I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2015
Interview
Had one technical phone screen which was easy. Then was called onsite for a set of 5 rounds. It was a long day of interviews. The interviewer in the first algorithm round had a fixed solution in his head and could not accept any other solution and was always trying to force me to move towards how he thinks the problem should be solved rather than what I was doing, he had no interest in my solution and I know my solution was right because I had solved that problem before and had confirmed it with online solutions and new all the ways of doing it. The second algorithms round was a dynamic programming round and to my surprise one of the interviewers had no clue about DP and was constantly arguing with me and the other interviewer saying that my solution was wrong. However the first interviewer understood my solution and agreed with what I was doing and was trying to explain to the other interviewer that my approach was different but most optimal( I was doing a bottom up DP where as he only knew how to do Top down which is recursion with memoization). After 30 mins of explaining to the second interviewer, he still couldnt get what is bottom up DP. I was very disappointed with Linked in on this. They should send interviewers who know their stuff or atleast what they are asking..lol. The design round was not a typical design round, instead of having a discussion with what's right and wrong with my design, he just asked me a series of questions and got done with the interview, I felt as if he was just assessing my answers based on what he had in mind. The manager round was good and relaxed. The last round i.e technical communication doesnt make any sense as everything is already covered in the manager round. I guess I just had a bad day on my luck with weird interviewers
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.