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Zappos.com Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Web: www.zappos.com | HQ: Henderson, NV

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Updated May 28, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 4 ratings

3.0

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 4 ratings

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Negative	25%

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2012 (took 1 week)

Recruiter called in a week as basic interview questions such as how weird are you.
The interview only took about 15 minutes.
At the end I asked if I can get any feedback.
She basically said I need to be super excited to join a company like Zappos, and do a lot of research on the company and the position

Interview Questions

How weird are you?

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Helpful Interview?

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2011 in San Francisco, CA (took 2+ weeks)

Round 1 was a phone interview with the hiring manager. That was the pretty standard easy interview that gets your foot in the door at any company. Nothing too difficult was asked, it's mostly about gauging your interest and hearing about the job.

Round 2 is the tricky bit. It's a HR interview that tries to figure out if you're the physical incarnation of their fabled company values. If I were you, I'd have a story ready for each one of them because the interviewer expects you to ramble on and hang yourself if you don't have good answers. I've never talked to a shrink but I got a feeling it is very similar. They ask a lot of deceptively simple questions whose answers probably don't really matter on the surface.

I think round 3 is a technical phone screen; round 4 is a in person interview, and round 5 is a flight to the mothership.

Interview Questions

Tell me about what you've been doing and what was your favorite project.

View Answers (1)

On a scale of 1-10 how weird are you?

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If you could be a superhero which one would you be and why? You can't pick superman, batman, or spiderman.

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Rate yourself from 1-10 on technical skill X and why?

Some of the topics were XHTML, server programming, javascript, hand coding (as opposed to what? feet coding???)

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Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Personality Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

1.0

Very Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2011 in Henderson, NV (took 3 days)

I applied online to this position as i have a very good background and experience with the technologies listed in the job description. I have been contacted by an HR person who went over my resume and she told me they want me to take a code test. We also discussed other typical HR questions. According to the outcome, they may or may not make a phone screening. I accepted the code test which took less than an hour. I sent them a working and tested java code, and gave the most reasonable answers to other java questions, but they did not follow up. I believe I don't fit their cooperate "culture".

Interview Questions

A Java class called Example has the following attributes: String name, int id, String description, List<String> comments. Write a method that takes an instance of the Example class as an argument and returns true if both instances are equivalent at the attribute level. Getters and setters are available for each attribute. Once added, will this method be sufficient to use Example as a key value in a Map? If not, what else is required?

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In a standard SQL query, it is necessary to retrieve rows where the column id is equal to 2, 4, 6, and 8 in the item table. Give two ways in which these values can be searched for without using IN. Explain the pros and cons of each way.

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In your own words, explain why a class such as String cannot be extended. Why would you want to do this in your own code and how would you do it?

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Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Jul 2010 in Henderson, NV (took 3 days)

i had a phone call with an HR person to start. That followed with a phone call with two engineers who gave me basic programming questions and experience probing. Then I was flown into their headquarters for a full day of interviews. The day started at 8a with an hour long tour of the facilities (which is quite the experience), then starting at 9a i had a series of interviews with two people rotating in every hour. At noon I went to lunch with several people (which iI found out afterward was actually part of the interview) and the interviews continued in the afternoon. These interviews were very technical in nature including logic problems, whiteboard coding and even coding a solution in Java on a computer. The day ended with standard HR interviews to make sure I wasn't a serial killer or whatever.

Interview Questions

Describe an example of a project you were on that failed and why did it fail.

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Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Skills Test and a Background Check.