I passed a HackerRank challenge and moved to the phone interview round. In summary, my Airbnb phone interviewer showed zero empathy and seemed to be looking to fail me:

• They presented a really hard problem.
• They didn't let me finish my solution.
• They stopped the interview at the 45-minute mark.
• They offered zero feedback during the entire time.

My interviewer had a Chinese accent and gave me a very hard graph problem, even by FAANG standards. Fortunately, I have a strong foundation and extensive experience working with graphs from my past jobs, so I found my way to a solution. I had already coded the major part of the algorithm, was able to print the answer to the first sub-question, and showed her how to arrive at the answer for the second sub-question.

However, just as I was about to reach the final answer (about 5 minutes away), she closed CoderPad. She cited that it was already the 45-minute mark and wanted to reserve the remaining 15 minutes (out of the hour) for me to ask questions (!!!). Well, thank you very much for your concern, dear interviewer! I needed to spend the first 10-15 minutes on greetings, reading and understanding the problem, recognizing it as a graph problem, and coming up with a general approach. That left only about 30 minutes to implement multiple steps of the graph algorithm.

There is a rumor in the SF Bay Area that Airbnb (or its Chinese engineers) discriminates against non-Chinese candidates. I totally understand that Airbnb is inclined to hire many candidates of Chinese descent since one of its key operations is to expand into China. They have a dedicated group for Chinese expansion and operations. My own Airbnb interview experience does not convince me that rumor is baseless.

For context: I am neither Indian nor Chinese (oy vey!!). I am also not new to technical interviews, as I am currently working at a large tech company in SF and received an offer from FAANG right before Airbnb. I was hoping to leverage that for negotiation with FAANG.

HackerRank challenge