I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airtable (Austin, TX) in May 2021
Interview
I was recruited by a manager and given a hard sell on applying after I told them I was not looking. They convinced me it was worth my time, and I regret now that I was swayed. Airtable had one of the least professional hiring processes I've encountered. The interviews were mostly live-coding trick problems, the decision notice from recruiter took weeks after interviews, and you are not compensated for your time.
Technical phone screen was a live-coding exercise that seemed contingent on noticing and flagging one particular inefficient action. Virtual on-site is broken into two day of multiple interviews, 3-4 hours long. The first day interviews are mostly more trick live-coding, where if you don't say the special term they're looking for, you probably fail the interview. No interviews where you talk about experience, or demonstrate actual problems/solutions that you've solved in the real world. The interviewers were ok, but mostly seemed disengaged.
I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by the gender and racial diversity among the interviewers.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Airtable in Mar 2022
Interview
The recruiter reached out to me, followed by a call from the hiring manager. The HM referred me to another team.
Another recruiter reached out to talk about the team. 1 hour technical interview was setup.
The communication was fast and professional.
The interview began with the problem description and went for more than 10-15 mins., to only come up with LC hard questions.
Colossal waste of time from candidate's perspective.
They could have as well asked to traverse tree and print the end nodes.
The second part was to build the in-degrees and out-degrees of tree. But it took me 10-15 mins to understand the problem description. I had run out of patience to understand those diagrams and long description.
It was an out and out topological sort. By then, I had run out of time.
To all the interviewers -> Please state the problem in simple words. Candidates have mere 45 mins to code, execute and debug test cases.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Print the last nodes of tree.
2. Topological algorithm.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airtable
Interview
I was a referral candidate. The whole process was quick. From initial conversation to getting an offer took less than a month. I took a few weeks to compare other offers and was never rushed into making a decision.
I enjoyed the interviews at Airtable more than I enjoyed mine at several other places (including FAANG & other companies of similar size).
Interviewers were polite and wanted to have a conversation. It felt more like exchanging ideas as opposed to being interrogated on a strict rubric.
Per company policy they don't negotiate on compensation (like really). It wasn't an issue for me because they made a very competitive offer. It was a much better experience than getting low-balled and having to negotiate with competing offers.
I didn't find the interview questions too hard. However, they were high signal because they focused on real and relevant problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding challenges were not leet-code. I had to solve simplified versions of real problems that they dealt with, in both the coding and design interviews.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airtable in Oct 2021
Interview
Standard leetcode medium phone round followed by an onsite round. Received a canned rejection email a day after the onsite. Sent multiple emails asking for feedback but got no response.
How poor is a process and company where a recruiter can't take 5 mins to call and share feedback after a candidate spends 8 hours interviewing? No idea where there is a mismatch, and I will probably never know.
I will never interview with them again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some standard leetcode style problems, and a system design, a behavioral round as well with a manager.