Initial Communication: I got an e-mail from the HR that I would be contacted by the hiring manager. The HR had setup a one hour phone interview with the manager.
First Phone Interview: The interview was a mix of soft and technical skills. The manager asked questions around team size, type and complexity of projects managed. Asked questions around my team and how did I managed low performers. Questions were around technology challenges faced by Expedia and what would be my recommendations for the same. The interview went well and since I was working in Amazon as a manager, i did not find the questions hard or un-necessary
After two to three days, I was invited over for an onsite interview at their Bellevue HQ. The process went smoothly, I checked in, got name tagged and was awaiting my first interviewer.
Instead I was met by the HR who informed me that there was a change of plan and that I would be meeting a separate set of people. No biggie, having been part of interviewing process at Amazon, I know this happens!!!!
The first interview: The first gentlemen I met, was a senior dev who had recently become a manager. He did not introduce himself, did not give me his name or what he did, just came into the room asked me how would I write the code to find all common entries in two sets.
(Wow!!!! Expedia, you need to have formal training of your interviewers cause this is very un-professional, never-mind being rude!)
I asked, if I could use HashSets, to which he replied I could, I simply wrote the code where I iterated through the first set and looked for the entries in the other one. Not much challenging. He seemed annoyed that I solved the question in two minutes flat. He then proceeded to ask me questions around Dev QA relationship.
Second Interview: Was with a program manager who asked me about the last bit of code I had written and then proceeded to ask me about the project and my role in it. He asked me why I was looking for a change cause what I was doing seemed way more interesting to him :)
Third Interview: Was with a director of test who was filling in for my manager. She seemed nice and we had a good discussion around the role of QA at Amazon. I also ate my lunch during this interview
Fourth Interview: Was with the director of technology. A great guy and an absolute delight to talk to. I had a great discussion with him and quite frankly the most relaxing and interesting interview of the day. We discussed technology and QA process and what we did to ensure a high TP system SLAs were met.
Fifth Interview: Was with a principal SDET. He seemed like a sharp guy but unfortunately a terrible interviewer. He started off with introducing himself and proceeded to ask a question around an efficiency algorithm. The question was as follows:
Given a method which takes in an array of numbers, where each number indicates the level of a wine barrel, the method outputs the most efficient set of barrels that can be returned which are full or near full.
Example: We pass six barrels with them being 10 20 30 40 50 60 percent full, it should return (10+20+30+40 = 100), (50+50 = 100) and 10.
We went through various ways to test it and how can we ensure the system was calculating it correctly, but he was looking for just one answer which I did not know. It is called "Answer Based Testing". Read up on it if you ever go for QA interview at Expedia. He seemed nice overall.
Sixth and Final Interview: Was a test manager. He seemed like a nice guy and asked me to test an API for him. Simply asked me to think up of as many test cases as I can. The interview went fine.
I was done with me in-house after this and left the office. I did not hear from them for next next three weeks after which they informed me that they did not wanted to proceed with the offer.
