Recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn, set up a technical phone screen. Interviewer had a strong accent and it was hard to understand him. There was a lot of noise on the call (people talking in the background) which was very distracting. The interviewer asked me to start coding before I had finished brainstorming an optimal solution. The code was not as elegant as it could be, but it was O(n) and constant space, which is the best time and space complexity for the problem I was given. I ended up finishing early and the interviewer asked me if I could make the solution more elegant. I started brainstorming again and he told me to stop, leaving 10 minutes for questions.
I got a message from the recruiter saying that it wasn't a good match at this time. I asked for additional feedback but received no response to my email.
Main reasons for rating this a negative experience:
-Interviewer asked me to start coding before I had developed an optimal solution; there was still plenty of time
-There was a lot of background noise and talking during the call, which was very distracting
-He cut the interview short when there was still time remaining, instead of giving me the time to optimize further
-The recruiter ignored my last email, was not more transparent about the reasons it wasn't a good match
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at LinkedIn (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
Got a phone interview with linkedin. The interviewer had a heavy chinese accent even though he had been with linkedin for over 10 years. the call started on an awkward note when i walked my interviewer through my professional background. i had spent 10 min talking about it and was eager to start the coding part but the interviewer insisted on spending yet another 10 mins on my background. in my experience, phone interviews are focused on writing code but apparently not for this gentleman.
when finally we moved to the coding part, the questions themselves were fairly easy however, the interviewer had a hard time understanding the difference between hashmap contains and hashmap add methods' time complexity. since both of them are constant time operations, i opined that the difference between using one over the other was purely semantic but the interviewer did not seem to understand what that word meant and asked me why I thought using add was better than using contains. we argued about this for over 5 mins. finally, when i had a working implementation, the interviewer did not seem convinced it would work, so i had to map out the entire function call stack for him, on a shared screen. at the end he begrudgingly accepted that the code looked ok.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
lowest common ancestor in binary tree, given two nodes
1. if the node class had a parent pointer
2. if the node class did not have a parent pointer
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Mar 2018
Interview
My interviewer (who says he has a Ruby and Java background) was claiming that Ruby modules are interfaces (like in Java) and seemed annoyed that I didn't agree. I told him that Ruby modules are ways of grouping methods to be shared between classes whereas Java interfaces are specifications of class behavior . Furthermore, because Java is statically typed, interfaces can be used in method signatures. But because Ruby is dynamically typed, you don't need to specify the type of a method's arguments. Another reason why Ruby modules aren't like Java interfaces.
My interviewer seemed annoyed that I brought these points up. Perhaps he meant that modules are the interfaces of Ruby in a more general or abstract sense, but if so, he should have elaborated more on why. Instead, he was just dead silent after I made my points.
If he's a reflection of LinkedIn's engineering culture, then I say it was a bullet dodged.