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Summary
I had a technical phone screen interview with LinkedIn for an IC-2 Infra role in Bangalore. The interview covered CS fundamentals and a coding question, which I largely performed well on despite some initial struggles with system design concepts and challenging follow-ups.
Full Experience
I started the interview with an introduction. I felt the interviewer was a bit nervous and seemed to have just come off another meeting.
We then moved on to CS fundamentals. I answered questions about Virtual Memory and Process vs. Thread perfectly. For Database Normalization, I mentioned the read/write trade-off and deduplication, but the interviewer didn't seem satisfied. When asked how to implement a hashmap from scratch, I was caught off guard and couldn't remember, providing an incorrect answer. This was a missed opportunity.
Next was the coding section. I was given the problem Nested List Weight Sum II, which had four follow-ups. I handled the coding and dry run almost perfectly in one go.
- First, I solved it with a two-pass DFS approach.
- Then, a single-pass BFS.
- For the third follow-up, I was asked for a single-pass DFS (ignoring call stack space and optimizing space), which I tackled by storing level sums in a hash map.
- The last follow-up was for a single-pass DFS with constant space, using the formula
(max_depth + 1) * unweighted_sum - normal_weighted_sum. I needed a hint for this one.
Interview Questions (4)
Differentiate between a process and a thread.
Explain database normalization concepts, including associated trade-offs like read/write performance and deduplication.
How would you implement a hashmap from scratch?
Given a nested list of integers, return the sum of all integers in the list weighted by their depth. The weight is calculated as max_depth - (depth_of_integer - 1), where max_depth is the maximum depth of any integer in the nested list. For example, if the input is [[1,1],2,[1,1]] and the max_depth is 2, then the four 1s at depth 2 would have weight 2 - (2 - 1) = 1, and the 2 at depth 1 would have weight 2 - (1 - 1) = 2. The sum would be 41 + 12 = 6.