If you know me you’ve probably already heard, but just in case you haven’t I’ll catch you up to this point.
I’ve worked at Lexmark Intl. for 5 years and 5 days (not counting the time i co-oped there. I had been building up to the process of looking around to see what else is out there for somewhere between a year and six months. About a month and a half ago i finished updating my resume and put a copy up on monster.com, not expecting to every hear anything back from that. Fast forward a week or two and i get a call from a lady at amazon.com asking if i would be interested in interviewing with them for a posistion with their digital media group. She mentions the job is in Seattle, which causes me to do a double-take. Seattle, the though of it had never crossed my mind, but now that it had it sounded intruging so i said sure. We set up a time for the first phone screening, a few days later.
Round One: So i don’t really do any prep for the interview other than a bit of research on amazon.com, the technologies they use, and seattle in general. Very little that will actually help me in the interview. So Monday rolls around and i get the call right on time and we start right in to things. “How would you find the nth element from the end of a linked list?” This one is easy so i rattle off the simplest solution and follow that up with the optimal solution making not of why the optimal is better etc. No problem there. So question to comes along (at this point i won’t post their questions, but if you ask me personally I’d be more than happy to discuss the types of questions and their purpose. This question threw me for a loop. I could think of a simple solution that would work in theory, but not in practice because of memory useage. I discussed it and then added a second pass that got rid of the memory requirements, discussing it’s merits and disadvantages as i went. The interview continued from there with more and more questions i didn’t _know_ the answer to. Finally culminating in a really hard, but really interesting question. We went back and forth about it for a few minutes. He would ask a question, i would propose a response and he’d question it, or expand the scope/throw more kinks in to the problem.
All through this interview i’m thinking to myself, i’m toally blowing this. I don’t even know the answers to the questions they’re asking in the first screening interview. As we draw to a close on the final question (after about 20 minutes of what i was told would be a 45 minute interview.) I’m thinking oh well. Which was werid b/c my initial thoughts when getting the call was why the hell not what can it hurt, but somewhere between there (when i started to read about amazon.com, learn about the job they were interviewing me for, and look in to seattle my “what the hell” turned in to “this would be really cool.”) So it’s at this point that i realize i apparently want this job. So the interviewer says, “well, i think that’s about all i have. Do you have any questions?” I asked a few got decent answers and left it at that. It’s at this point that he shocks me and says that i should be expecting a call in the next day or so about scheduling round two. Huh, i must of missed something. Anyway i keep my composure and say something to the effect of “i’m looking forward to it,” tell him bye, and hang up the phone in disbelief.
So i’m thinking i must be missing something and decide to look around on the internet about this interview process that i knew existed, but have never before underwent. I pretty quickly ran across a blog about a guys experience of interviewing with amazon.com and microsoft. After reading through it and some of the stuff it linked to i started to realize that i’d actually done exactly what i was supposed to i the interviews. I wasn’t supposed to know the answers, i was supposed to demonstright the ability to work through difficult problems (problem solving) and understand general software programming concepts and discuss them as i went. So i feel much better about it now and place an order for a copy of Programming Interviews Exposed. I bet you can’t guess where i ordered it from, heh…
(to be continued…)