The interview process was straightforward and smooth. The recruiter scheduled a phone screen with one of the engineers. It involved the usual CoderPad exercise. I 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 more interesting part unfolded.

• 1 Hiring Manager Interview: It was fun to talk to the hiring manager and gain a lot of insights about the company.
• 1 System Design and Architecture Interview: This was straightforward and easy.
• 1 Mobile Coding Round: This involved three small coding exercises to be performed on the laptop. The interviewer was nice and friendly, 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 things got interesting. In the first 5-10 minutes, while we were talking about my resume, we both realized we had gone to the same school, only a couple of years apart.

Then, the interviewer asked 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 it on the whiteboard. The interviewer suggested there was an 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 on his laptop. I kept mumbling and talking to myself, trying to explain the solution step by step, but he was not interested at all.

Finally, he looked up and said, "Okay, let me read what you wrote," and then proceeded to compare it with some solution he already had on his laptop, literally comparing it line by line. It was clear he did not know the solution himself or even know 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 were left in the interview when he asked me another LeetCode hard problem (which should have its own interview because the solution and algorithm are long). He asked me the Minimum Window Substring problem from LeetCode. Again, the interviewer was so lazy that he did not even bother to change the input and output from the LeetCode question. He read the question in front of me from the website.

I explained to him that there were only about 20 minutes left in the interview, and leaving 5 minutes aside for my questions, there were only 15 minutes left. I asked if he still wanted me to give him a solution or write code on the board. He insisted I start writing the code on the board.

I explained my plan for the code and the problem, creating the window, moving the window, resetting the counters, etc., and started writing the solution. (Again, he was disinterested and went back to his laptop.) I wrote the entire solution on the board and asked him if he would like to go over the algorithm and see how I arrived at my answer.

He again said, "Give me two minutes," while he read the code on the board and started asking questions about how it would work for duplicates and long inputs. While explaining how the code handled it, he said, "Oh, there is no time left."

I did not even get the time to ask him questions. He left.

Three to four days later, the recruiter called me and said that all the interviewers said yes, except for the coding round. 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 was asked two LeetCode medium/hard questions in 45-50 minutes. I gave the best solution for the first question and the best solution for the second question, too. He did not show any interest, was too lazy to understand the algorithm, and frankly rude to behave the way he did in an interview. He had a fixed solution which he expected and compared line by line with my 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 for which I would be rejected. 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 two-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 one-way street all the way.

Phone interview: LeetCode Medium DS/Algos question.

Onsite:

• Coding: Minimum window substring, Find leaves of binary tree
• System Design and Architecture
• Mobile coding
• Lunch
• Hiring manager interview