I interviewed at amazon,India last year for their Arora DB team. It was one of the worst experience I ever had interviewing at any company.
I was asked to come to their office on a week-end, the HR calls me a day before to remind me that I have to be there at sharp 8:30 AM. I was living bit far from their office, but I made sure that I was there at their office well ahead of time. Turns out there are 50 odd candidates waiting there. They had never informed me that it was a mass interview. They then asked us to assemble in a room and told that interviews will start soon. Turns out the people who were supposed to interview us were flown down from their HQ and they were running late. So, to our frustration, they arrived 4 hours later. They provided us some average lunch and interviews started in the afternoon. The initial interviewers were fine, but in the later rounds(in late evening) I felt that the interviewers did not seem interested. In the last interview, the interviewer( I guess he was one of the directors), was not even making eye contact. He asked me a data structure question and asked me solve it on the white board, but then he got busy with his laptop. My solution was not very efficient one, but there was no hint or discussion on how to make it better and he then suddenly started talking about how great Amazon is as a place to work for!
After few days, they arranged for next set of interviews and the HR mailed me bunch links I had to study. Then I got a call from one their senior managers to inform me that there will be lot of leadership principles questions and they are very serious on them and I have prepare for them thoroughly!
They took another month to complete like next 5 rounds and at the end the HR calls me and say that I had to take one interview again as one of the the directors had lost the feed back on me!. I said no, then he comes back and says that they have found the feedback.
They took another few days and sent me a rejection letter. I wasn’t expecting an offer from them as I did sort of average in the interview, but the whole experience made me think how unprofessional they were!.
> He asked me a data structure question and asked me solve it on the white board, but then he got busy with his laptop.
It's bad that he didn't tell you this, but it's expected of an amazon interviewer to write a more or less accurate transcript of the interview. Almost certainly what the interviewer was doing on his laptop was writing down your work.
This is absolutely tragic, and software is not yet so commoditized that most folk should need to put up with this kind of experience. I can imagine why locally Amazon might seem like a good employer, but after a recruitment experience like that, how would you expect to be treated as anything but cattle for the remainder of your placement? I'd sooner take work in a bar or soup kitchen than an environment like that, and in any case definitely wouldn't have participated in the interviews.
Are mass recruitment events a recent software thing, or perhaps a local culture thing? I've never heard of them before except maybe for new graduates
After few days, they arranged for next set of interviews and the HR mailed me bunch links I had to study. Then I got a call from one their senior managers to inform me that there will be lot of leadership principles questions and they are very serious on them and I have prepare for them thoroughly! They took another month to complete like next 5 rounds and at the end the HR calls me and say that I had to take one interview again as one of the the directors had lost the feed back on me!. I said no, then he comes back and says that they have found the feedback.
They took another few days and sent me a rejection letter. I wasn’t expecting an offer from them as I did sort of average in the interview, but the whole experience made me think how unprofessional they were!.