A recruiter contacted me about a TPM opportunity. She sent me an online quiz. Took it in a few minutes off the top of my head. A few days later I got an invite for a phone interview with the hiring manager. Again I did not prepare at all, just tried to keep in mind some challenging projects I had done recently. I was waiting for the second phone (per glassdoor reviews), but I got an invite for an onsite interview in Seattle after about 1 week.
I proposed a few days starting from Oct 10th. After a week they booked me for a flight on Oct 10th to have in person interviews the next day from 9:30am to 4:00pm. So I flew over on thanksgiving day (Canadian eh!) and returned home the next day. Only 1 day off, which was great! flights, hotel, meals, uber, everything perfect and generous. (waiting for the expense compensation yet though!).
Started with recruiter for about 30 minutes. She gave me a tour of the building and gave me some hints about the interviews such as use "I" as opposed to "we". She asked me how prepared I was, I said almost nothing. She tried to sell the job then... Amazon is a big company, it's not fair to generalize a bad working experience in one team to all departments and teams. I truly believe the first and second line of reports shape the team experience.
The building was very big with a few employees in. Almost all rooms were empty. Fresh coffee, tea, etc. was available but nobody was around. Even at noon only one person was having his lunch. I got a feeling that many were working from home or perhaps Amazon needs more people to fill the HQ positions!
I trust the team wisdom to figure out if I could be a good fit for their team.
They focused a lot on my past experiences. To my surprise I did not get any behavioural questions like "tell me about a time ...". I did not get any questions re scaling either which is one of my expertise areas.
I asked some good questions which helped me learn about the company. For example there is no centralized change management process apparently. Following ownership culture, every team can go and apply a change to systems. At times it can be messy when more than one team is supporting a system. One of the interviewers seemed frustrated about the process because he/she recalled an incident that amazon.com was down for an hour. Apparently the impact was not that bad as many customers assumed their own internet had problem and tried again later!
Also there is no concept of enterprise architecture (again my expertise!). Every team works like a start-up. When they need a system they go and build it as opposed to reusing the existing ones. Understandably EA slows things down sometimes so many companies get rid of it as opposed to optimizing it to improve time to market.
Another observation I had was the fact everybody except a sr manager (in his 50s perhaps and very nice knowledgeable guy btw) was with Amazon less than 2 years including the hiring manager who had joined from Microsoft (again very nice knowledgeable guy!). That tells me amazon has a challenge to keep its resources. Maybe that's why they offer a generous bonus which can be cashed 5% first year, 10% the second, 40% third year, 40% fourth year. It was not hard to guess most of the interviewers were waiting for the fourth year! :)
I have a feeling it was not an easy decision to reject me because it took 9 days to arrive on a decision and let me know after a thank-you note + 2 follow-up emails. but it could be the busy schedule of the recruiter who did not get a chance to get back to me earlier! Except some special cases, if you don't get the offer in 3 days, you can assume you were not their first choice. so even if they had offered me a job, it would not be a very attractive offer BELIEVE ME! ;)
