The longest flight ever. I’d decided that it was best not to sleep on the plane as i figured if i got a couple of hours sleep there i wouldn’t be able to sleep once i got to the hotel. My plane landed around 10:00 PST and i walked out of the chute and looked around. SeaTac is probably the nicest airport i’ve ever been in, probably a big part of which is that it’s all recently been (re)done. I made my way to the ground transport area and looked around. There were shuttles that went downtown, but i was tired and i really didn’t feel like trying to figure out which one went where so i grabbed a cab and we were on our way, with a short stop at the natural gas filling station. Apparently all of the cabs and busses run on natural gas there, or so says the driver.
I we made it to the W Hotel around 10:45 and i checked in and went up to the room. I didn’t spent much time looking around at the hotel or room, i was too tired, but i did need to iron my shirts and pants for in the moring so i did that as i made a few phone calls and headed to bed. I managed to fall striaght to sleep which was great. The next morning i woke up at my normal time, which wasn’t great considering it was still 4:00 seattle time. I managed to lay around for an hour or so before giving up and getting going. I decided room service was my best bet for breakfast, which was ok, but way way way overpriced at altogether $23 for pancakes and fruit. Looking back i had plenty of time to have gone down to a coffee shop or something, but oh well. I don’t really know what all i did to pass the time, mostly half watch tv i suppose. I was supposed to be there a little before 10:15 to sign some paper work so i killed time until around 9:45. The only time in there that i got nervous was about 20 mins before i was supposed to be leaving. I wasn’t in the mood to watch tv anymore and didn’t have anything to distract me.
As soon as 9:45 rolled around i got my stuff together and headed down to catch a cab. After a long winding pathway up and down the hills i saw the pacmed building come in to view. The cab dropped me off at the south entrance and i made my way in to the visitors desk and spoke with the person there. He gave me a badge and some paperwork. A tip if you’re interviewing with amazon.com, you’ll probably want to show up a little earlier than i did. I was slightly rushed to get all of the paperwork read and filled out in the time i had (~15 mins.) Also make sure to bring a copy of your resume and references as they’ll come in handy with filling out the application. After i finished the paperwork i sat for a few mins and looked through the magazines in the waiting area and was retreived by someone from HR. She took me to get some water and then to the interview room in which i would be spending much of my day.
We talked for a few minutes doing some of the standard behavioral interview stuff and then my first interviewer came. We introduced ourselves and she asked a general question or two as she wrote the first technical question up on the board. I got off to an ok start and was doing things pretty much how i was supposed to, talking through the problem, diagraming, etc. I started to code up the solution i had come up with and got off to an ok start there as well. As i continued to fill out the code there was something about it which i didn’t like. It was getting a bit bigger than i thought it should be and i knew there had to be a better solution, but it wasn’t coming to me. That was well and fine, and i was able to continue writing out code that was pretty close to a solution, but i kept getting tripped up because i really wasn’t liking my solution. I came up with a solution to the more code and work that it should be problem in the cab on the way home, not that it did me any good at that point. After we wrapped up that question we went on to some more general, non-code, questions and i was able to kind get things rolling and felt like i did a better with the rest of the questions, technical and non, from that point on.
My second interview went smoother, or at least i felt that way. We got through 5 or so questions half of which involved code, two of which were object/design, and one of which was a scoping/estimation problem. There was some non-technical stuff interlieved in there. I guess i would say the two differences between the phone interviews and the on-site were much harder questions and the non-code stuff interleaved.
My third interview was a lunch interview with the hiring manager. I got to eat at the PacMed Cafe. The food was pretty good, we were in a pretty decent hurry so i didn’t really get to look around too much. The lunch interview went really well the manager seemed really interested in me. He had an interesting style, which made me think back to the first phone screening (which was also with him.) There’s something about the way he asks follow up questions and for clairfication of what you’re saying that gave me the impression that what i was saying was wrong. It took a few minutes to kinda realize what was going on and after i did it was much easier for the rest of the time, i guess by easier i mean i felt that i was doing better more than it was less difficult.
The fouth interviewer was from the same area, but a different group. We walked through a code question, to which i got off to a false start mis-understanding what he was looking for. After a couple of mins working through things the wrong way i started to realize there was a misunderstanding and stepped back and asked several more questions about the problem that clairfied it for me. I then went to work on a solutino and was able to come up with something that would work, but wasn’t all that efficient. He then supplied me with a piece of information about the problem that i could take advantage of to drastically optimize my solution. I was able to understand what he was suggesting after a little bit of discusion and then we started to work through coding that up. His next question was a pretty quick and simple one about serilizing a tree and then we went on to a couple technical questions about security of digitial media and authentication.
As we finished up my final technical interviewer arrived. We introduced ourselves and talked for a few mins and he was from a different area of the company. We started out with a database design question modeled on a real system they have in place. From there we moved on to questions about scalibility and redundancy as well as coding questions that involed set operations. As we were finishing up he was asking non-technical questions and we were talking about the company, the things they do, and the interviewing process as a whole. He said he was my “bar-raiser,” someone who’s job it is to make sure that the interviewer is better than the average amazon.com employee, or so i’ve since read somewhere. His interview was a bit different from the others, i wouldn’t say too much harder, but much much greater in scope.
After talking a bit longer, we got a call from the technical recuiter person who was supposed to wrap things up saying she wasn’t able to make it so he walked me back to the reception area and we concluded the interview process. They called a cab for me and i looked around at the amazon.com product launch stuff framed on the walls until it arrived. All in all i was very impressed with amazon.com and the people there. I felt that i did pretty well with the interviews and had a good rapore with all of my interviewers. As i walked back in to my hotel room, i sat in the desk chair and decided that i wanted an offer from them, i wanted to work for amazon.com in seattle.
(to be continued…)