Several steps. First someone calls for 15min "what is up" questions. Then they schedule phone screening. Then they rescheduled for Thursday but called me on Wednesday. However, they got timing correct, I was home and quickly walked to my computer to take test. That was the online phone tech screening. First a few questions about what you did before in your life. I asked if he wants some specifics instead of whole life story and that helped to not waste our time on staff that is irrelevant at this step. Next was the problem, it was easy problem, described below. I explain exactly the algorithm as it was stupid easy. The only issue I had was that it is in a text editor and day-to-day work you use some IDE that gives you all functions of each object you use. In particular I needed to sort() and I could not remember if the sort function takes call back, lambda or something else in the language I used for the interview. I was recently working with several different languages and each has different syntax for sort. The interviewer did not like that. The I said that I think it takes lambda function with 2 args and returns true/false. He googled and it was not the case for this language. Oh well, I never met a developer who is not using Google nor StackOverflow every day. Another thing is that the interviewer was going on silent and when I had a question he probably was somewhere else and did not answer several times.. Finally at the end he asked if I have questions. I actually wanted to learn more about Amazon. However, he answered first 2 questions in short sentences and then pretty much let me know he does not want to talk any more. Summary: I agree that developers should be tested on algorithm implementation. However, if real IDE is not used then it needs to be in a pseudo language because in nowadays it is pointless to remember all syntax sugar of each language, - IDE does it for you, the same way as we do not code in assembly any more.