I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Oct 2021
Interview
I had a pleasant interviewer but I'm disappointed with the interview process. My interviewer didn't ask any resume or behavioral questions, instead he just introduced himself and went straight to the coding question (which is fine). The question itself was taken straight from the top tagged LC questions for LinkedIn, so I had seen it before and already practiced solving it.
I wrote out my solution in Python, explaining it as I went, and was satisfied that it work (again, because I had already done this question correctly on LC). My interviewer used Java so he had trouble understanding a technique I used on arrays that's only found in Python. I tried to explain what it would do, but he didn't believe that it would work correctly. I wasn't going to sit there and argue with him, so he asked me to take a different approach to the question. This is fine I suppose, but I was already put off by the fact that he wouldn't listen to me explaining how this would work in Python.
I gave another solution to the problem using recursion, which he was satisfied with, and then I was rejected the next week. I saw the rejection coming, as I figured he wouldn't be impressed with my technical skills since he didn't believe my solution would work.
If an interview is language agnostic, then to avoid situations like this they should at least let candidates use the compiler in CoderPad so this doesn't happen. This could have been easily avoidable if the compiler was enabled and I could've run my script to show that it did indeed work. Instead, because my interviewer didn't know Python, I wasn't moved forward.
Interviewed for an SDE role. The process was well-organized and the recruiters were responsive throughout. That said, the technical rounds were significantly more challenging than expected — definitely come prepared to go deep. Overall a valuable experience regardless of the outcome.
That was a real stroke of luck — when I got to the coding round and encountered a question on finding the maximum subarray sum, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com a few days earlier. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview. It was intense, especially with the focus on algorithms and data structures. I also faced some behavioral questions that challenged my experience. After a final onsite round, I received an offer and happily accepted. Overall, it was tough but rewarding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an integer array nums, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum and return its sum. Walk through Kadane's algorithm and explain the O(n) approach.
Overall, a good interview process and the team were very friendly during the interview process and it was very good and pleasant. Nothing in regard to negative feedback or anything as such like that.