I passed HackerRank challenge and moved to phone interview round. In summary, my Airbnb phone interviewer showed zero empathy and was seemingly looking to fail me: giving really hard problem, didn't let me finish my solution, stopped it at 45-min mark, gave zero feedback during the whole time.
My interviewer has Chinese accent and gave me a very hard graph problem (even by FAANG standard). Fortunately, I had strong foundation and lots of experience working with graphs in my last jobs, I found my way to solution. I already coded the major part of the algorithm, was able to print out the answer to the first sub-question, and showed her how to get to the answer of the second sub-question.
However, while I almost get to the answer (about 5 mins away), she closed CoderPad, citing that it is already 45-minute mark and want to leave the rest of 15 minutes (out of one hour) for me to ask question (!!!). Well, thank you very much for your concern, dear interviewer! Remember that I need to spend first 10-15 minutes for exchanging greetings, read and understand the problem, recognize it's a graph problem and come up with the general approach. That will leave only about 30 minutes to implement multiple steps of the graph algorithm.
There is a rumor in SF Bay Area that Airbnb (or its Chinese engineers) is discriminating against non-Chinese candidates. I totally understand that Airbnb is inclined to hire many candidates of Chinese descent since one of its key operations is to expand to China. They have a dedicated group for Chinese expansion and operation. Well, my own Airbnb interview experience does NOT convince me that rumor is baseless.
For context: I'm neither Indian nor Chinese (oy vey!!). I’m also not noob in technical interviews as I'm working at a large tech company in SF and got an offer from FAANG right before Airbnb. I was hoping to get some leverage for negotiation with that FAANG.