The process involved two phone screens and an onsite interview, which consisted of three technical and two non-technical interviews.

I had heard very positive reviews about their culture and office space. Let me be very blunt: the recruiting coordinator was "super lazy" and exuded negative vibes. Every question I had was answered with a simple yes or no. She showed me around the office, and my honest impression was that it was a "zoo." I understand the significance of decorating office spaces to reflect company culture, but artificial trees and stuffed animals in restrooms? You must be kidding.

Interviewers would walk into the interview room (or what was called one), introduce themselves (2-3 minutes), ask for my introduction (2-3 minutes), and engage in some banter about Airbnb (3-4 minutes). They would then explain the coding question and all the constraints the solution needed to satisfy (5 minutes). This left only 25-30 minutes to actually get a working solution. You would need to be a ninja who had seen the question beforehand to clear this.

My interview room was decorated with travel and music items. It contained three small, foldable wooden chairs that were always creaking. My first interviewer sat on one, immediately stood up, and wondered when it would collapse. This, my friends, was Airbnb reveling in its own culture. Half the conference rooms had benches and crude furniture. I am certainly glad they did not switch the standard ergonomic furniture with their themed, half-torn, dusty versions and claim their office better reflected their culture.

The non-technical interviews were a disaster of their own making. I was asked what drew me to Airbnb and what "weird qualities" I possessed to qualify for working at that zoo.

Right after the second interview, I made up my mind that this was not a place I wanted to work, regardless of their crazy valuations. The subsequent interviews only reinforced my decision.

Tip: Try using terser language for coding solutions. I was using Java, and by the time I created their input of List<List<List<CustomObject>>>, half my interview time was over.

Optimized Boggle, Merge Intervals with some cap.

Questions were more difficult than LeetCode hard questions. As the other interviews note, your thinking process counts for zero. All they are interested in is working code.

The interviewers were friendly but made no attempt to understand the code.