LinkedIn is hiring like crazy right now. On the particular random day I arrived, there were at least 10 other applicants hanging around the receptionist's desk.

They sent me a solicitation on LinkedIn (no surprise), and I followed up. A technical phone screen was quickly scheduled.

They then flew me out to interview on-site about a week later and put me up in a really nice hotel. They gave me a gift bag on arrival, and the whole process felt really comfortable, which is unusual for an interview.

I interviewed with something like 11 people total, some alone and some in groups of two.

• Half of those interviews were about demonstrating programming skills on a whiteboard.
• The other half were for demonstrating "design" skills (abstractly designing systems).

There was a break in the middle for lunch in their giant, excellent cafeteria.

You have a potentially very-large set of documents, which are potentially very-large and contain text. For searching these documents, they've been pre-processed into a (very-large) table mapping words to the set of documents that contain each word. For example:

(word) : (documents (referenced by ID) containing that word) Apple: 1, 4, 5, 6, 32 Banana: 5, 6, 7, 9, 32 Cantaloupe: 1, 2, 6 ...

Clients will pass in a set of words (e.g., {apple, cantaloupe}) and want the set of document IDs that contain all the words (e.g., {apple, cantaloupe} -> {1, 6}). Design a distributed system to implement this, bearing in mind that the number of documents, the number of words, and the number of document-IDs-per-word are potentially really, really big.