Booking.com Developer interview questions

The process started with a call with the recruiter to know a bit more about your experience, what you are looking for and also they give you a brief introduction about the company and what projects are on going and they are hiring for. The second step was a call with a technical lead. The first half and hour was about giving a bit more explanation of your current responsibilities, project that you work, technologies that you use, methodologies, etc. The second part is more about technical questions focused on the backend end. The features introduced in Java 8, advantages and disadvantages, differences with previous implementations, microservices, etc. The third step of the process is an on-site interview. This one has two parts, first part is about competencies with an engineer manager and a product owner. I found this one an easy and friendly to be in, it felt like a normal conversation both ways. The second part of the on-site interview was technical focused. It was done with a technical lead and a senior software engineer. There were questions about Java 8, new features, design patterns and at the end a coding exercise. Not really sure what they were after as I had to follow their directions for the coding exercise, my guess is that they were after I was using the right object type from the JDK. This part was the worst as the interviewers (from their position) were a bit harsh, their expressions and faces when answers were given and they were not what they expected, it was not really prepared as the questions were a bit random.

I attended Booking.com Hackerrank assingment which has 4 questions and takes 75 min. Two weeks later, while I was abroad, I got an email from them. Email was starting with "congratulations" . They were requesting 25min HR interview.  I was abroad for vacation, on Monday morning I wrote my time frame according to the local time and I waited their call during the week.  On Friday I got called very early morning and eventually I missed the call. I replied back with email and mentioned that I am still interested in the role and that I will be back to my country next week, and again I wrote new available time frame according to my country's local time. After that Booking.com never called me back even though I sent a reminder email.  It is very time consuming process, I think there are too many candidates like me, it is like a lotery and very disappointing.