questions asked in Amazon interviews

Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, selling everything from books to shampoo, and lots of people want to work there.

We looked through Glassdoor's massive index of user-submitted interview questions for prospective employees to find the most thought-provoking ones asked at Amazon.

1. Who was your most difficult customer?
2. How would you introduce AWS in an elevator pitch?
3. What is the worst mistake you ever made?
4. If your direct manager was instructing you to do something you disagreed with, how would you handle it?
5. Describe what Human Resource means to you.
6. What is the angle between the hour hand and minute hand in an analog clock?
7. How do you detect whether or not a word is a palindrome?
8. Do you know our CEO? How do you pronounce his name?
9. Here's a string with numbers from 1-250 in random order, but it's missing one number. How will you find the missed number?
10. What would you do if somehow you misdirected 10,000 units of something?
11. Are you willing to work on your feet for ten hours, four days a week?
12. Do you think you'll reach a point where you storm off the floor and never return?
13. Would you tell on a employee for stealing?
14. How would you solve problems if you were from Mars?
15. How do you persuade people?
16. Describe what happens in your browser as soon as you hit enter after writing a URL in the address bar.
17. Tell the story of the last time you had to apologize to someone.
18. Walk me through how Amazon Kindle books would be priced.
19. What would you do if you saw someone being unsafe at work?
20. How would you improve Amazon's website?
21. You have 30 people working under you with 2 working indirect. Each employee can do 150 units/hour. Each work day has two 15 min breaks and one 30 min lunch. In a 5 day work week, how many total units can you complete?
22. What is the most difficult situation you have ever faced in your life? How did you handle it?
23. How would you tell a customer what Wi-Fi is?
24. You are Amazon and Samsung offers you 10,000 Samsung Galaxy S3s at a 34% discount. Is that a good deal?
25. Design an online payment system.
26. Give me an example of a time when you were 75% of the way through a project, and you had to pivot strategy -- how were you able to make that into a success story?
27. Should we sell private label cleaning products?
28. What would you do if you found out that your closest friend at work was stealing?
29. Which Amazon leadership principle do you resonate most with?