Recently, I had a phone interview with LinkedIn. The coding question, which used CollabEdit, was something like: "Search a sorted array for the first element larger than k."

I had studied Data Structures and Algorithms extensively and know binary search by heart, so this was pretty easy for me.

However, to my surprise, the interviewer told me that my code had an infinite loop! I double-checked the code and explained that it couldn't have an infinite loop:

During each iteration:

• hi is updated to (mid-1)
• lo is updated to (mid+1)

But it appeared that the return statement was incorrectly indented and inside the while loop.

After the call, I put the code in a file and ran the script. As I expected, there was no endless loop, and all tests passed perfectly.

Then I asked the interviewer where the infinite loop came from. During the call, I had asked for a hint about the infinite loop, and he said that would be too easy. Now that the call was over, he did reply with the following:

"I identified the issue after the call. The issue was caused by an incorrect indentation which you resolved later during the call."

What he said made no sense at all! The indentation issue I mentioned related to the return statement. If there had been an issue with the return statement, the code would have terminated prematurely, and there would be no way to cause an infinite loop.

For those who will have an interview with LinkedIn, be prepared for such nonsense.

Search a sorted array for the first element larger than k.