Initial Communication: I received an email from HR stating that I would be contacted by the hiring manager. HR had set up 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 about team size, type, and complexity of projects managed. They also asked questions about my team and how I managed low performers. Questions were posed about technology challenges faced by Expedia and what my recommendations would be. The interview went well, and since I was working at Amazon as a manager, I did not find the questions hard or unnecessary.

After two to three days, I was invited for an onsite interview at their Bellevue HQ. The process went smoothly; I checked in, received a name tag, and was awaiting my first interviewer. Instead, I was met by HR, who informed me there had been a change of plans and I would be meeting a separate set of people. No biggie! Having been part of the interviewing process at Amazon, I know this happens.

The first interview: The first gentleman I met was a senior developer who had recently become a manager. He did not introduce himself, did not give me his name or what he did, and just came into the room. He asked me how I would write the code to find all common entries in two sets.

(Wow! Expedia, you need to have formal training for your interviewers because this is very unprofessional, 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. It wasn't very challenging. He seemed annoyed that I solved the question in two minutes flat. He then proceeded to ask me questions about the Dev QA relationship.

Second Interview: This 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 why I was looking for a change, as what I was doing seemed much more interesting to him.

Third Interview: This was with a director of test who was filling in for my manager. She seemed nice, and we had a good discussion about the role of QA at Amazon. I also ate my lunch during this interview.

Fourth Interview: This 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 processes and what we did to ensure high TP system SLAs were met.

Fifth Interview: This was with a principal SDET. He seemed like a sharp guy but unfortunately a terrible interviewer. He started off by introducing himself and proceeded to ask a question around an efficiency algorithm. The question was as follows:

Given a method that 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%, and 60% full. It should return (10+20+30+40 = 100%), (50+50 = 100%), and 10%.

We went through various ways to test it and how we could 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 a QA interview at Expedia. He seemed nice overall.

Sixth and Final Interview: This was with a test manager. He seemed like a nice guy and asked me to test an API for him. He simply asked me to think up as many test cases as I could. The interview went fine.

I was done with my in-house interviews after this and left the office. I did not hear from them for the next three weeks, after which they informed me that they did not want to proceed with the offer.

The question around the efficiency algorithm I have posted above.