I was hired by Amazon a few years ago and left recently. My initial interview experience doesn't match Mr. Kromin's account well. My experience with the Amazon interview process while at the organization doesn't match well either.

The main missing detail from Kromin's account is "leadership principles." Amazon is famous for its list of leadership principles. It constantly hammers them home to all employees during performance reviews and peer reviews. It stencils them on the walls of the workplace. Most importantly, it trains interviewers to use these leadership principles as a basis for judging job candidates.

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

Every person participating in an Amazon job interview is assigned one or two leadership principles on which to assess candidates. The interviewers are very open about this and their questions dealing with the principles are very clear. The recruiters explicitly tell job candidates to read the list and prepare answers that deal with each one.

Since the Amazon leadership principles are non-technical, perhaps Mr. Kromin considered them too trivial to mention. But considering the obsessive emphasis these ideas were given during every Amazon job interview I saw over the past two years, I find the omission odd. I'm not questioning the facts of this account -- I'm merely suggesting that they are so vague as to make it impossible for anyone to judge the nature of the experience.