The interview process started with a phone call, followed by a first-round DSA question, which I answered perfectly. This led to the final round, which had four parts: two DSA questions, a system design section, two more DSA questions, and a conversation with the hiring managers.
After the interview, I felt confident about my performance on the DSA questions, as I ran test cases, explained my thought process clearly, and addressed complexities in detail. The hiring managers were also engaged and expressed a lot of interest. They even mentioned that I was the first candidate to talk about their employee values in such depth.
However, the system design interview was drastically different from what I was led to expect. The company's preparation materials, including their official prep videos, outlined a process where system design would involve using a whiteboard to draw high-level architecture, discuss trade-offs, and cover both functional and non-functional requirements. In contrast, during the actual interview, the system design interviewers showed no interest from the start. They seemed unprepared, and the question itself was not even properly formulated. As I asked for clarification on functional requirements, they kept changing the goalposts.
I was ready with a whiteboard as instructed, but they explicitly told me not to use it or any other visual aids, and to only talk through the design verbally. Furthermore, the question posed wasn’t even relevant to system design as advertised — it focused on OS development, which had no connection to the role I was applying for. Despite doing my best to adapt and explain my approach, the interviewers rushed through this section, making it clear they were more interested in ending it quickly than in a thoughtful discussion.
To make things worse, the recruiter tried ghosting me, and I had to send multiple emails just to get a response. Even after that, they never provided any feedback. LinkedIn should DO BETTER.
The system design experience has been extremely unprofessional, disorganized, and frustrating. It reflects poorly on LinkedIn’s hiring process, and I expected much more from a company of this caliber.
