I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Bengaluru) in Jun 2017
Interview
3 Phone screens. Followed by 5 onsite technical rounds. The interview panel appeared bored, disinterested and strangely full of ego at the bangalore office. The funniest part was the interview by the hiring manager. He appeared to be completely unimpressed by whatever I had to say in the interview often stopping my answers mid way with sarcastic comments. There were many instances in the interview where the manager made me feel like I know little about the team's technical stack and while I agreed I had a learning curve, I was a bit surprised at how a hiring manager would sell his team and project so short to a candidate they are trying to hire. I was offered a job at the end of this painful experience but I received a ton of joy in kicking the offer. I didn't so much as wait for the salary numbers. I flatly declined stating the role was not interesting. Interview panel needs to understand that the candidates are interviewing the company and the culture as well and while LinkedIn has a great office and benefits, this experience made me run away from the idea of working or reporting to a manager with serious attitude problems. LinkedIn, get your act straight. Is this really the work of a "best place to work for?". Some panelists were delightful to interview with. I like a interview that is challenging but also informative and makes me want to work with those team members. Especially the hiring manager round for me is an insight into the future with the team. Even if the manager was trying to put me under stress, this is a big gamble which in his case turned completely upside down for me as I was turned off. If he didnt want me on the team, the offer shouldnt have been rolled out in the first place. Very weird experience. I have interviewed with LinkedIn before with their mountain view teams and save for a difficult interview experience, the panelists were humble and down to earth, a far cry from the bored, boastful Bangalore panelists. Clearly LinkedIn Bangalore has much to learn from their US counterparts in brand building during interviews. I feel like rather than going anonymous on glassdoor, I should have shared this feedback with the recruiter but I decided to not paint all of LinkedIn in the same color due to one panelist's bad attitude. Although, the other panelists werent too great either (save 2). I know LinkedIn is serious about their brand as a employee friendly place so I hope this feedback reaches the right people and I sincerely hope this was an aberration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find 3 numbers in an array, that sum or are closest to given sum.
Culture fit and behavior round: Mostly around past projects and dealing and handling team members in large complex software projects
Onsite:
Find connected islands in a matrix of 1s and 0s
Write approx function for sqrt n
Design a tiny url service
Software craftsmanship - Describe what quality controls do you suggest for a critical highly available service before deploying to production
A very weird managerial round. Most important accomplishment. Do you describe yourself as a leader or a individual contributor? What kind of managerial style do you prefer?
Describe any technical project you worked on in the past. Technical communication round.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Feb 2017
Interview
I applied through employee referral. Got a phone call from recruiter. They were courteous.promptly. They set me for two 1 hour phone screens, one leadership screen, one technical screen. The leadership screen mostly focused on background. Where you came from, what you did + why. Decisions and projects that were difficult to showcase such. The technical screen was a couple questions and one coding exercise.
I thought I did well on coding question. I wrote the code as problem was stated initially. Then the interviewer added further constraints. Other question was to complete some missing implementations in a C++ class.
Leadership was all right.
I pinged the recruiter after 3 days. Next day, she informed that their hiring committee has decided not to go ahead with onsite interview.
It looks like they are looking for a perfect solution during phone screening!
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Jan 2017
Interview
Standard hiring process same as other big tech. companies. First got a phone call from recruiter that explained me what the role was for. Then two 1 hour phone screens: 1st Behavioral and the 2nd Coding interview using collabedit.
2 days after the phone screen I got an email from the recruiter that hiring committee decided not to continue with the on-sit interview round.
Although both phone screens went well, here are the reasons why I am rating this as a negative experience:
1. First interviewer (Behavioral) was 10 minutes late. I had to email the recruiter after I waited for him on BlueJeans for 10 minutes. The interview went well overall. It appeared he was happy with the answers and the background / experience I have.
2. Second interviewer (Coding) was 15 minutes late. The interviewer was constantly coughing throughout the interview. Even though this was a "Staff Software Engineer" interview she asked me a question related to "RAID." Still can't figure out the reason for it. But I was able to answer that question fairly easily as I do have good knowledge of not only Software Engineering but IT infrastructure management and related concerns as well. Then she asked me a few questions about threads, processes and mutex -- all fine and went well. Then she asked me to implement a blocking queue in collebedit. My primary language is C# and the recruiter did say it will just be fine as long as I can use any of these languages: Java, C# or C++. I asked her if I can use C#. She said no since she didn't have an answer for the coding exercise in C#. Even then, I completed the exercise in Java and the solution I implemented was technically pretty sound and that was confirmed by the interviewer. However, I was not given additional 15 minutes to work on the edge cases (even though, it was the interviewer who came in late) or improve the design.
So if the hiring committee made a decision based on this, that would be really unfortunate and injustice actually.
I did reached out to the recruiter asking the reason and also when I can re-apply. Did not get any response from them. I was expecting more from LinkedIn than this in terms of both professionalism and conducting fair interviews.
Note: I have more than 12 years of leadership and hands-on architecture / engineering experience in the Software industry and have worked on many truly enterprise scale projects used by many Fortune 500 and Government entities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lot of questions related to my previous jobs / experiences. Here are the questions from the coding phone screen: What is RAID? What is a difference between a Thread and a Process? What is Mutex? Implement a thread-safe BlockingQueue in Java.