I was initially interviewed on the phone for 45 minutes. There was an issue with codepen, but together with the interview we were able to switch over to collabedit. The interview went smoothly and I was moved to the onsite.
The onsite interview was in the San Francisco location. I was really excited to see the office, and showed up an hour early. Unfortunantly I didn't read the interview orientation e-mail close enough and spent most of the time in the lobby.
The day started pretty well. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was able to snag a banana and a large glass of water. I was led to a small room next to the design department. The room itself was covered in carpet. The overhead light was out which seemed to bother everyone throughout the day except for me(pro-tip: don't make a "mood lighting" joke at and an interview).
The first session was the cross functional one, I was paired up with someone from the marketing department. I have to admit I didn’t research this and was caught a bit off guard by some of them. I was asked what is the best gift I have ever given and received and that froze me. Eventually, I realized it was an opportunity to monologue and I ended up talking quite a while.
The second one was also cross functional, but the interviewer was an engineer. I never really connected with the question, but we ended up having a very nice earnest discussion about career expectations. Throughout the day, one of the best parts was flipping the questions and getting the perspective of the interviewer
Session three was a general coding question(sample included below), about finding a free slot given a list of schedules. We spent a short amount of time talking through it and I felt it would be best to code it to be better understand so I jumped right in. While my solution worked a bit different from what the interviewer was expecting, I had the impression that he was more or less happy with it.
Lunch was impressive and I might have overeaten a bit.
After lunch was the tour. That was my favorite part of the day. I had 15 minutes and as I got to see all the themed meeting rooms(they have modeled them after beautiful Airbnb listings) and big spaces full of cushions. There seem to be books everywhere, and I wanted desperately to just browse and see what people might read. The recruiter kept me moving, I wished I could have got lost and just wandered a bit.
The next session was a project deep dive. I tried to explain a localization management project that I was really excited about. This one touched overall architecture and general technical setup. There was no feedback at the end of this one.
The second post-lunch interview was the first web dev specific one(question included below), creating a autocomplete widget. I had implemented something similar during my last job and was able to complete the question. I asked for feedback and I felt like I had succeeded. They asked me if I had any questions about the engineering culture at Airbnb and I sheepishly admitted I did not.
The last interview was also a web dev coding question(question included below), create a star widget. This one I started working with Javascript and CSS, but decided that I would try to come up with something a bit more impressive and go for a CSS only solution. I was able to get mostly there and with a few hints from the interviewer I put something together. I felt really good at the end of this interview and we were able to have time to chat. The interviewer shared a personal anecdote that was quite touching. This capped off what was an interesting day.
Coming home I felt fairly confident in my chances. The turnaround was quick and I got a polite rejection, explaining I didn’t reach the technical bar. As the process was smooth and some of the conversations were really enjoyable(I wish I could have spent more time talking to several of the interviewers), it didn’t sting too bad. The biggest frustration was the delta between the phone screen and the actual in house interviews was not so large, but it seems like the expectations were much higher. Based on the amount of time and money it takes for both parties to have an onsite, I wish that the phone screen would have been a bit harder. If I could have, I wish I could have spent a little more time touring the office, this was my favorite part of the day.