Hands-down the worst interview experience I've had in several years. It was so bad & discouraging, that I heavily considered just dropping from the Zoom call. Interview here if you want to thicken your skin a bit before you interview with the company that you actually want to work for.
Started off with a lot of low-level trivia around memory allocation, concurrency, OS's, etc. If I was unsure at all or did not know/remember the topic well enough to answer, my interviewer would make snide remarks, like, "You don't know about ? Okay, well that's pretty fundamental... So what do you know?". Really set the tone for the rest of the interview.
Q#1: After trivia, it was onto a list-based LC easy/medium. I hadn't spent a ton of time on lists so it took me a bit longer to think out some solutions. While thinking through different approaches, my interviewer asked, "is this question hard for you?" with an incredulous tone. When I came up with a brute force, O(n^2), solution (something is better than nothing - was planning to optimize from there), the interviewer & his trainee/shadower actually laughed & asked if I understood why it was O(n^2). Started feeling like I was being made fun of at this point. Deserved or not due to my anxiety & unpreparedness, it's incredibly disrespectful & gave me a glimpse into the culture at LinkedIn.
Q#2: They quickly hurried me along to another question, LC medium, based on backtracking & DP. I did better on this question as I studied these topics more recently...but at this point they had crushed my spirit and all willingness to work at LinkedIn. I heavily considered just ending the interview here but figured it was good practice & to stick it out.
The cherry on top of this whole terrible experience was the final 5 minutes after getting a backtracking solution in place for question #2. He snarkily asked "look, we have about 10 minutes left. You can ask us questions... if you really want...".
Ultimately, this was an incredibly discouraging & humiliating experience. I was able to quickly laugh it off but others could easily take more personal offense. I have no doubt that my interviewers were smart, perhaps even brilliant! However, the lack of tact that they displayed hinted at some toxic elitism.
I absolutely would not want to work at LinkedIn if the culture resembles a fraction of this interview experience.