I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2015
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn. Spoke to her about my skills and what I was looking for. Scheduled a phone screen with an engineer a couple of weeks later. I don't think the phone screen was being conducted by a specific team that were looking for someone with my skill-set. It was conducted by a random engineer who was not interested at all in hearing the answer and had a thick accent that was difficult to understand.
The phone screen went as follows: "Hi, I am abc. I work on a team that is trying to reduce customer support. Airbnb is not hotel. We want customers to call hosts directly. We don't want them to call Airbnb. That is me. What about you?" I am literally quoting word for word here and it was just as awful. I spoke a bit about myself, then he we dove into an algorithm. This was the most disappointing part where there was no feedback at all throughout the interview. No dialogue, no questions, he wasn't even listening. When I would ask a question about the problem, there would be no response. I would have to repeat myself and then he would answer in a monosyllable.
The recruiter had said that I should verbalize my thoughts, but when I tried doing that I was told, you don't need to think out loud, just focus on solving the question. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I don't even know why they have a human conducting the phone screen, they might as well have given me a test paper that I had to solve in 45 mins. Since, I couldn't cover all the cases within the 45 mins, he said - I will give you 10 mins to work on the solution more, but I need to leave. I will check after 10 mins. Do you have any questions for me? I asked about the next steps and he said - ask the recruiter and then hung up. Airbnb treat engineers like cattle and the interview process like an assembly line. They wasted my time thoroughly and left a very bad taste in my mouth. I will never recommend this company to anyone.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a 2-D int array, write an iterator that traverses it from left to right and top to bottom. The iterator has 2 methods - boolean hasNext() and int next(). The array can have rows of different sizes, so for e.g.
1, 2, 4, 5
5, 6
<null/empty>,
10, 40, 50
The 2D int array was represented as ArrayList<ArrayList<Integer>>().
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airbnb in Feb 2017
Interview
Telephonic round: The interview started with no introductions... open coderpad, copied a problem... "read the problem and solve it". I tried explaining the problem and how i would solve it, but the interviewer did not have the patience to listen.
Anyway I started coding and there was a STL warning for which I thought I would ask a question. I got the response "I do not know C++".
In all, my code compiled but the O/P was not correct... I ran out of time.
As expected I got a reject.
But the experience was one of the worst I had gone through in my 12 years of industry experience. The person on the other side of the phone was super rude and I completely missed the point of such an interview (they can very well give me a timed coding challenge and that way I would have done the same without the weirdness of talking over phone with a rude person).
I would recommend folks to rather put your brains towards a better company (with humble people).
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airbnb
Interview
They offer you either phone interview or online test. would recommend online test and cheat as the level of questions is freaking hard. If you go for phone interview, the phone interview is gonna be harder as the level of questions is too high
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2016
Interview
A phone interview which asked to solve a coding problem (coding, compile, come up with your own test, and run) within 40 minutes. The coding was not hard. But the testing phase was not clear. The interviewer didn't mention anything about how to process the input.
The interview was mainly to find out if you can code quickly and cleanly (no bug). They didn't care about your industry experience and other stuffs on the resume. As long as you can code, you'll be fine. And they seemed to put a junior person on the interview who sometime gave wrong comment about the code. It could be part of the interview process - to see how you approach to vague/wrong description of the problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Not hard problem. Need to implement a java class with a few APIs to solve a practical problem.
