My Amazon Interview Horror Story
As someone who is soon to graduate in CS from an university, these seemingly       
reoccurring stories of terrible interviews really scare me.<p>Is it normal for the interviewing process to take up all the candidates            
day? Is it always expected to spend 3 weeks brushing up on algorithms for an       
interview?<p>How important are the coding interviews in the decision process? I consider        
myself a decent programmer, and I have passed and even enjoyed all the algorithmics
courses at my university. However, asking me to implement, lets say, the Minimum Cut 
algorithm on a whiteboard in front of multiple interviewers, would totally break
me down.<p>From my limited professional experience, the average day of a developer is the  
exact opposite of what you have to display at these interviews I read about.       
When I code, I need my silence and time to think, I need a relaxing and            
comfortable environment, I need the internet, man-pages, StackOverflow, IRC. I   
need my own notepad on which I can doodle, and occasionally write down notes for 
later. I need room to make and learn from my mistakes. And last but not least,  
I will have bad days where I might underperform.                                                        
Interviews seem to be the exact opposite of all this.