I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Jul 2015
Interview
Contacted by their recruiter. Next day had a call with her, and within 24 hours they scheduled a phone interview for the next week. Smooth and clear, no hiccups.
Phone interview was with one of their junior SWE, he was very nice and polite. We briefly talked about each others' past and current projects and went straight to the coding. Was not that hard after all, I just did not have a practice of that sort of interactive coding. The guy, again, was polite, few times gave me some small hints. At the end he confirmed that I did it correct.
Recruiter contacted me next morning and asked for another phone call with more senior team members. Going to do it next week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Task was for using different data structures in Java Collections framework.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Jul 2015
Interview
Linkedin is hiring like crazy right now - on the particular random day I arrived, there were at least 10 other applicants hanging around the receptionist's desk. They sent me a solicitation on linkedin (no surprise), and I followed up and had a technical phone screen quickly scheduled. They then flew me out to interview on-site about a week later and put me up in a really nice hotel. They gave me a gift bag on arrival, and the whole process felt really comfortable, which is unusual for an interview. I interviewed with something like 11 people total, some alone, and some in groups of 2. Half of those interviews were about demonstrating programming skills on a whiteboard, the other half were for demonstrating "design" skills (abstractly designing systems). There was a break in the middle for lunch in their giant, excellent cafeteria.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have a potentially very-large set of documents, which are potentially very-large, and contain text. For searching these documents, they've been pre-processed into a (very-large) table mapping words to the set of documents that contain each word. E.g.
(word) : (documents (referenced by ID) containing that word)
Apple: 1, 4, 5, 6, 32
Banana: 5, 6, 7, 9, 32
Cantaloupe: 1, 2, 6
...
Clients will pass in a set of words (e.g. {apple, cantaloupe}), and want the set of document IDs that contain all the words. (e.g. {apple, cantaloupe} -> {1, 6}) Design a distributed system to implement this, bearing in mind that the number of documents, the number of words, and the number of document-IDs-per-word are potentially really, really big.
I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (New York, NY) in Jun 2015
Interview
INterview process was intense- 3 phone interviews, 1 6 pannel interview in person, and then finally you present a 30, 60, 90 day plan on how you would ramp up to speed. very results and data driven.