Standard hiring process, same as other big tech companies.

First, I received a phone call from the recruiter who explained the role. Then, there were two one-hour phone screens: the first was behavioral, and the second was a coding interview using CollabEdit.

Two days after the phone screens, I received an email from the recruiter stating that the hiring committee had decided not to proceed with an on-site interview round.

Although both phone screens went well, here are the reasons why I am rating this as a negative experience:

• The first interviewer (Behavioral) was 10 minutes late. I had to email the recruiter after waiting for him on BlueJeans for 10 minutes. The interview went well overall. He appeared happy with my answers and my background/experience.
• The second interviewer (Coding) was 15 minutes late. The interviewer was also coughing throughout the interview. Even though this was a "Staff Software Engineer" interview, she asked me a question related to "RAID." I still can't figure out the reason for it, but I was able to answer that question fairly easily, as I have good knowledge of not only software engineering but also IT infrastructure management and related concerns. She then asked me a few questions about threads, processes, and mutexes, which were fine and went well. She then asked me to implement a blocking queue in CollabEdit. My primary language is C#, and the recruiter had said it would be fine as long as I could use one of these languages: Java, C#, or C++. I asked if I could use C#, but she said no, as she didn't have an answer for the coding exercise in C#. Even then, I completed the exercise in Java, and the solution I implemented was technically sound, which the interviewer confirmed. However, I was not given an additional 15 minutes to work on edge cases (even though the interviewer was late) or to improve the design.

If the hiring committee made a decision based on this, that would be really unfortunate and unjust.

I did reach out to the recruiter asking for the reason and also when I could reapply. I did not get a response. I was expecting more from LinkedIn in terms of both professionalism and conducting fair interviews.

Note: I have more than 12 years of leadership and hands-on architecture/engineering experience in the software industry and have worked on many truly enterprise-scale projects used by many Fortune 500 and government entities.

I had a lot of questions related to my previous jobs and experiences.

Here are the questions from the coding phone screen:

• What is RAID?
• What is the difference between a Thread and a Process?
• What is a Mutex?
• Implement a thread-safe BlockingQueue in Java.