LinkedIn Interview Experience for SWE | Summer Internship 2021

I was contacted by a recruiter from LinkedIn in early December 2020 to apply for software internship role. So I filled the application form provided.

The process consisted of 1 online assessment and 2 interviews.

Online Assessment

Date : 14 Dec 2020

Platform : HackerRank

Time : 90 minutes

Number of questions : 4

Question 1

Find the 4th least significant digit of a number.

Solution Approach : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-kth-least-significant-bit-number/

Question 2

Given an array of numbers, find the number of unique pairs with sum equal to a target value.

Solution Approach : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/count-distinct-pairs-with-given-sum/

Question 3

Given an array of capacities of umbrellas, find the minimum number of umbrellas to cover exactly n people.

Solution Approach : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-minimum-number-of-coins-that-make-a-change/

Question 4

Given a weighted graph, output for each edge if it lies on any shortest path between node 1 and node N.

Solution Approach : 

• Find the lengths of shortest paths from all nodes to node 1. Store them in array A.
• Find the lengths of shortest paths from all nodes to node N, Store them in array B.
• Let the shortest path distance between node 1 and N be minD.
• Take a boolean array E corresponding to edges of the given graph, initialize it with all FALSE values.
• For each edge i-j (corresponding to index k of array E) do :
  • If A[i] + weight of edge i-j + B[j] = minD OR A[j] + weight of edge i-j + B[i] = minD then mark E[k]=TRUE.
• Output array E.

I completed all the questions in 75 minutes with all testcases passed.

Interview 1 (DSA Round)

Date : 21 Dec 2020

Platform : Video call through Zoom, live coding on https://coderpad.io/

Duration : 1 hour

The interviewer firstly introduced himself and gave an overview of the work done under his team. The work related to login authentication grabbed my interest and I asked some questions on the same. After this, I was asked to introduce myself. He asked a few questions about one of the hackathons I participated in.

This took around 15 minutes.

Then I was asked to write the codes and time & space complexities for the following questions one-by-one. The interviewer explained some examples for each question and we performed dry run over some testcases after I wrote the codes.

Question 1

Intersection of Arrays

1. Given two arrays, find the elements occurring in both of them. (Here, it is important to ask the interviewer how we are expected to handle duplicate elements)
2. Provide an optimized solution if the arrays are already sorted.
3. Give an optimized solution if one array is very large as compared to the other. (I used binary search on larger array, making suitable modifications to handle repeated elements)

Example :

Input : [1, 3, 3, 5] , [1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 7, 8]

Output : [1, 3, 3, 5]

Similar article : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/union-and-intersection-of-two-sorted-arrays-2/

Question 2

Number of connected components

Given a matrix of alphabets, find the number of connected components, considering all 8 neighbors.

Example : 

Input :

[ “aabcc”,

  “abbea”,

  “aaaaa”]

Output : 4

Similar article : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/connected-components-in-an-undirected-graph/

The whole coding part got completed quickly and easily. 

There were still almost 10 minutes left, so we discussed about life at LinkedIn and I told him about some of the features of the LinkedIn app that I thought should be improved.

Interview 2 (Host-Manager Round)

Date : 8 Jan 2021

Platform : Video call through Zoom 

Duration : 1 hour

This was a behavioral interview. Starting with the introductions of both of us, we discussed about the fake-content checking(one of the tasks being done by his team at LinkedIn).

Then I was asked to describe one the projects that I had mentioned on my resume. 

After this, some behavioral questions were asked, like :-

• What are your expectations from the internship?
• Tell me about a situation
  • when you faced conflict of ideas with your teammates.
  • when your idea got discarded and you had to follow the rest of the team.
  • when the outcomes of a project were not as expected.
  • when you managed to bring results even after facing a lack of resources.
  • when you felt that you lack certain skills.
• What kind of work would you like to do during your internship?

This whole interaction was quite interesting for me and I really got to analyze a lot of my own experiences from various contests and events.

At last he asked me if I had any questions for him and after my questions the interview ended.

After 2 days I received a call from the recruiter about my selection for the internship.

Most helpful resources based on my experience : GeeksForGeeks, InterviewBit, CodeForces.