Ok, this started as a really smooth interview, very nice people, free food and snacks, an iPad with me the whole interview period duration, shortly an environment similar to that’s of Google with les politics. A lot of factors made me say: “Ok, if I got an offer, I am accepting it”.
During all the loops except the last one (which I am going to comment on it shortly), the general feedback was very positive. Everyone was commenting on how smart I am, giving comments of type “Yeah, this is the same solution we adapted in our production environment, etc.”, so I was 100% certain that I am going to get an offer until I reached the final loop.
Usually in any company in software industry, the last loop is reserved for the hiring manager or someone higher than him in the food chain but with LinkedIn, my last interview was with a couple of QA engineers (a male and a female) whom look like it was their first interview loop ever.
They first gave me a technical question which they thought is going to take like 30 minutes but when it was solved in like 2 or 3 minutes, they kind of got puzzled cause they had no idea what they are going to do in the remaining time, so what did the female QA engineer did? She just invented a question out of nowhere that she was not even sure what she wants out of it. The question was simply: “Imagine an ingoing operation that keeps pushing integer numbers, we want to be able to quickly tell the median among all the last integers that were pushed to the system”
Fair enough, it was also like 2 minutes answer for that question. She didn’t get the answer (although the male QA that was with her got it just right away), so I spent like 30 minutes with a gazillion examples showing her how does it work, finally when she got it, she said something like: “Oh no, I just wanted to know the index of the item in the middle of the array formed by all the incoming numbers”, I told her are you talking about n/2? This is like a single line of code! She said “hmm, ok, no problem!”
So after that interview, I was 50/50 sure about whether I’d be getting an offer or not, a couple of days later, I received an email that I am not getting an offer.
Up until this point, I might have given them a neutral feedback judging by how great everything else was if it was not for the other screw up they had!
So in any company in the industry, when you plan to interview an out of state candidate, you usually confirm the interview date/time and then you do everything for them (reserve air ticket, hotel, car, etc. and pay for them all) and send them the confirmation. If you pay for anything, it would be just taxi fare from/to airport, meals and maybe gas for the rental car. They would reimburse you these tiny expenses back in like 3 weeks or less. Right? This has been my experience and my friend’s experience in nearly every software company in the market.
With LinkedIn it was different. Although they did the reservations and everything, when I arrived at the rental car company, they asked me for my credit card info cause no one paid for the car!! Same thing happened for the hotel, so what if I was not carrying enough cash on me or a credit card with enough balance?!! Why the they didn’t communicate back that those things were not paid for?! Why even they didn’t pay for them if they did the reservation?! I’ve no clue!
For the experience to even become more worse, their reimbursement process was said to take 4-6 weeks (don’t ask me why someone would need 6 weeks to do a simple reimbursement process but anyway), I contacted them after 5 weeks, and they told me that they sent the check to the wrong address (which is something that puzzles me cause I gave them my address printed on a paper which means they can’t say that my handwriting was bad or any crap of this sort) and then asked me to wait an additional week. If I didn’t receive it, then they can send it via direct deposit.
Now it’s like 3 days after I gave them my bank info and still, no money and no reimbursement for the over $800 bill that I had cause of this screwed up experience. They just contacted me that they sent another check and asked me to wait one more week!!!
Advice? If they contacted you for an interview, run like hell!!
Oh, on another comment, their interview process IS REALLY LONG, it took like a month and a half from the first phone screening until the actual full loop!!