I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Aug 2017
Interview
The process took a grotesquely long time to begin with. Originally, a recruiter reached out to me about interviewing with them, so I applied to one position. Getting the phone screen even scheduled took weeks because the recruiter was so unresponsive. After the phone screen, it took 3 weeks to get any feedback because it turned out that they thought I'd be a better fit for a different position than I applied for, but that position wasn't open yet, and the recruiter just didn't bother to tell me in a reasonable amount of time. A few months later, they reached out to me again to tell me that the position opened up and they wanted me to interview for it, so I accepted.
When I finally did the in-person interview, most of the people I spoke with were friendly, except one of the coding module interviewers, who was pretty rude. He was 10 mins late, and was looking at his laptop, obviously doing something else while I was coding my answer to his question. It was very clear that he was totally disinterested in doing the interview. The other coding module interviewer was nice and personable, but asked a question that had a shaky basis to begin with, and the interviewer's answer to the question was just totally wrong.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers, write a function that will produce a random permutation of the input array.
Given two linked lists that could potentially have a merge—i.e., at some point during one of the linked lists, the next node is a node in the other list—write an algorithm that determines if two lists merge or not. The lists could also potentially contain a cycle—i.e., an element can loop back around to the head.
Interviewed for an SDE role. The process was well-organized and the recruiters were responsive throughout. That said, the technical rounds were significantly more challenging than expected — definitely come prepared to go deep. Overall a valuable experience regardless of the outcome.
That was a real stroke of luck — when I got to the coding round and encountered a question on finding the maximum subarray sum, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com a few days earlier. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview. It was intense, especially with the focus on algorithms and data structures. I also faced some behavioral questions that challenged my experience. After a final onsite round, I received an offer and happily accepted. Overall, it was tough but rewarding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an integer array nums, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum and return its sum. Walk through Kadane's algorithm and explain the O(n) approach.
Overall, a good interview process and the team were very friendly during the interview process and it was very good and pleasant. Nothing in regard to negative feedback or anything as such like that.