I was referred by a friend.

I was given a code challenge to work on, on HackerRank. I produced code that wasn't able to pass all the test cases. Afterwards, I had a follow-up call with an engineer where I discussed how I would have fixed my solution.

I moved on to a phone screen interview with an engineer. The interviewer was generally friendly and talkative, so I was able to bounce my ideas off him. I wrote a working solution with test cases, and he seemed satisfied.

Eventually, I was scheduled for an onsite interview. I commuted to the city and walked to the office. The area outside the office wasn't too nice, but once you were inside, it was beautiful. It was the nicest office I had ever seen, even better than Twitter, in my opinion. It was incredibly quirky. The recruiter took me around for a short tour, and then I was thrown into my first two interviews.

The first two interviews were "cross-functional" interviews, but they were basically cultural interviews. They ask pretty broad behavioral questions that aren't necessarily related to work at all. Each interviewer asked about 10-15 questions. I came prepared for most of the questions and didn't feel stumped by any of them.

After the cultural interviews was a deep-dive interview, which was pretty fun. I also prepared for this interview, so I felt I did really well. I went into great detail about the largest project I tackled at work. The interviewer would ask clarifying questions, and by the end of the interview, we were both pretty fired up.

After this interview, I had lunch with my friend who referred me. I was assured this was NOT an interview, lol.

After lunch, I was thrown into two coding interviews. The first interviewer was extremely intense, noting my mistakes before I was even able to notice them. They asked me a hard question that I practiced from LeetCode and Glassdoor. I was able to explain my thought process and get a working solution with a few minutes to spare. This felt like a pair programming exercise.

The next interviewer came into the room and seemed extremely flustered. I legit thought he was having an anxiety attack. It made me feel uncomfortable. He could barely tell me what the question was, and then once he was finished, he sat down and was furiously working on his laptop. This interview was a stark contrast to the previous interview and was just weird. I was able to get 2/3 of the solution complete with running code, so I didn't feel too bad about it.

Finally, I had a whiteboarding/system design interview with a senior engineer. I was asked to design an internationalization system. This interview was pretty fun and mostly consisted of clarifying requirements and evaluating the tradeoffs of different approaches. By the end of this interview, the interviewer seemed quite excited about the discussion.

Finally, I met with my recruiter again and was escorted out. Overall, the day was extremely tiring, given that I already had trouble sleeping and then had to go through a 5-hour onslaught of interviews. I left feeling incredibly optimistic and excited about Airbnb as a company. Throughout the entire process, my recruiter was incredibly helpful, and everything was extremely clear.

Two days later, I was rejected without feedback. Upon asking for any feedback, I was ignored. I'm not entirely convinced Airbnb is honestly hiring for a particular position. It feels like they might just be constantly interviewing and willing to hire any absolutely fantastical candidates. Similar to other reviews on Glassdoor about Airbnb, I was left with a sour feeling in my mouth. What could I have possibly done better?

Matrix Iterator

Alien Dictionary

Graph with file path-like structure

Tell me about a time you had to give someone terrible news.

What is Airbnb?

What does "belong anywhere" mean to you?