I was contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter. After an initial chat with the recruiter, he offered some teams of interest. Then, two phone screens followed.

The first phone screen focused on Java-specific questions and coding for a multithreaded data structure. The second phone screen asked me to create a minimal spanning tree, which was straightforward.

I received a reply in four days, and then they set up the onsite interview. I was flown to Mountain View, and they covered flight, car rental, and hotel expenses.

The onsite consisted of five interviews and a tour at the end.

The onsite questions were considerably more difficult. Each interview had a shadow interviewer, which added to the stress. Two interviews were deep dives into projects on my resume. They wanted to know every detail, including why I made certain decisions, the tradeoffs involved, the most difficult bugs encountered, mistakes I made, and other technical specifics. One interview was on system design, where they asked me to implement my own web crawler system. This was again very technical and deep. I didn't know much about search systems, so I didn't perform very well here. Two interviews focused on coding.

The first was a dynamic programming question that I had not seen before. It required some assistance to realize it was a DP problem. I was able to write the code after I understood the approach. The second coding question was to find the longest arithmetic progression in an array of integers, which was easy.

I received an offer after one week. The offer was decent. I spoke with some friends of friends working at LinkedIn and got the sense that it was not a healthy work environment, and they weren't very happy. The office space was overcrowded, and the environment just didn't seem like a place where I could do my best work.

Dynamic programming question.

I don't remember the details.