Interview process was straight-forward and smooth. Recruiter scheduled a phone screen with one of the engineers. The usual coderpad exercise. Was asked a Leetcode medium question.
After clearing the phone screen , I was invited to come onsite for a round of interviews.
This is where the interesting part comes along.
1 hiring manager interview -> Was fun to talk to the hiring manager and gain a lot of insights about the company.
1 system design and architecture interview -> was straight-forward and easy.
1 Mobile coding round -> 3 small coding exercises to be performed on the laptop. The interviewer was nice and friendly here and was helpful. The round was medium difficulty but i was able to solve it fully.
1 Data structures and Algorithm coding round-> This is where the interesting thing happens. In the first 5-10 minutes when we were talking about my resume and stuff, we both realized we had gone to the same school only a couple of years apart.
Then he asks me to do a coding question based on Trees. "Find Leaves of binary Tree, gather the leaves and Collect and remove all leaves, repeat until the tree is empty." I came up with a recursive DFS solution in about 15-20 minutes and wrote on the whiteboard. Interviewer suggested there is a O(n) single pass solution to this question, I tried for another 10 minutes and suggested some ideas but he seemed disinterested in any of those. He gave me no hints and all the time I was writing the solution he was busy in his laptop, I kept mumbling and talking alone trying to explain the solution step by step but he was not interested at all.
Finally he looks up and says "okay let me read what you wrote" and then proceeds to compare some solution he already has on his laptop and literally comparing it line by line.
It was clear he did not know the solution himself or even knew the question properly, He was so lazy that he picked up the question from leetcode and did not even change the input.
About 20 minutes left in the interview, he asks me another leetcode hard problem (which should have its own interview because the solution and algorithm is long).
He asks me the minimum window substring problem from leetcode. Again interviewer so lazy that he does not even bother to change the input and output from the leetcode question. Reads the question in front of me from the website. I explain to him that there are only about 20 mins left in the interview and that leaving 5 mins aside in the end for my questions there are only 15 mins left , I ask if he still wants me to give him a solution or write code on the board. He insists i start writing the code on the board.
I explain to him what my plan for the code and the problem is , creating the window, moving the window, resetting the counters, etc etc and start writing the solution(Again he's disinterested and goes back into his laptop), I write the entire solution on the board and asked him if he would like to go over the algorithm and see how i come to my answer.
He again says give me 2 mins while he reads the code on the board and starts asking questions about how it would work for duplicates and long inputs, and while explaining how the code handles it , he says ohh there is no time left.
I did not even get the time to ask him questions. He leaves.
3-4 days later the recruiter calls me and says that all the interviewers said yes except the coding round and the feedback was that I was not able to optimize the solution and rushed into coding.
This is probably a clear case of unconscious/conscious bias or whatever. I'm asked 2 leetcode medium+hard questions in 45-50 mins. I give the best solution for the first question and i give the best solution for the second question too. He does not show any interest, is too lazy to understand the algorithm and frankly rude to behave the way he did in an interview. He has a fixed solution which he expects and compares line by line with your solution.
If this is how LinkedIn works then i am glad I did not get the offer. I was honestly disappointed that this was the round I would be rejected for. If anyone from Linkedin is reading this then i suggest you guys go back to the drawing board about your interview process and give some interview training to your employees as this is not how interviews should be conducted in any company.
Getting a job is a 2-way street, the company should convince the candidate to join their company while the candidate should also try his best to join. Clearly in my case it was a 1-way street all the way.
