn't understand the language (C++) she had asked me to write in even though I could easily have done it in several others.
The biggest takeaways here were that the questions were all canned and could be looked up, the coding would have better been managed by text instead of over the phone, and there was very little feedback on how my answers were. In general, there were gaps of more than a week in which I heard nothing at all and given no insight as to why, the interviewers seemed to take notes but only the last one seemed to have read them.
Overall, the whole thing was just a long, drawn-out mess, and a waste of a month. I'm lucky enough to be currently employed or I would be irate about how slow the process was. When I interviewed with several other companies (including Microsoft) a couple years ago the longest it took was a week including on-site interviews. It just seemed like Amazon had a complete disregard for my time.
