Airbnb Software Engineer interview questions

Recruiter reaches out to me to set up a time to talk. The recruiter neglected to call me at that time. I send them a follow up email 30 minutes afterwards saying I didn't receive a call. No response. I send another follow up email a week later asking about rescheduling the call. The recruiter says that she mixed up her schedule, but she said she sent a follow up email asking to reschedule the call afterwards, which for some reason I didn't get. Either way, I end 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 that are known to have a selective interview process, in order 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 to each position. It sounds like they mostly just care about culture fit anyways from what I've heard about the onsite interview process. For a company that touts their core values and host-like nature, I find it hilarious that this is the worst interview experience I've ever had.

I was recruited to apply for a frontend software engineering position at Airbnb, and invited in to the office to have lunch and chat with a recruiter. I was warned that the interview process was incredibly selective, and that it would best to over prepare. Luckily, I wasn't in a rush to leave my current job, so I scheduled my phone screen for 2 weeks out, and spent the time brushing up on data structures and algorithms. The phone screen was a live coding exercise, which lasted about 45 minutes. They called me up the next day to schedule an onsite for the following week. The onsite was a bit of a marathon, 1 general coding interview, 2 frontend focused interviews, a break for lunch, then 1 architecture interview, and 2 culture fit interviews. Each segment lasted about an hour. Honestly, it was challenging, but not unfairly so. All the questions seemed focused on my ability to do the job, rather than simply brain teasers or hypotheticals. I ended up smiling my way through most of the sessions. They followed up really quickly (I had a verbal yes the next day and an offer within a couple of days).