Interview Scheduling:

Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn. We exchanged a couple of emails. I cleared the first basic MCQ phone call round and provided my availability for a phone screen. The recruiter did not respond for a couple of days. Afterward, the recruiter said she could not “locate” my email. That was the first red flag.

It seems the recruiter did not take me seriously; why reach out in the first place? Weird!

Interview Overview:

I wrote optimal code for all the problems. After the interview, the recruiter called me and relayed the feedback, saying I was not supposed to write optimal code and that they were expecting a simple, naive solution. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I have never seen an interviewer asking for a naive solution over an optimized one.

Overall Experience:

For each problem, I explained the naive solution and then wrote the optimal solution. The interviewer seemed very inexperienced and naive. I observed that the interviewer kept muting and unmuting and was not communicative. I somehow feel he was not interested in understanding what I was explaining to him. At every step, I explained to the interviewer why I was doing that.

My goal was to write an optimized and scalable solution, which I did, not a simple, unoptimized solution. I made that clear in every problem while discussing my thought process.

Don’t waste your time interviewing for an SRE role at LinkedIn. Not worth it!

FizzBuzz

REST API calling using recursion

Parsing log file and printing counts of messages at given timestamps