Hands-down the worst interview experience I've had in several years. It was so bad and discouraging that I heavily considered just dropping from the Zoom call. Interview here if you want to thicken your skin a bit before you interview with the company that you actually want to work for.

It started off with a lot of low-level trivia around memory allocation, concurrency, OS's, etc. If I was unsure at all or did not know/remember the topic well enough to answer, my interviewer would make snide remarks, like, "You don't know about X? Okay, well that's pretty fundamental... So what do you know?". This really set the tone for the rest of the interview.

Q#1: After trivia, it was onto a list-based LC easy/medium. I hadn't spent a ton of time on lists, so it took me a bit longer to think out some solutions. While thinking through different approaches, my interviewer asked, "Is this question hard for you?" with an incredulous tone. When I came up with a brute force, O(n^2), solution (something is better than nothing – I was planning to optimize from there), the interviewer and his trainee/shadower actually laughed and asked if I understood why it was O(n^2). I started feeling like I was being made fun of at this point. Deserved or not, due to my anxiety and unpreparedness, it's incredibly disrespectful and gave me a glimpse into the culture at LinkedIn.

Q#2: They quickly hurried me along to another question, LC medium, based on backtracking and DP. I did better on this question as I studied these topics more recently, but at this point, they had crushed my spirit and all willingness to work at LinkedIn. I heavily considered just ending the interview here but figured it was good practice and to stick it out.

The cherry on top of this whole terrible experience was the final 5 minutes after getting a backtracking solution in place for question #2. He snarkily asked, "Look, we have about 10 minutes left. You can ask us questions... if you really want..."

Ultimately, this was an incredibly discouraging and humiliating experience. I was able to quickly laugh it off, but others could easily take more personal offense. I have no doubt that my interviewers were smart, perhaps even brilliant! However, the lack of tact that they displayed hinted at some toxic elitism.

I absolutely would not want to work at LinkedIn if the culture resembles a fraction of this interview experience.

What is a semaphore and how is it used?

How does virtual memory work?

What is the difference between a stack and a heap (memory allocation)?