A recruiter reached out to me to set up a time to talk. The recruiter neglected to call me at that time. I sent them a follow-up email 30 minutes afterward, stating I didn't receive a call. There was no response. I sent another follow-up email a week later, asking about rescheduling the call. The recruiter said that she had mixed up her schedule but claimed she had sent a follow-up email asking to reschedule the call afterward, which, for some reason, I didn't receive. Either way, I ended up speaking with her and setting up a phone interview.

The engineer I spoke with didn't speak much and was difficult to communicate with. The problem I was given involved a bunch of ugly string data parsing and using a heuristic to modify the data in a certain way. It was an easy problem, but they wanted a fully working solution within the short time limit. I couldn't finish it in time. Pick a language that has as little verbosity as possible and don't bother engaging with the interviewer, because they don't care to speak with you. They just want to see how fast you can code.

There are a lot of companies known to have a selective interview process to maintain their reputation as a desirable company to work for that is difficult to get into. Most of these companies ask difficult problems to test your capabilities, but Airbnb is essentially just applying an arbitrary filter to weed out the large number of applicants for each position. It sounds like they mostly just care about culture fit anyway, from what I've heard about the onsite interview process. For a company that touts its core values and host-like nature, I find it hilarious that this is the worst interview experience I've ever had.

How fast can you parse strings?