Some things were good, and some were bad along the way. Thinking back, it was mostly bad, which is funny because I initially intended to write a neutral review. My view of Airbnb is generally more negative after this process, as there was a lot of hypocrisy against their mission statement. However, they are doing cool things, so perhaps they are a company worth revisiting down the road (they have a 1-year cooldown period). Feel free to use this process for interview practice, as their coding assessments are quite stringent and would be good preparation for other companies.

LAYOUT 0. Recruiter chat

1. Phone screen (2 if they need more data)
2. Onsite, which included 1 system design, 2 coding, 1 experience, and 2 culture fit assessments

GOOD

1. Recruiters were generally friendly.

BAD Here are some things to watch out for if you want to avoid dealing with nonsense as a candidate and have other onsites to worry about, as I did.

1. It took a couple of months to get from the phone screen to the onsite. Perhaps it's better at HQ, but this was very slow in Seattle, and I wouldn't recommend it if you're on a tight deadline. This is likely due to limited headcount, which is understandable but doesn't lead to a pleasant candidate experience.

So much for "Being a Host"!

1. All but one of my interviewers had a thick accent that made communication an uphill battle. As a native English speaker, it's frustrating to have only 45 minutes for these problems and spend half the time saying, "Can you repeat that?" and tenaciously clinging to every sentence fragment you can understand. One interview was so bad that I couldn't even explain my thought process for the first 5 minutes. The interviewer made me jump straight to drawing my system on the whiteboard after 30 seconds since we had to communicate in a common language of pictures. I'm all for ethnic diversity in the workplace, but did you think lots of accents meant diversity? No. This brings me to my next point...

All but one of my interviewers were male and East Asian. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; I'm sure these employees are great and deserve to be here. But Airbnb explicitly states on their website that they are all about diversity and inclusion, which wasn't the case. There wasn't a single underrepresented minority on my loop (I guess that's why they call it underrepresented), and I would hate to be an URM working here.

So much for "Belong Anywhere!"

1. The interviewers were unaware that I wasn't bringing my own laptop, which led to a lot of fumbling around with passwords, CoderPad links, and general logistics. This isn't an issue with whiteboards or other companies following the same process. Again, when you mandate only having 45-minute interviews and deviate from the standard process, you should ensure that those 45 minutes are used wisely.

2. It's generally good practice to spend 5 minutes understanding the prompt and discussing your solution before jumping into implementation. Because you only have 45 minutes, almost every interviewer pushed for implementation sooner than that (closer to 2 minutes on average), which is the opposite of what the recruiter and the rest of the industry advise. Moreover, when I asked clarifying questions, I sometimes received a condescending response: "It doesn't say anything like that in the prompt!" I suppose you're just supposed to do what you're told. Someone needs to make a decision and be more consistent in what they tell candidates.

3. My lunch buddy casually slipped in negative comments about the company during our lunch. Small things, like the food being bad. Big things, like the work-life balance. I can't say I felt more enthusiastic about the company after asking questions.

4. I don't want to make ad hominem, personal attacks, but I don't have to when it applies to everybody. Pretty much everybody had a very typical techie personality and didn't pass my simple interview bar: "Do I want to spend 8 hours a day with this person and collaborate with them?" If you are a social engineer, uhh I mean, a sociable engineer, perhaps this place isn't for you.

5. The interview was on Monday. The recruiter said you'd get feedback by Tuesday. Lol, no, that's too easy. How about we make you wait all week, call you first thing Friday, and spoil your happy weekend outlook with a rejection? Recruiters (not just at Airbnb) need to start underpromising and overdelivering here.

LeetCode Hards, involving graph/tree problems and a system design question.