Amazon

I'm sure someday I'll look back and think "it didn't go that bad". ;) In summary, I think I did reasonably well on my first four interviews, so-so on the fifth, but generally flailed around on the last one.

Amazon has several locations in the city - I found out the "Frankenstein's Castle" building up on Beacon Hill is where corporate services is located, functions like legal, marketing, accounting, etc. The software development mostly happens in a great location near the International District, between Uwajimaya (a giant Asian grocery store) and Qwest Field, where the Seahawks play. That was the interview location.

The first interviewer asked some general questions and then handed me a small program and had me find all the bugs I could. I do pretty well at these types of questions. The second interviewer had an interesting design question involving firewalls, and presented sample inputs. The third and fourth interviewers were managers so the interviews weren't as technical. The fifth interviewer asked one problem that I solved quickly, and while I stepped through I found a bug, which I could easily fix. His second question stumped me for a while and I needed a hint to get the best (most efficient) answer.

So far, so good. But the sixth interviewer asked a really general, open-ended design question, and I spent altogether way too much time considering the various issues that needed to be handled, and never really got started on solving it. Towards the end I just wound up describing how I would proceed in general, but I think he was getting impatient and wanted to see more concrete progress.

Oh well! Lunch at the Shanghai Garden restaurant was really good. ;)