I have almost 2 years of full time industry experience (2 years next month)
I was interviewing for a backend role
5 total rounds - Your recuiter should email you a full run down of the onsite interview 1-2 days before your interview
Round 1 - Behavorial with Host Manager
- This person may, or may not, end up being the final hiring manager, but will be able to provide you with information on the different projects, engineering team culture, challenges, etc.
- He/she will be asking you about your career history, your job search (why you’re looking, why is LinkedIn interesting, what technologies are you interested in), and an overview of interesting projects you worked on, and your involvement in these projects.
- They will also evaluate your thinking and problem-solving abilities:
- how do you figure out problems, develop solutions and alternatives, what is your decision-making process, your organizational fit, and your motivations.
Round 2 - Algorithms and Data Structures questions (2 questions easy and hard)
- easy question was a graph question and hard question was a string question (sliding window)
- LeetCode's definition of easy, and medium
Lunch
Round 3 - Algorithms and Data Structures questions (3 questions easy + 2 mediums)
- easy question was a graph question, medium question was related to the 1st (so obviously also a graph problem)
- 2nd medium question:
Given a linked list of numbers and a pivot k, partition the linked list so that all nodes less than k come before nodes greater than or equal to k.
For example, given the linked list 5 -> 1 -> 8 -> 0 -> 3 and k = 3, the solution could be 1 -> 0 -> 5 -> 8 -> 3.
Round 4 - Technical Communication
- Discuss any project that you can talk about for at least 45 minutes.
- This will be a deep dive into projects you worked on, technologies used, and architectural decisions.
- Make sure you’re able to speak of an interesting/challenging project you worked on and be able to explain the challenges faced, lessons learned, and technical details.
- They’ll be looking for excitement or interest in the projects you worked on because they want to work alongside engineers who are passionate about what they do.
Round 5 - System Design Question
- Design an api rate limiter
Make sure you read the PDF your recuiter sends you!
Learn from my mistake! The PDF includes a breakdown of the behavorial rounds, and how you should approach them! LinkedIn takes these rounds very seriously (Clearly I had 2). Onsite was 2 days ago - haven't heard back yet
Self-Evaluation:
Aced both rounds of Algorithms and Data Structures, Asked for clarifying questions and I communicated my strategy clearly and added comments throughout each solution. Also did a walk-through of the each solution using one of the examples given to me.
The round where I had 3 questions, was only because the I was able to solve and walk-through the easy question in 10mins. So they asked a follow-up to that. The adjustment to the previous solution took about 15mins plus another 5 to walk-through it with an example, one of the interviews did catch that my solution was incomplete and I was able to adjust quickly and add the necesaary code for the edge case I was missing.
The Linked List question, did trip me up a bit, but as I was thinking out loud I was just able to come up with a solution, cover edge cases, and walk-through the solution with the above example
I failed to see that I was going to be asked a system design question. I have never been asked one before, and I've been on at least 10 interviews with major companies. So I was surprised when I received the full breakdown.
However, upon checking the PDF my recruiter sent months ago. It did describe all these rounds, so I had more than enough time to prepare, but my negligance prevented me from properly preparing.
My System Design response was at best "meh" - lack of preperation
- regardless my interviewer was very helpful and gave me several hints to help me progress through my solution and address certain aspects of my design that I had not addressed or was missing
The both behavorial Rounds went okay. I did not properly prepare for these either. Again all on me.
Normally behavorial interviews are easy for me, but the answers you go over with the interviewer should be well "reherased" - dont read off a script - just make sure you have 1 or 2 projects that you can very very clearly communicate. It's all about your technical communication
If there are any aspects of the (1 or 2) projects that you're confused about make sure to clear that confusion before the interview!
They will ask clarifying questions ! It's a conversation !!
My Interviewers were 10/10.