I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Mar 2016
Interview
Very negative experience, the interviewer was late for 6 minutes and didn't apology for the delay. It was clear from the beginning that he is in a hurry and the interview is not interesting for him. He didn't qute well understand the solutions that I suggested and we spend quite a long time just to explain how I'm going to solve it. Maybe I didn't explain it well, but I'm sure it was because he had no interest for the interview and didn't follow what I'm talking about. As the result I spent a pretty long time for a medium coding question. In the middle of the interview the interviewer disappeared for 5 minutes (!!) and I talked with no one. Eventually I solved both problems and suggested optimizations, but looks like the time and overall interviewer's negative were critical factors and as expected I got rejected. I didn't have such unprofessional phone interview for a long time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard questions from leetcode, they don't expect you to think, they expect you to _know_. Even the recruiters tell imagine the interview as kind of college exam.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Calabasas, CA) in Mar 2016
Interview
2 Skype video type interviews including a shared electronic whiteboard. Very cordial engineers. They want folks who are quick on their feet. Who doesn't. I did not get job but they were nice.
It was as follows:
(1) When I asked how I could be of service at LinkedIn, the interviewer could not answer the question, stating they were not sure whether I would be filling an entry-level role or a senior role.
(2) It was difficult to understand the interviewer’s accent.
(3) I was given the same question I was asked ten years ago: How do you test whether two binary trees are mirror images, for which the entry-level coder's answer would be something hideous like:
==============================================
bool isMirror(Node* tree1, Node* tree2)
{
bool ret_val = false;
if(tree1 != null && tree2 != null)
{
ret_val = (tree1->m_data == tree2->m_data) &&
isMirror(tree1->m_lhs, tree2->m_rhs) && isMirror(tree1->m_rhs, tree2->m_lhs);
}
return (tree1 == null && tree2 == null) ? true : tret_val;
}
==============================================
(4) The interviewer did not want an iterative solution that avoided stack overflows and made better use of CPU cache, much less a PhD with physics and maths skills.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you apply quantum mechanics to data mining? Sadly, the interviewer did not seem to know the answer to a very basic question that even the most mediocre physics undergraduate could answer in under five minutes.