Position: SDE1 at LinkedIn
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Yoe: 1
Interview Date: August 2021
Onsite (5 rounds)
Round 1 - Work History with a host manager
Just basic questions about work history, what's your most siginificant accomplishment career-wise/ what are you proud of, name a time when you had conflict with someone in your team, etc. I stuttered a lot.
Round 2 - Coding
The first one was basically 200. Number of Islands except you have to return the sizes of the islands in decreasing order. My solution was O(mn) time and O(mn) space to which the interviewer asked a follow-up question along the lines of "What if there are space constraints where m = 10 and n = 10?" and I answered "Uh maybe use like multiprocessing I don't know". Then my internet started going bad when he was explaining what he meant so if someone knows, please let me know. Anyway, the second question was grouping leaf nodes in the order that they would fall off. I ran out of time so I just explained my approach. The interview was really nice but I knew I bombed it.
Round 3 - System Design
I got bitly.
Round 4 - Coding
I did 698. Partition to K Equal Sum Subsets which sucks I was just about to do it the night before but I opted to sleep. I didn't get this one too and one of the interviewers either was pissed off for some reason or he thought his mic was quiet because it sounded like he was yelling at me.
Round 5 - Technical Communication
I had to describe a project I worked on at a high level, from the system, software, etc and talk about contributions I made to it. The interviewer also threw in some questions like what would improve about the project if you could start over, are there any part of the project that could be improved and what improvements did you make. I was more relaxed on this one but it was probably because I could already feel the looming presence of rejection.
Overall, I knew I wasn't gonna get it because my Leetcode prep was like a month but I thought it'd be good interview experience so why not try. I got a rejection the very next day which hurt because they could've at least waited a few days and make it look like they actually considered me. The recruiter said my coding skills were weak so I'm at least glad to know that the secret to landing a good job in this industry is to just grind Leetcode. If I had any advice for past me, I would say:
* Grind Leetcode
* Follow this because it's pretty accurate: https://github.com/xizhengszhang/Leetcode_company_frequency
* Pay for mock interviews