Linkedin Technical Phone Screen | Senior Software Engineer

I recently had a technical phone screen interview with Linkedin. I have almost 8 years of experience and the interview covered a range of topics from my current project to computer fundamentals. Sharing my experience as I couldn't find Linkedin TPS interview experience here.

The interview began with a deep dive into my current project experience. We discussed the challenges I faced in the design and implementation of the project. Following that, the interviewer delved into computer fundamentals with questions such as:

What is OLTP vs OLAP?
How will you monitor your deployed service in production?
What is transaction?
What are ACID properties?
What is serialisation and de-serialization?
What challenges have you faced in your design?
Why indexing is used in db?
What are the disadvantages of indexing in db?

I might have forgotten some questions.

The first 30 minutes of the interview focused solely on these questions, and I must admit I wasn't as well-prepared for this segment as I should have been. It was a challenging start, and I found myself struggling to articulate some of the concepts on the spot.

To my surprise, the next question caught me off guard. I was asked to solve https://leetcode.com/problems/max-stack/ LeetCode hard problem within the next 30 minutes. Initially, I felt as though the difficulty level of the question was intentionally high to trip me up, but I took a deep breath and worked through it. Eventually, I provided the solution to use max heap for the order of elements and max elements to reduce the complexity of the operations.

However, despite successfully solving the coding problem, there seemed to be a misunderstanding during the explanation phase. I clarified my approach, but it appeared that my explanation didn't resonate well with the interviewer. Unfortunately, this discrepancy was reflected in the feedback, where it was mentioned that I struggled with the coding problem. Despite the effort I put into addressing the technical questions and solving the coding problem, there might have been an unintentional bias in the assessment. It's essential for interviewers to approach evaluations with an unbiased mindset to ensure fair and accurate assessments.(Damn tough luck.)