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by yadamo 3759 days ago
OP has posted this link before, both here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10990206 (with the title "Get an interview at LinkedIn by solving this puzzle") and on the Who's Hiring threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014173

As an exercise, I wrote a quick and dirty python script to solve this back in February (albeit it's not the most elegant solution but far better than brute force) and submitted my answer and subsequent contact info hoping to eventually hear back about said interview, and never did.

Which is quite frustrating from the perspective of someone on the job hunt. Why use something like this as a hiring tool and not follow up on it?

</rant>

4 comments

I completed it too just for fun. I never was contacted either. At the very least, an email saying 'congrats' would have been nice.
Is LinkedIn a desired place to work? I've never heard anyone clamoring to work there.
I work at LinkedIn. Let me be the first one to tell you that it is an amazing place to work at! Everyone is super smart and talented. The infra teams have some really amazing projects under their belt - a lot of which are open sourced. I work on the applications team and I love the culture in our org - everyone is super friendly, helpful and it's a privilege to be working on products that are used by hundreds of millions of people and being able to call shots on them. Also as a relatively inexperienced dev, I'm given ample responsibilities to drive my projects and mould them that I feel are helping me grow. The perks are absolutely amazing - pretty comparable to the ones you get at FB/Google. My favorite ones are $2k reimbursement for fitness related expenses per year, an entire week off during Independence day and Christmas, a day off to yourself and your team each month (search for InDays), and frequent company and team outings (there was a screening for the last Star Wars movie and is another one for Batman vs Superman soon). I'll probably never work for another big company again after this for an entirely different set of reasons, but I am absolutely glad about my decision to join LinkedIn.
Are you in the Bay Area? In my circles they are known as a good place to work.

That said, I don't understand why they've hired so aggressively nor what all those employees do, but they have a nice campus, good pay, and good perks.

> not the most elegant solution but far better than brute force

Actually, brute force works just fine for such a small matrix:

https://gist.github.com/aexaey/3657fa39cc35c861f6d6

This seems to be a common pattern. I suspect there could be a business opportunity here for someone to outsource intermediated job applications and keep track of both applicant and employer communications.

Plenty of sites try to match up the two sides but it seems most fall down at the point of initial contact.