I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at LinkedIn (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
2 Phone Screens and a coding test. The first phone screen was general and did not discuss technology. The second phone screen asked basic CS questions like the difference between a heap and a binary tree and about certain common design patterns often used by Java Programmers.
Then there was a fairly difficult programming test, that the person who provided it seemed to imply must be completed in Java but it turns out choice of language doesn't really matter. I wish I had known that, it would have been much easier to complete it in a higher level language and one I was more familiar with.
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.
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