Amazon attends the career fair at our University every semester and the have a couple of interview with a few selected candidates and if they pass they are invited to Seattle. This time I instead got a email to take the programming challenge. A weeks time was given to submit the code. The challenge itself was for 2 hours. It had three questions and all you had to do is write the code (there is no compilation), explain it and also add relevant comments. The questions weren't extraordinarily tough or anything. If you have sound logic and a good grasp of data structures you should be okay. 2 weeks later I got an email to attend an onsite interview. The whole process of scheduling a onsite took almost a month. I've heard that it usually doesn't take that long but they probably had many people interviewing. I flew out on a Thursday and was accommodated in a nice hotel quite close to the headquarters. The interview was scheduled to begin at 12:00PM. I made my way to the office and after all of us who had interviews assembled (around 40) we were given temp IDs and taken to a large room with many tables. They asked us to sit in groups of 4 at a table and grab a bite to eat. In a few minutes our interviewers came and joined and everyone had a nice informal chat. After half an hour, names of interviewers and and those people who they will interview were called out. We were taken to our respective rooms and the interview started. As is with many other reviews here, I am not at liberty to disclose what they asked me during the interview. But make sure that you have spent time sitting and writing code by hand on paper or better yet, on a whiteboard. Cracking the coding interview was the only thing I referred to. Solve the book yourself and towards the last chapters you'll realize that breaking down difficult problem comes naturally. I had four back to back interviews. All technical with quite a large amount of coding involved. There were a few random HR questions but mainly coding. There were 2-4 programming questions in each round. One has to explain the logic, write the code and explain his/her logic, prove that the code works run test cases and be ready to tell him/her/them how you would scale that code up in case they ask you. There was no pre defined level to the order of difficulty, I found the first three equally intensive and the fourth one very hard. More stress cannot be laid on the following fact - "Strict proper coding is of paramount importance". Just scribbling stuff, writing algorithms will not help you. You are expected to know your stuff. Proper function definitons, variable names, pointer usage (if c/c++). When you test your function make sure that you have thought about EVERY SINGLE edge case under the Sun. You might think that you have covered them all but beware. If I say every possibilty under the sun, I mean under the Sun not only on Earth but also under the sun on Jupiter, Saturn, moon etc. I got stuck at a point where I didn't even have a single line of code on the board. The interviewer did give me a hint after a couple of requests. But be sure that you have thought out (aloud) every other possibility. There is no greater sin that not knowing what space and time complexities are and how to figure out what they are for the algorithm you have come up with. We were done by 5 in the evening on a Friday and I had the offer on Monday. Good luck to anyone reading this!