3 telephone interviews spaced across 3 weeks.
Three different managers asked me various questions, mainly getting at temperament, experience, skills. There were also questions aimed at general problem-solving approach, and engineering values.
I was asked to "prep" on Amazon's core values, and given some URL's that contained documents that went into detail. But there was nothing in the interview that really dealt with those.
The skills questions were not necessarily "difficult" but were more to test rote recall than anything else. The basic mismatch was that the position was billed as a "Systems Engineer" which is usually more of a generalist, skills-wise, and they asked very narrowly focussed sets of questions regarding specific solutions to specific problems that were outside of my area of expertise. In my view, a Systems Engineer doesn't have specific things memorized, but has a good enough understanding of technology that they can take on a broad variety of tasks, and drill-down where necessary to accomplish the goal. This was not what A2Z was looking for for that position.
Ultimately, the position was not a good fit, and we mutually agreed to terminate the interview process. It was a great experience, and it was good for me to do it. I'm not sure that I feel that it exposed any particular skills deficiency, but it gave me a better idea of the direction in which I need to focus my improvement objectives. Maybe I wasted some of their time; but when you're interviewing multiple candidates, it's good to get a range so you can compare, so they benefitted in that way.
