I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Airbnb
Interview
Their whole process is really big on live speed coding, it doesn't matter how strong your experience is don't bother unless you've spent time practicing on topcoder.
I skipped the online speed coding portion and moved straight to interviews. Because they had to break my interviews up over several days, I got actual feedback part way through. Killed all my past experience interviews (half a million lines of code to choose from), but they weren't happy with the speed of the speed coding, apparently.
There's also an clear age bias, the projects (and their whole "youthful enthusiasm" culture stuff), and a head count around the office makes that pretty clear. Lots of Koolaid.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give me an example of when you've been a good host.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2015
Interview
Got the initial phone screen through referral. I had very good conversation with the recruiter. After a week, it is a tech phone interview. I was asked to write and run code on a online editor. You can choose your programming language. I used JavaScript. I was not able to finish it with 45 mins especially we spend almost 15 mins to explain and understand the question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Provide a set of positive integers (an array of integers). Each integer represent number of nights user request on Airbnb.com. If you are a host, you need to design and implement an algorithm to find out the maximum number a nights you can accommodate. The constrain is that you have to reserve at least one day between each request, so that you have time to clean the room.
Example:
1) Input: [1, 2, 3] ===> output: 4, because you will pick 1 and 3
2) input: [5, 1, 2, 6] ===> output: 11, because you will pick 5 and 6
3) input: [5, 1, 2, 6, 20, 2] ===> output: 27, because you will pick 5, 2, 20
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2015
Interview
Overall it was a pleasant process. Had one phone screen and being brought onsite next week. On site interview consists of 6 parts, one for past project deep dive, two front-end questions, one data structure and two cultural interviews.
What really got me is the data structure part. I probably spend too much time on it so I couldn't finish it in time. After being rejected, I found the question is actually is one of the top 10 popular questions on leetcode, and being categorized as hard. I think if you are not a leetcoder, solving it in time does have difficulty.
I am not comfortable after knowing that question is from leetcode, but I think that's what everybody is doing right now : pick a question from leetcode, hire an engineer that is good at leetcode.