Intern Focus – Amazon.com!

One good thing about NIT Warangal is the number of companies that come for placements and interns (this is, of course, without considering how many they recruit). So we had Goldman Sachs and then Amazon coming for interns. I, incidentally, made it to the interviews of both – and flunked out in both. And here I’ll write about the Amazonian debacle (should I call it so) as it is still fresh in my memory. The GS one would be followed up later…

The Aptitude Test – Stepping Stone to Failure!?
So on the 20th,we had a hard-core technical aptitude – full of stacks and queues and trees and algorithms. A joy for the technically sound, but a disaster bell for the others. We had two rounds – one objective and one subjective. And I got 17 in both (I got to know my scores later when I saw my answer script during the interview). So a total of 34 on 90, and still I qualified – guess that says a lot about the level of questions and the level of correction. And we got the results at 2:15 AM… Don’t think anyone expected that, or anyone was awake to expect that! It was just by chance (or maybe it was fate) that I woke up at 2:30 and saw the sms.

So there it was – interview the next day, ie. 21st at 10:15 AM. Four were shortlisted – and we hoped at least one would make it. Not to be… The count remained a big ZERO. Anyways, I’ll tell about my interview – maybe it’ll help others.

1st Round!
My first round started at 2 PM (true, I was sitting-doing-nothing for 4 hours)– and by that time, others had already got their results of their respective first rounds. So these were the questions asked to me :

• There are 25 horses. Maximum 5 horses can run in a race and you’ll know the top 3 of each race. How many races (min.) will you need to find the overall top 3?

• There is a doubly linked list in which the back-links are ambiguous, ie. they need not point to the previous node – they can point to any node occurring before the current one. Write a function to make a copy of it. (Mind, they want the moist efficient one)

• What are the four basic concepts of OOPS?

Guess that was all – rest was just beating around the bush.

2nd Round!
Perhaps the best of the 3 rounds I faced. Duration 3PM - 4PM.

• Can a knight move from one corner of the chessboard to the opposite while visiting each square once and only once?

• What are the different sorting mechanisms?

• What is bucket sort?

• Which is the most efficient sorting mechanism?

• Tell me the algorithm of quicksort.

• Write a fully functional code for mergesort.

• Minimum spanning tree algorithms – Kruskal and Prim's.

• A singly linked list branches at a certain node into two. Identify the branching node in least possible time.

• There is an array of size ‘n’ having integers 1 to n. But a certain integer ‘l’ is missing and another integer ‘k’ is repeated twice. Find ‘l’ and ‘k’.

He literally ground me to pulp – but I managed to scrape through somehow.

3rd round!
The worst round – and perhaps which brought about my downfall. I was the only one left to attend this one – everyone else had been eliminated. I was hoping it might be non-technical. But alas! How wrong I was…

• Can an object of a base class be initialized using a function of a derived class?

• In Amazon, we maintain records of the pages viewed by customers on each day in a file. I’ll give you the files for two days. I want you to create a list of those customers who visited on both the days and at least two distinct pages. Which data structure would you use?

That was all – quite a short one. But I had to wait for two hours for this one.


I guess I learnt quite a bit – but it was disappointing falling down at the last hurdle. But there’s always the next chance!