I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Jun 2022
Interview
Hands-down the worst interview experience I've had in several years. It was so bad & discouraging, that I heavily considered just dropping from the Zoom call. Interview here if you want to thicken your skin a bit before you interview with the company that you actually want to work for.
Started off with a lot of low-level trivia around memory allocation, concurrency, OS's, etc. If I was unsure at all or did not know/remember the topic well enough to answer, my interviewer would make snide remarks, like, "You don't know about ? Okay, well that's pretty fundamental... So what do you know?". Really set the tone for the rest of the interview.
Q#1: After trivia, it was onto a list-based LC easy/medium. I hadn't spent a ton of time on lists so it took me a bit longer to think out some solutions. While thinking through different approaches, my interviewer asked, "is this question hard for you?" with an incredulous tone. When I came up with a brute force, O(n^2), solution (something is better than nothing - was planning to optimize from there), the interviewer & his trainee/shadower actually laughed & asked if I understood why it was O(n^2). Started feeling like I was being made fun of at this point. Deserved or not due to my anxiety & unpreparedness, it's incredibly disrespectful & gave me a glimpse into the culture at LinkedIn.
Q#2: They quickly hurried me along to another question, LC medium, based on backtracking & DP. I did better on this question as I studied these topics more recently...but at this point they had crushed my spirit and all willingness to work at LinkedIn. I heavily considered just ending the interview here but figured it was good practice & to stick it out.
The cherry on top of this whole terrible experience was the final 5 minutes after getting a backtracking solution in place for question #2. He snarkily asked "look, we have about 10 minutes left. You can ask us questions... if you really want...".
Ultimately, this was an incredibly discouraging & humiliating experience. I was able to quickly laugh it off but others could easily take more personal offense. I have no doubt that my interviewers were smart, perhaps even brilliant! However, the lack of tact that they displayed hinted at some toxic elitism.
I absolutely would not want to work at LinkedIn if the culture resembles a fraction of this interview experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What's a semaphore & how is it used?
How does virtual memory work?
What is the difference between a stack & heap (memory allocation)?
It was phone technical screen. Asked some general BQ and some leetcode questions, similar to past experiences. Be sure to watch your timing and explain your solutions faster. Just practice more LinkedIn tagged leetcode questions and try several solutions to each problem. BQ is pretty basic, don't think BQ matter that much for phone screen.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Bengaluru) in May 2022
Interview
There were 6 rounds of interviews including the screening round. The rounds were fairly decent and the interviewers were friendly.
I really appreciated the hiring manager round and the high level design round as the interviewers were logical and the discussion was nice.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical phone screen (1 hour):
https://leetcode.com/problems/repeated-dna-sequences/
A lot of cross-questioning around memory. Bitwise answer expected
Given weights such as (a,b,c) for heights of a tree. Print the final answer evaluating an expression such as
a(sum of all at height 0) + b(sum of all at height 1) + .....
Data Structures (Round 1)
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/the-celebrity-problem/
One more LinkedList + Heap question (don't exactly remember)
Data Structures (Round 2)
Order tree nodes in the order in which they will fall. Child nodes fall first, then parent nodes fall whose child nodes have already fallen.
https://leetcode.com/problems/max-stack/
System Design
Design a system that is responsible to determine the trending posts for the last 10 mins, 1 hour, and 24 hours. Extended discussion around several approaches. In-depth analysis of tech choices. In the end, an extension was added - what if the number of times a post is shared is clubbed with the type of post, posting person, sentiment, and topic to determine the trending posts.
Technical Communication
Choose a project you've previously worked on in-depth. I was asked to choose one where we can have a 40-45 mins discussion. The interview went for ~80 mins and the interviewer asked the most minute of questions on tech choice, teamwork, time and resource management, stakeholder communication, and conflicts.
Hiring Manager
Lots of behavioral questions. Some that I remember are
Why are you looking for a change?
How to handle conflicts in the team?
What in your opinion is your biggest achievement?