The interview was for a front-end engineer position. The process took about two weeks, including a recruiter phone screen, a technical coding phone screen, and in-person interviews. There were three technical and three non-technical interviews for the in-person portion, which I found pretty interesting and refreshing.

I thought I did pretty great and breezed through most of the questions (including the phone screen), except I fumbled on one of the tech interviews with a non-front-end question. It was an algorithm question, which I usually struggle with, given to me by a non-FE engineer who admittedly did not know much JavaScript outside of React (e.g., "no tuples in JS?", "what's Angular/Ember?"). I had a little trouble understanding the expected input/output, which ended up eating 10 minutes. That left about 15 minutes to figure out the actual problem, which ended up being a pretty simple solution.

The interviewers themselves were all fantastic and really nice, and seemed to enjoy working there. Although a couple of them looked like they had been through war with all the interviews they were doing (up to 5 a week!), which I thought was a little unfair to their employees as well as candidates. One was yawning every 3 minutes and checking his phone, which was distracting.

I walked out of the office thinking I nailed it and started planning all the vacations I was going to go on with my quarterly travel credit! I was honestly the most confident here out of 3 other companies I interviewed at and received offers from. Obviously, I was a little sad and surprised to hear they decided not to make an offer, or even a callback for a second round. The recruiter was only allowed to say I got one "no," so they rejected me.

With all that said, I'm mostly okay with this process, as Airbnb is a top place to work and probably has an overwhelming amount of top candidates at their door. However, if the "no" was from the one algorithm question, I think there is a major disconnect with their acceptance criteria and how much they say they value culture. Why waste everyone's time if all it takes is one veto from, in my opinion, the least important module on the technical side? Should the interviewer with the least amount of experience in front-end be making this decision (he was very smart and friendly, and I believe we actually would have worked well together)? I'd like to think this module was more to get insight into one's thought process and problem-solving skills versus arriving at a canned/memorized answer, but I was apparently wrong. Maybe toss out the culture ones and add another coding module if they carry more weight? Anyways, I'm sounding bitter and frustrated now. Good luck if you can get in; it seemed like a lot of fantastic people work there.

What is your favorite travel destination?