I interviewed at Airbnb recently. Interviewers do not really prepare for interview before they walk-in. First interviewer - Entered 5 mins late. Start searching for question for few minutes in the laptop after entering. Finally, he/she din't find then finally wrote method signature on whiteboard with (a) method name (b) input and (c) output. Then, he/she says can you think what can be question here?Seriously? just by method name and data structure name? I had to come up with data and ask whether this is what he/she thinking about? Then, he/she says no it's not that. Then, I explained more he/she says it's not even that. On top of that he/she questions why do you think that is what I'm trying to ask? I gave up here. Then, I questioned him/her requesting "You should give me the data" to explain the question :-( I know in that moment I din't ask nicely may be because I lost 15 minutes of time and months of efforts in preparing for interviews. If we are spending months to prepare, why interviewer can't do a good job of preparing ahead? Second interviewer - Enter the room. Greet.! hand me the printed paper...! Now, I should understand the question by myself. I'm not complaining about that. But, my major complaint is when I'm asking for clarifying question even interviewer do not remember what they are asking clearly? On the other hand, design interviewer did excellent job. With proper question and helper functions, and expectations. Ironically, design interviewers should be abstract. I may have been fine without that. Funny part is, When I escalated "coding interviewers" to recruiter, response is even more classic. He/she says that we are maintaining similar standards for all candidates and don't have any complaints from there. It was a tight slap on my face that Facebook at least listens to the feedback regardless whether they take action. It made me think do I really want to leave Facebook and work here.
Sigh and It’s Imaginable. Young and aggressive tech worker in AirbNb.
Lol I would rather call careless and lazy 😉..!
I had similar experience. Specifically, they handed out a print out and expected me to respond using a pre determined function. Interviewers were mostly in a rush. They need work on their interviewing game. I did not bother sharing feedback with HR because they were a bigger joke.
This seems common with startup interviews. They want to keep up the facade of interviewing even if they don’t really need to hire more and also keep a pulse on the talent market. It’s like when you search for deals / Craigslist / Tinder every few days to get a feel for the market.
Seriously? Would they do that? But, I don't consider Airbnb is a start up anymore.
Airbnb was the least hospitable group of interviewers I had, ironically. One of my interviewers sat on her laptop the entire time. Another was super aggro before I got a word out of my mouth. Another asked me if I wanted to get off the call halfway through my phone screen. I guess she was bored. Oh well. Short term vacation rentals are serious business!
😂 Sat on her laptop? May be working on SEV.
The interviewer asked you if you wanted to hang up the call? That's pretty rude.
I 100% believe your assessment of your experience, but just thinking out loud, I would not give a well structured leetcode question to a SDE from Facebook. What would information would that give? I already know they're capable of leetcode problems. Would definitely go for more open ended and less structured coding problems to gauge analysis.
I partially agree with you. It all depends on the philosophy of the company. If you are a star being recruited, it makes sense. For a general hire, I think is just laziness
It's not about asking leetcode question or not. They are free to ask any thing under earth or they can make up their own. Here, interviewer is not prepared enough, tbh not prepared at all, to explain the question. Interviewer jumped on to interview as if he/she is walking into weekly team meeting. To be fair, If people need to listen to me in my weekly meeting I would arrive better prepared about my thought process in the interest of their time. Importantly, I wouldn't ask listeners to guess the future and come up with their guesses so that I can prove them wrong for wrongly guessing my train of thought 😀
I’m sure the person is female. If the person is male, OP wouldn’t mask it.
DM me the interviewers’ names. This is definitely not how I conduct my coding interviews.
Thanks for showing the interest to fix the problem. I may not be sharing those for obvious reasons. These values should be trickle down from top rather than going from ICs to top. Anyone can have a bad day and can come unprepared. Though I strongly feel this is strictly because of negligence. The point when Airbnb lost me when recruiter responded like that.
This is the problem with the generalist interview
Maybe they are trying to protect their job and feel insecure after seeing the likes of WeWork and Uber? Engineers are insecure because many of them don’t have social skills to get a job outside the industry and many are also immigrants with restrictions in job search either due to communication skills or Visa. This also should be a good lesson for us as well. I see so many people criticizing about the interview process, interviewers, interviewers but they don’t realize they might be one of the negative contributors (not saying op is). Interviewers are picky as hell and it is hard to satisfy these sensitive engineers. As OP pointed out, many of the interviewers are unprepared or don’t make effort to make the candidates feel comfortable and do their best. Instead, they like to point out nitty gritty details in code and verbal expressions (they are so easily hurt). I feel like engineers are even more sensitive than artists. Anyhow, if we want to make this easy, we should start being more generous to the candidates. Attitudes like this by the interviewers will only choose the candidates who practiced the problems before because they can answer no matter how poorly the interviewer was prepared. I say that this is not limited to AirBnb nor FANG. I found smaller companies are actually picker. Perhaps they don’t want to hire people unlike big companies where the interviewers feel better in job security.
Lol, this is funny
It may seem that way in the end, but with weeks or months of preparation is being played by bad interviewers. Each person is different. If you promise 45 mins for coding including introductions and questions in the end, you should give that time to the candidate.
Most interviewers don’t realize that while they are evaluating a candidate, a candidate is also evaluating them and their employers brand. Sending naive interviewers ends up doing significant harm to the brand of the employer. In a talent starved market, this is even more critical than anywhere else to ensure consistent interview experience for majority of the candidates. It’s not that hard to be prepared as an interviewer to ensure positive interviewing experience for majority of the candidates.