I had a phone interview with Amazon in 2009, when I was between jobs. The interviewer asked me to write out a binary sort function in my preferred language.
Now, I can describe a binary sort in pseudo-code pretty well, but it's been a long time since school (a lot longer for me than for the interviewer, I suspect) and I suggested I just describe what a binary sort was and we could move on, but he stubbornly insisted that I do the scripted exercise.
I then asked, is this type of coding a requirement of the job, because that's not really my strength, and he seemed to become rather irritated. I terminated the interview, and sent a complaint about this kid to the Amazon recruiter who set up the interview (never heard back, obviously).
I'm terrible at writing code in interviews or answering quiz type questions. I'm much more comfortable with top-down types of scenarios--how would you approach this problem, what tools would you use, what languages, sketch out a solution for us, how would you test, what's your documentation style, what version control system do you like to use, etc. I like telling war stories from previous jobs--weird problems I've had to solve, interesting challenges, and so forth. I enjoy talking to people, and usually in these sorts of open ended interviews, I do pretty well.
The OP seemed uncertain about going to this interview in the first place; he had a pretty good situation, he doesn't really like the interview process and is not that comfortable with that type of social situation. He didn't like breaking his routine, either. Therefore, it's not too surprising if his lack of enthusiasm came across.
What's inexcusable is for him to have invested all that time, and for them to have invested all that time, and not to give him the courtesy of a one liner email followup, especially after a verbal offer was made. Annoying, but not at all uncommon. It's happened to me, too; I remember in particular an all day interview at GTE, a verbal offer, then nothing. The only thing you can do is just shrug it off and move on.
(If it's any consolation, I've cut back on Amazon orders since they started charging state sales tax where I live. I philosophically disagree with the "use tax" concept (a whole debate for another time) so I just switch to buydig or ebay or newegg or whoever else is still tax-free. As it turns out, though, AMZN still has the lower price in many cases, so I might still order from them, though sometimes I can get it from an Amazon Marketplace Seller for less.)
Nice trick to use in these situations; Give them an arbitraririly hard question to solve, too. As a general rule, I've found the people most willing to whip these kinds of questions on you in an interview are the least able to solve one when put on the spot themselves...It's a bit of an aggressive counter-move, but the power-reversal can make them think twice about dismissing you out of hand...
For what it's worth, I think it's totally reasonable to ask a software engineer candidate to implement a binary sort, even if the candidate has to derive the particulars of the algorithm from first principles. If the candidate can't implement something as well-understood as a binary sort, how are they going to perform when given a totally novel problem that no one has ever solved before?
If anything, the problem with that as an interview question is that it is too obvious and common, and will not do a good job distinguishing between a strong candidate and someone who crammed for the interview and happened to practice that particular problem.
Now, I can describe a binary sort in pseudo-code pretty well, but it's been a long time since school (a lot longer for me than for the interviewer, I suspect) and I suggested I just describe what a binary sort was and we could move on, but he stubbornly insisted that I do the scripted exercise.
I then asked, is this type of coding a requirement of the job, because that's not really my strength, and he seemed to become rather irritated. I terminated the interview, and sent a complaint about this kid to the Amazon recruiter who set up the interview (never heard back, obviously).
I'm terrible at writing code in interviews or answering quiz type questions. I'm much more comfortable with top-down types of scenarios--how would you approach this problem, what tools would you use, what languages, sketch out a solution for us, how would you test, what's your documentation style, what version control system do you like to use, etc. I like telling war stories from previous jobs--weird problems I've had to solve, interesting challenges, and so forth. I enjoy talking to people, and usually in these sorts of open ended interviews, I do pretty well.
The OP seemed uncertain about going to this interview in the first place; he had a pretty good situation, he doesn't really like the interview process and is not that comfortable with that type of social situation. He didn't like breaking his routine, either. Therefore, it's not too surprising if his lack of enthusiasm came across.
What's inexcusable is for him to have invested all that time, and for them to have invested all that time, and not to give him the courtesy of a one liner email followup, especially after a verbal offer was made. Annoying, but not at all uncommon. It's happened to me, too; I remember in particular an all day interview at GTE, a verbal offer, then nothing. The only thing you can do is just shrug it off and move on.
(If it's any consolation, I've cut back on Amazon orders since they started charging state sales tax where I live. I philosophically disagree with the "use tax" concept (a whole debate for another time) so I just switch to buydig or ebay or newegg or whoever else is still tax-free. As it turns out, though, AMZN still has the lower price in many cases, so I might still order from them, though sometimes I can get it from an Amazon Marketplace Seller for less.)