My Interview Experience

Its been almost two years since I attended my last campus interview for adobe. Its amazon, chennai now. Have already attended amazon interview twice during college, first time for my internship and the next for my campus placement. This time I had five technical rounds of interview during the weekend.

It all started at 3:00 PM, Saturday and I had three rounds on that day itself and left sometime around 8:30 PM. I am informed that I will be having two more rounds the next day, starting at 8:00 AM. Finally I completed my technical interview by 11:30 AM on Sunday.

I always know that its not so easy to crack technical interviews of big shots like amazon especially when you are not in top of your pitch. The interviewers are very much concerned about your understanding of data structures and its right application. Given a problem how smart you are in choosing the right data structure and the algorithm is what is being watched. Though it is not always required that you solve the problem till the end, it is always the approach that is important. Hints are always provided when you struggle, but you need to grasp faster from there.

The interviewers are very much experienced and sharp in analyzing your solution and especially the code. The clarity of your solution must very much be reflected in your code. The competition level is very high and so is the expectation. Though a week's preparation should suffice, it is always recommended that you master the concepts very well before you go for the interview.

A very good aspect of the interviewers is that once you complete your rounds of interview you are being given the feedback on your performance. You can very well rate yourself on amazon's scale. To summarize their feedback on my performance, I got to improve and master data structures and its optimization and the quality of my code.

Still waiting to hear from them :((

These are the questions asked in the interview.

1. Given a friendship list for a social networking site like orkut, design and implement the code to cluster the friends together.

ex:
Input: (a, b); (b, c); (b, d); (e, f); (g, h)
output: (a, b, c, d); (e, f); (g, h).

No other information is given.

2. Persistence and Restoration of a Binary Tree.

Given a binary tree, store the tree in the file and reconstruct the tree from the data stored in the file.

3. Design classes for Notepad.

All your design skills, especially the modularity and the clarity of flow are tested.

4. Given a big document and search key words. Return the smallest portion of the string in the document that contains all the search key words. If any one of the key words are missing return nothing.

5. Given an integer array and an integer return two elements in the array (if any) whose sum will be equal to the integer given.

6. Create doubly linked list from the binary tree.

7. Design a data structure to perform the "insert, delete, search and give a random element from the data structure" operations in a fixed time.

8. Given a doubly linked list and a node delete the node from the list.

Write Code for all the questions except 3. I wrote the java code for all the questions.