LinkedIn Software Engineer interview questions

I did a technical phone screen (yes, as all have said, the questions are all from here - just prepare Software Engineer, Senior Engineer and Principal Engineer questions and you will be completely covered). Every coding round has two questions - one easy and one difficult. You will need to answer both of them to move forward. The phone screen was done (Solved both the questions in less than 30 mins) and I was invited onsite. The onsite begins with a tour of the office which is nice. The recruiting coordinator was friendly and nice. They gave me a loaner iPad with my schedule for the day. They also gave me a goody bag with a couple snacks and my LinkedIn connection map which was a nice personal touch. I then met with the recruiter for about 15 minutes - general casual talk about my job search. The first round is a host manager round. They question you on each of your prior experiences and ask you why you left that job, what kind of work you did there, how big a team, what was your contribution and so on. The second round is a coding round - two engineers and two questions (all questions are documented in Glassdoor multiple times from others so wont repeat it here). Third is technical communication and you have to explain your project in depth to an engineer - the engineer asks some questions on your decisions so please be ready to explain them. The next was the lunch interview - non technical and casual talk but the interviewer provides feedback on you. Next is a system design round (Again question is already on Glassdoor and is repeated many times - prepare variations of sliding time window system design for big data systems, and you will be able to answer questions here). Next was the final coding round - again two questions. Again just repetitive questions - nothing fancy. One of the final interviewers (he was a Senior SDE) did not know the answer to the question he posed. My code is an exact implementation from CLRS' algorithm book that I had prepared by reading up the question on Glassdoor. He did not get it/even look interested in getting it. His head was buried into his laptop and he could not be bothered into listening to me. He had a co-interviewer who wanted to talk/participate but this guy kept cutting him off - so unprofessional. Until this round, I had no negative impressions on LinkedIn and thought it might be a great place to work but this one guy started making me have my doubts on the quality of engineers there (again, there are bad employees everywhere - even in my current workplace - so it is probably just my frustration). On the offer, I did not get one. Overall, I had four good rounds and one bad round. Two things for LinkedIn to note: a. Please provide answers to the interview questions to your interviewers in addition to the questions from the question bank, so they know the answers to at least the questions they are asking and not waste people's time. b. When I am asked to provide interview feedback on the loaner iPad at the end of the interview, please ask interviewers to step outside. A shout out to the recruiter/sourcer and coordinator - Extremely professional and organized. The recruiter also gave me feedback on my interview performance on their own accord that the only negative feedback was the last coding round. The rest supposedly went well and it was a narrow miss. So one bad round could impact you a big deal..

LinkedIn's interview process is very transparent. Before every interview, I was given the names and LinkedIn profiles of every person I would speak to. My recruiter also called me before each interview step to discuss the expectations and share a few preparation tips. Even if you don't end up working with them, you'll probably at least come away feeling much more knowledgeable and prepared for technical interviews in general! I noticed two unusual aspects about LinkedIn's software engineer interviews: (1) Most interviews are 2-on-1, with both interviewers submitting feedback. (2) Their coding questions apparently come from a shared company-wide repository. All the coding questions I got were identical (verbatim) to ones that have already been posted here or on other sites. I didn't know this upfront, but I realized it when I looked them up after my interviews. My interview process was: Technical phone screen: - 2 coding questions On-site interview: - 2 coding / algorithms - 1 system design - 1 technical communication - 1 behavioral / cultural fit (host manager) - 1 lunch interview (note: the lunch interviewer does submit feedback too) The coding questions were all very easy. I would say they were of slightly below-average difficulty compared to many other major Silicon Valley tech companies. I got the impression that the LinkedIn folks pay much more attention to your communication skills and design thinking than your raw problem-solving ability. The technical communication interview was fun. Basically I was asked to talk through one of my previous projects / systems, as if I were orienting a new developer on my team. It felt just like a real engineering discussion at work. Likewise, the host manager interview was really relaxed, focusing mostly on probing my resume and past experience, and the typical behavioral type questions ("tell me about a time when..."). The system design interview was probably the most challenging aspect of the process. LinkedIn is a web-scale company after all, so you need to have at least some basic familiarity with building distributed systems and making architectural design trade-offs in that context. Of all the components of the on-site interview, I would recommend spending more time preparing well for this one. I definitely came away with a very positive impression of LinkedIn. All the interviewers I met were very friendly and smart, and all of them talked about how they loved the highly collaborative culture at LinkedIn. Definitely give these folks a shot if you have the opportunity.