To honor the NDA I signed, I will be as vague as possible regarding specific technical questions.

I had a phone screen first, which consisted of two programming questions.

The first question was very simple, designed to ensure basic programming proficiency and the ability to design unit tests. It was easy to introduce bugs, but manageable with fundamental programming knowledge.

The second question tested data structure knowledge. It's important to understand the appropriate uses for lists and sets.

The recruiter was very responsive, providing a response within three days. They offered good luck and then transferred me to another recruiter to schedule the on-site interview. I had to reschedule the on-site date once, and the recruiter was professional and accommodating.

The on-site experience was extremely nice. While I wasn't initially particularly interested in LinkedIn, the initial phone interviews, recruiters, and campus impressed me. Their campus is located right next to Google's.

Upon arrival, we were given an iPad 2 for the day to check our schedules and interviewer details. The on-site consisted of five interviews and lunch:

• Two technical interviews
• One design interview
• One interview to explain one of my projects in excessive detail
• One behavioral interview

The two technical interviews were fairly straightforward. The first was very direct, involving a long programming question that was overall pretty straightforward and did not require special algorithms or data structures.

The second technical interview was a bit trickier. Familiarity with binary trees is essential. I am confident I performed well on the first part but spent more time than necessary on the second.

I felt I really struggled with the design question. This question is posted on Glassdoor by another candidate (hint hint), but to honor the NDA, I won't repeat it here. However, I highly recommend studying the questions others have provided.

This interviewer impressed me the most with their knowledge and overall intelligence. I suspect this was the interview on which I was rejected. It is definitely important to know your distributed systems. Unfortunately, I had no prior experience in this area.

I must also mention that the final interview of the day was arguably one of the worst I've ever experienced. This was not due to my performance, but rather the interviewers seemed quite junior and nervous. The atmosphere felt awkward, with one interviewer studying and not paying attention, and the other continually checking their watch, clearly eager for the interview to end. They drilled into the details of one of my projects, but it was uncomfortable due to frequent silences, indicating they sometimes didn't know what to say.

Overall, the experience was great. I did not receive an offer, which was disappointing as I felt I performed decently overall. However, my performance on the design question was weak, and ultimately, the hiring decision is up to the company's needs.