Got a phone interview with linkedin. The interviewer had a heavy chinese accent even though he had been with linkedin for over 10 years. the call started on an awkward note when i walked my interviewer through my professional background. i had spent 10 min talking about it and was eager to start the coding part but the interviewer insisted on spending yet another 10 mins on my background. in my experience, phone interviews are focused on writing code but apparently not for this gentleman. when finally we moved to the coding part, the questions themselves were fairly easy however, the interviewer had a hard time understanding the difference between hashmap contains and hashmap add methods' time complexity. since both of them are constant time operations, i opined that the difference between using one over the other was purely semantic but the interviewer did not seem to understand what that word meant and asked me why I thought using add was better than using contains. we argued about this for over 5 mins. finally, when i had a working implementation, the interviewer did not seem convinced it would work, so i had to map out the entire function call stack for him, on a shared screen. at the end he begrudgingly accepted that the code looked ok.