LinkedIn Sr Software Engineer interview questions

Contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter. After an initial chat with the recruiter, he offered some teams of interest. Then two phone screens. First phone screen was around Java specific questions and coding for multhreaded datastructure . Second phone screen asked me to create a minimal spanning tree. Easy enough. I got the reply back in 4 days. Then they setup the onsite. I was flown in to Mountain view. They took care of flight, car rental and hotel expenses. The onsite consisted of 5 interviews and a tour at the end. The onsite question were considerably more difficult. Each interview had a shadow interviewer so that made things more stressful. Two interviews were deep dives into projects on my resume. They wanted to know each and every detail including why I made certain decisions, what were the tradeoffs, what were the most difficult bugs, what mistakes I made and more technical details. One interview was on system design where they asked me to implement my own web crawler system. Again very technical and deep. I didn't know much about search systems so didn't do very well here. Two interviews focused on coding. First was a Dynamic programming question that I had not seen before. Required a bit of help to realize that it was a DP. Was able to write code after I realized the approach. Second coding question was to find the longest arithmetic progression in an array of integers. This was easy. Got an offer after one week. The offer was decent. I spoke to some friends of friends working at linkedin and got a sense that it was not a healthy work environment and they weren't very happy. The office space was crowded beyond what it could hold and the environment just didn't seem like a place where I could do my best work.

I had two phone interviews and SIX back to back onsite interviews. The second phone interviewer did not call at the assigned time, I had to track the recruiter - when they finally tracked the guy down, they arranged for another call. The interviewer was clearly frazzled and had no idea how to frame questions - he got lost explaining the question itself!! Anyways, I aced both phone interviews and go invited to on-site and they scheduled me with the same guy for the first interview. Guess what? He doesn't show up, AGAIN! I sit in the room with my 'oh so cool iPad' waiting, then finally he shows up 45 minutes late and they made him come back again after my last interview. Total 6 on-site interviews with coding and design questions. The design interviewers weren't really sure on what they were looking for - they didn't even know how to explain the question well or how to probe deeper. After all six interviews (majority of which ended up in the interviewer clearly impressed and one even saying 'hope to see around here soon'. I got a small tour of the company by the recruiter. The next day recruiter calls me and says that they were very impressed with my interview feedback and wanted to see where I fit and he wil call back and arrange a phone call with a hiring manager and then prepare an offer. Few hours later the recruiter calls back and tells me that none of the hiring managers found me to be a good fit so they are not proceeding an offer at this time and gave some vague assurances that they will keep looking for a fit (wth?!) I found the whole interview process totally BACKWARDS. Why would you put a candidate through EIGHT HOURS of interviewing - not to mention waste his entire day and energy - and then have all your interviewers give positive feedback AND THEN find out if he is a good fit or not. In any mature stable company, that kind of stuff is cleared out BEFORE the first phone interview or DURING the phone interviews or DURING the on-site interviews. Not AFTER the whole process.