Join Engineering Manager, Prachi Gupta and Principal Engineer, Neha Narkhede for an interactive session of personalized advice on technical interview techniques, resume writing skills and gaining extra-curricular experience that makes you stand out.

1. Student Opportunity Lab:
LinkedIn Engineering Session
Title: How to get noticed and excel at technical interviews
Prachi Gupta
Engineering Manager, [in]cubator Co-
founder
http://www.linkedin.com/in/prachigupta
Twitter: @prchg
Email: pgupta@linkedin.com
Neha Narkhede
Principal Engineer & Open source
contributor
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede
Twitter: @nehanarkhede
Email: nnarkhede@linkedin.com
Abstract
Join Engineering Manager, Prachi Gupta and Principal Engineer, Neha Narkhede for an
interactive session of personalized advice on technical interview techniques, resume writing skills
and gaining extra-curricular experience that makes you stand out.
Presenter Biographies
Prachi Gupta
Prachi is a hackday master, and co-founder LinkedIn’s [in]cubator program. She leads
engineering teams for the Identity Engagement product suite at LinkedIn. Most recently, she led
the development of LinkedIn endorsements, the fastest growing product in LinkedIn’s history. She
is also an experienced hiring manager actively involved in the hiring process for both new college
graduates and experienced engineers at LinkedIn.
An entrepreneurial software engineer at heart, she loves to conceptualize, design and deliver
impactful software and travels around the US/world to organize LinkedIn hackathons and meet
with global entrepreneurs.
As an active contributor to the US State Department's TechWomen program, she has mentored
program participants and brought back program observations home to co-found LinkedIn's
Women in Technology initiative.
Prachi holds a Masters in computer science, and has significant experience in working with
startups to explore innovative solutions to real world problems; from socially driven consumer
websites to enterprise business intelligence & analytics software.
Neha Narkhede
Neha Narkhede is a principal engineer leading development of LinkedIn’s data pipeline serving
billions of events per day.
Neha is an active contributor to the open source community and is one of the original authors of
Apache Kafka, a highly scalable distributed publish-subscribe system used heavily at LinkedIn
and across the industry. She actively evangelizes Kafka through various conferences and
meetups; resulting in its adoption by industry leaders like Twitter, Netflix, Dish Network among
others. Prior to that, she developed Oracle Enterprise Search at Oracle.

2. Neha is passionate about encouraging and helping women build careers in technology and has
served on the panel of LinkedIn’s Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner.
Neha holds a Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and is passionate about building
and scaling operable large-scale data systems.
Details:
Resources for preparing for technical interviews
Introduction to Algorithms by CLR, book and videos
Cracking the Technical Interview, Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Programming Pearls, by John Bentley
geeksforgeek.org
Leetcode.com
projecteuler.net
Stanford notes on linked lists
Notes by MIT on Dynamic Programming
Programming interviews exposed by John Mongan, Noah Kindler, Eric Giguere
Practice is not overrated
Come up with designs for existing problems faced by companies in the area that you
want to work in. For example, how would you design LinkedIn’s PYMK feature, how
would you design a Newsfeed feature etc.
Start by writing code for some of the example problems listed at the resources mentioned
above. It is often easier to start by writing code that compiles and passes tests before
practicing on the whiteboard.
After some reasonable practice on a computer, make sure you practice solving interview
puzzles on a whiteboard/piece of paper.
Practice walking through a problem. How you get to the solution is just as important as
finding the right answer.
Talk to your interviewer so they can see your thought process. Silently eliminating
approaches in your mind looks exactly the same as looking clueless to the interviewer.
Dealing with pressure tactics
Applying pressure tactics is just an interviewing style
Try to focus on “what’s being said”, and ignore “how’s it’s being said”
Build your personal brand
Open source your work or contribute to existing open source projects. Github is a good
place to start. If you already are active in the open source community, add your github
account to your LinkedIn profile. Open source contribution is very effective in conveying
your coding skills to your potential employer and interviewers.
Maintain your personal blog and post your thoughts on new technologies you learnt,
synopsis of research papers, or just post a quickstart on how to get started on a new tool.
Depending on your strengths, blogging can be a very effective way of getting your future
employers and peers to notice your technical depth