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      Software Engineer - Applications Development Interview

      14 Nov 2014
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Jun 2014

      Interview

      All the phone interviewer questions can be found here on glassdoor. The on-site one consists of 5 rounds focusing on soft skills, technical communication, two rounds of coding (one easier, one harder), and system design (level of experience). For me all the coding questions are coming from geeksforgeeks, one is about string matching, the other is set partition. The system design question is about basic information retrieval system, like a search engine prototype. If you are not familiar with this topic, the first chapter of Introduction of information retrieval will cover everything you need to know for the interview. One thing I do want to mention is that, don't spend too much time looking at the prep materials your recruiter sent you, nothing is from there and it's not even pointing you on the right direction. geeksforgeek or leetcode is the way to go. I heard Facebook and Google like leetcode, looks like to me LinkedIn prefer geeksforgeeks a little bit more. Most interviewers are very nice. For me, I had a hard time understanding the Chinese lady in one of the coding round due to her strong Chinese accent. Another interviewer told me he is pulled into this interview and he didn't prepare at all. It showed up as I realized he himself did not really know the answer of the question he was asking. We were kinda just trying to figure out a solution together during the interview, not sure if this is the way it is supposed to be. The system design round is a disaster for me because I don't have any background of information retrieval system. I think it's funny because after the interview I spent like 2 hours reading the first chapter of Introduction of Information Retrieval and that's all they were asking for. I just don't see how this is a good indication of my level of experience. Also, the interviewer in this round is very inexperienced in terms of explaining the question, clarifying confusions and having a respective attitude. Although the recruiter did point out the interviewers may not be the people i will be working with if I get an offer and join them, I do want to say I found half of the interviewers not that type of people I would like to work with. Besides the interview, I don't really like their work environment very much. Although the office looks nice, both the cafeteria and gym are very disappointing. They offer free food, but they put tons of oil into everything probably trying to make you feel full longer so you don't eat too much. There is not many healthy choices either, and the cafeteria is very small, crowded and noisy. The onsite gym is practically a workout room, not a real gym at all, like those workout rooms that come with your apartments complex. Not sure if you care about this, but most people working there don't seem to have a general sense of how clothes fit together to look acceptable. Another thing I noticed is there is a huge Asian population, which implies if you have low tolerance on accent you may have hard time communicating. Just something nontechnical to think about. Also, their office is kinda hidden inside of Google campus, so the traffic there is really bad. There are lots of bumpers around that area so driving won't be fun either.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      They want me to design a scalable prototype of basic information retrieval system.
      2 Answers
      4