Typical interview setup.

Called with the recruiter, then arranged for a phone screen. The phone screen was set up with CollabEdit for one hour.

Coding questions were not very difficult. One was to massage a JavaScript object into a specific format, and the other was a nested array normalization algorithm question, for which I used JavaScript. I also answered a few questions on JavaScript (promises, DOM, etc.). I completed the phone screen within 40 minutes.

Then, the recruiter set up an onsite interview for the following week. The onsite was again typical, with five rounds.

• First round: General frontend questions. I was asked to create a custom tooltip component, similar to the one on LinkedIn's homepage. I whiteboarded everything from markup to CSS to JavaScript.
• Second round: This is where I think I messed up. The person interviewing me was a data scientist, and this was the first time he was interviewing a frontend person. The question caught me off guard as it was a basic algorithm question that I was not prepared for (convert Roman numerals to numbers and vice versa).
• Third round: Lunch interview. We just talked about my release process and asked questions about LinkedIn's tech stack and other things.
• Fourth round: A manager questioned me about my career goals, my previous accomplishments, and asked me to code an API server for a small project. He kept making notes and yawning throughout the talk, which felt discouraging.
• Fifth round: Architecture questions. I coded up everything from the datastore level to APIs and the UI.
• Last round: Again with a couple of web developers, but again, two questions on algorithms. This time, I coded them up without any flaws and finished so quickly that the interviewers were running out of questions to ask (one question on matching braces and one more on object mapping in JavaScript).

From the outset, I believed I did really well in the interview. That was the feedback from the last set of interviewers too, who said, "We will meet you soon on campus." But things didn't turn out that way. The recruiter called me a week later and said I was not a fit. I guess I messed up one question on the second-round algorithms because I remember I did well on every other question in the interviews.

It really felt weird that they said I was a reject, but anyway, I got a much better offer somewhere else. Bye, LinkedIn.

Javascript promises, object mapping, build custom tooltips, nested array normalizing with a counter for each level of nesting, roman numeral to number conversion, build an architecture for a game they had in mind, find the missing braces in a string of code.