Getting ready for an interview at Amazon? Especially if you are applying for a job as a product manager, engineer, or some similar technical/creative role, you might have read around to try to learn more tips about the interview process.
In the process, you might have read about the very tough puzzle questions which have been given to applicants in the past. You might well be quite worried about facing these notoriously difficult tests of reasoning.
In this article, we run through what these kinds of questions are, where they come from, how they have been used and why. We also cover how these kinds of interview questions have been controversial for the tech industry in general, as well as how the interview format has changed in recent years, so you might not have to worry about these puzzles as much you thought…
1. Brainteasers
Amazon used to have a reputation alongside other big-name tech firms for making applicants solve very difficult puzzles or somewhat abstract problems. These questions were close relatives of the “brainteasers” and estimation questions that had formerly been used by high-end management consulting firms for decades before, and indeed the Fermi-style estimation questions beloved of physicists and interviewers for certain top universities.
You have probably seen examples of these kinds of questions online — examples that might or might not have come from real interviews are often shared on social media as fun tests.
A couple of fairly cliché examples would be the following:
- How many golf balls will fit inside an airliner?
- What is the distance between two 10m poles with a 10m string draped between them such that the lowest point of the string hangs 5m from the ground?
1.1. Utility
So, why ask these strange kinds of questions at all? Why not stick to more traditional job interview questions.
The primary reason for asking these kinds of questions is that they let an interviewer get a very direct view of your reasoning abilities and general intelligence.
In doing so, these kinds of more abstract questions are also a great leveler. For many roles at Amazon, what matters more than the particular degree or previous degree an applicant has is that they are cognitively able and can creatively think through issues. However, when applicants do indeed have all manner of disparate resumes, then it can be hard to come up with more practical questions which do not put those who happen to have prior knowledge of one area or another at an advantage.
In short, Amazon wants clever recruits who can think outside the box to solve problems and are happy for the right individual to pick up some of the specifics on the job. Brainteaser-style questions should be a good way of assessing this in a way that controls for the different backgrounds applicants might have.
Notably, these kinds of puzzle questions were used in management consulting and university interviews well before the tech giants like Amazon ever came to be (remember when local bookshops used to exist?).
1.2. Controversy
Often these will be some shade of “trick” question, with a counterintuitive answer (as with the string question above…).
This can already seem somewhat unfair and cruel to give candidates. Such puzzles are fun to solve amongst friends when nothing is at stake beyond bragging rights but will be immensely stressful in an interview situation when the whole course of one’s career hangs in the balance.
Some commentators have even claimed that, where they are used by tech firms and the like, they were more about projecting mystique and the superiority of the interviewer over the applicant than about actually sorting talent.
Of course, these kinds of ethical questions can be argued both ways — an interviewer might reasonably claim that if they are interviewing for a high-stress job that requires problem-solving under pressure, then these kinds of questions are perfectly reasonable to include.
In general, these kinds of questions can often seem a little eccentric, especially when deployed in a job interview as opposed to an academic setting. Beyond concerns that they are “cruel”, there are more pragmatically valid criticisms that some puzzles might not be very good at sorting applicants as intended.
Particularly where brainteasers are more like “trick” questions, it might be random whether two candidates of equal ability happen to “get it” or not within the interview time. Imagine the sinking feeling of realizing how easy it was on the way out of the building! Luck is not a great way to pick out the best talent.
2. Changing Times
However, this reputation for brainteasers is a little out of date at this point. In recent years, Amazon has been moving away from a heavy emphasis on these kinds of questions to more direct assessments of the specific skills required for particular roles.
Indeed, this mirrors their recruiting forerunners in the management consulting sphere, who had long since discarded brainteasers and moved to administer realistic case studies in interviews to simulate the real tasks associated with the job.
This avoids some of the disadvantages around puzzle questions, whilst helping to give the interviewer very direct insight into how you will perform in the day-to-day tasks of the role you are applying for.
3. The Exception That Proves the Rule
If you were worried about running into this kind of puzzle question in your Amazon interview, then this article so far will have been fairly reassuring.
However, it must be emphasized that whilst Amazon has indeed moved away from these questions as a dominant feature of interviews, this move remains only one of degree. Thus, whilst the majority of the interview will be spent on more conventional questions covering your specific skills for the job and your fit with Amazon, there is still some utility for interviewers in including puzzles to test how you think, as described above.
This might only come up as a smaller part of one interview, depending on the role you apply for, but is something you should expect.
So, in short, you shouldn’t let brainteasers, puzzle questions, and the like worry you unduly if you are applying to Amazon. However, you should put in some time to practice them nonetheless, as they might well come up at some point in the interview process and you should be prepared!
