Internship insight into working with LinkedIn: Saurav Kumar from IIT Kanpur

I interned at the Bangalore office of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking service. This internship provided a great learning experience with a lot of fun.

Selection Procedure

Let’s walk through the only dull and boring part of this internship experience, the selection phase. It involved a coding round for short-listing, followed by an interview. The problems in coding round and interview were mostly from Data Structures and Algorithms. There were 4 problems in the coding round, to be solved within an hour. The interview was conducted in 2 phases, both on telephone. I was given 2 problems in each, and I had to come up with a solution and code it on a online shared code editor. Each interview lasted for about 45 minutes.

Accommodation and Food

LinkedIn provided accommodation in a 4-star hotel in Bangalore for the entire duration of 2.5 months. We had free breakfast, lunch and snacks at the office followed by even more awesome buffet dinner at the hotel on weekdays.

Work Culture and Office

Work culture at LinkedIn is amazing. It promotes you to take intelligent risks and move fast. People are very cooperative to each other at LinkedIn. Most of the open _source technologies that I worked on were home grown at LinkedIn. The office has a lot of good food, snacks, drinks, games: pool, foosball, TT and gym too. Interns were given an awesome cubicle with 2 large monitors, 64 GB _RAM / 16 core CPU and a macbook pro.

My Project

I worked in the Content Filtering Team. LinkedIn has a lot of spam classifiers and filters to prevent spam content on LinkedIn. In case of false positives, there was no existing way to find out why a particular text content has been marked spam. Specially when the content was large, for example in case of Pulse articles, it was painful to manually find the offending parts of text. My project was to build a tool which finds out which specific parts of the text content contributes more towards the spam-score of the content. It was a happy feeling when my code was pushed to production servers and the tool is being used by content filtering team.

Fun activities

LinkedIn also organized a lot of fun activities like Bike-_and-_Hike trip to Sholay Hills, Hands-_on pasta _making class, laser tag. We also had a few speaker series talks from top leaders at LinkedIn.