Airbnb Site Reliability Engineer interview questions

Here's the good news: - If you've done some research about SRE hiring at AirBNB, you've probably seen a writeup about a horrible experience one candidate had a few years ago. It's not like that anymore. With almost all the people I met, I thought they were acting like a host. - The interview is passable. They are not knowingly trying to trip you up with trick questions. Even for sessions that I did relatively bad on, the interview hosts were friendly and able to teach me a couple of things that would help me in future interviews or at my work. - The interview preparation material I was sent was very hard. While the interview for SREs is still a hard interview, I prepared for way much more than I was asked during the interviews. I prepared for but was not asked any Dynamic Programming questions. Here's the bad news: - There is one interview that I thought was essentially a "shibboleth" for having worked at Google/Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter. I'm not going to give the question. I don't think they realize what they are doing, and as long as they continue asking that question, I bet their most successful candidates will tend to come from these companies. I offered up several different creative options in my interview, but they were looking for a specific answer that will be obvious if you've worked at those companies. You can still get an offer without succeeding in this interview, but you may need to do even better than average on the other interviews. More good news: - The programming questions were difficult but not impossible. You won't find the ones I was asked on leetcode-style websites. There was one programming question that I spent the first 5 minutes thinking, "I have no idea how to do this and I'm going to end up turning in an empty file". Somehow I was able to arrive at the solution (with the help of the programming language documentation). It was a thrill and if you've made it to this point, you can do it too. I did not get an offer. I like to think that I was close.