I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Booking.com
Interview
The interview process is simple and same as described by other people. I'd like to add a couple of things to this -
- Recruiter was very polite and helpful in my case.
- Strong emphasis on justifying your algo/system design choices with numbers/experience/rational reason.
- Interviewers do give hints if you're not going in the right direction but if you fail to catch them and correct your solution, that shows rigid mentality and it's a big negative sign.
- Bonus points for being proactive in finding edge cases and bugs in your code/design and correcting them.
- In no interview did I feel like I was being interviewed. They all felt like discussions between colleagues.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Straightforward algorithm question followed with discussions on scaling and how to productionize it
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Manchester City Centre, England) in Sep 2017
Interview
Too long; there were ~5 calls and a code problem to solve. No questions were asked about the actual technologies I'd be working with, which appeared strange to me. The code problem was pretty clever and fun to solve.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Code development, quality assurance and testing - how it all works
I applied online. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Dec 2017
Interview
Started with a telephonic interview and then a codepair interview which I failed terribly.
I failed to interpret one of the questions they asked and passed the other two. Two weeks later I got an email telling me I wasn't what they were looking for and advised me to try again later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
'''
We want to implement a feature to suggest to users the cheapest hotel that is more popular than the one they are looking at.
Write a function that given an array of hotels, sorted by their popularity returns a map from the hotel ids that associates each hotel with the cheapest hotel that is more popular than the one in question.
if there is no hotel that is cheaper and more popular than the one with that id, then it shouldn't be put in the map.
You can assume that hotel ids and prices are integers and that hotels have the following format:
struct hotel{
int id;
int price;
}
Example 1:
input = [
{ id => 123, price => 200 }, # Most popular
{ id => 55, price => 150 }, # Second most popular
{ id => 17, price => 70 }, # Third most popular
{ id => 18, price => 500 }, # ...
{ id => 27, price => 270 },
{ id => 101, price => 230 } # Least popular
]
output = {
18 : 17,
27 : 17,
101 : 17
}