I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Feb 2022
Interview
I applied through a referral and a recruiter reached out. I had a phone screen with the recruiter. The recruiter was very unprofessional during the interview. We first discussed my experience and what projects I was working on at my current company. I explained at a high level the project and my contributions to it. Then the recruiter proceeded to inform me about how inexperienced I was because of my explanation and that he "actually knows about tech."
Then he asked if I was applying at any other companies. I responded by saying that yes I was and then he went on to say how terrible these companies are with regard to their compensation, corporate culture, and technologies.
The general screening questions continued, but during one of my responses, he proceeded to wash his dishes during the interview and would also intermittently curse whenever he spoke. It seemed that during the entirety of this interview he either did not care about the interview or about what he was doing.
While he provided great advice during the interview, his behavior and demeanor outweighed the great advice and I requested to have my application withdrawn because of it.
The interview process started with a screening round featuring one LeetCode medium problem and an SQL challenge. This was followed by a comprehensive onsite with five rounds: a LeetCode coding challenge, an SQL assessment, a system design interview, a hiring manager conversation to evaluate cultural fit, and finally a team matching phase to find the right team.
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.