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A vaguest ion that was asked in a very general way, but which the interviewer clearly had specific answers he was looking for: "what are four components that are included in every specification doc". That sounded a lot like a thing you would find at Microsoft and similar large companies where process is more strictly defined. I answered poorly, I think, perhaps because I haven't worked with that kind of spec in a very long time, and not on any projects that worked out well. Smaller orgs/programs/projects (startups and incubators, for example, where the outcome is always in flux, as I am accustomed to working with) can have poor specs, specs that are centered on marketing, planning documents that are made up of wireframes and time-based stage gates. In any case, I choked a bit, and the interview kind of skated around and became more specific as we went along. I don't think that is inappropriate, though, because Amazon does value and expect the ability to deal with ambiguity.
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Senior Technical Program Manager

Interviewed at Amazon

3.5
Dec 4, 2012

A vaguest ion that was asked in a very general way, but which the interviewer clearly had specific answers he was looking for: "what are four components that are included in every specification doc". That sounded a lot like a thing you would find at Microsoft and similar large companies where process is more strictly defined. I answered poorly, I think, perhaps because I haven't worked with that kind of spec in a very long time, and not on any projects that worked out well. Smaller orgs/programs/projects (startups and incubators, for example, where the outcome is always in flux, as I am accustomed to working with) can have poor specs, specs that are centered on marketing, planning documents that are made up of wireframes and time-based stage gates. In any case, I choked a bit, and the interview kind of skated around and became more specific as we went along. I don't think that is inappropriate, though, because Amazon does value and expect the ability to deal with ambiguity.

You have an array randomly filled with red, blue and green items. How do you order this list so the red items are at the beginning, followed by the blue ones, followed by the green ones? The algorithm should be in-place (no extra storage, or only constant extra storage) and the algorithm should only walk threw the array once (every position can only be read once).
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Programmer

Interviewed at IG Group

2.9
Feb 27, 2010

You have an array randomly filled with red, blue and green items. How do you order this list so the red items are at the beginning, followed by the blue ones, followed by the green ones? The algorithm should be in-place (no extra storage, or only constant extra storage) and the algorithm should only walk threw the array once (every position can only be read once).

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