I have applied for the software developer position on their jobs website. I received an email after more than a week. The interviewing process was described in that email.
1. Phone interview with the Recruiter
2. Technical phone interview with 2 members from the IT Department
3. In-person interview rounds at our Global headquarters in Amsterdam
The position was for Perl developer but they didn't require Perl experience.
I've passed first interview and I failed at the technical one. Since they have read my resume I expected questions that were in my field of knowledge.
Also I think that the description of requirements could be more clear.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given a text file containing the text for Hamlet (/usr/share/file.txt), return the top 5 most frequent words with count.
You have a long set of numbers. More than 400k. How would you search if a specific number is in set? They expect a better solution than looping the set until you find the number.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com
Interview
Applied online and got call from HR after 2 weeks, conversation was very good and scheduled interview week later. HR explained me the interview process (online notepad they can see in real time) and conversing over phone.
Interview lasted for 30-35 mins and I was asked 2 programming questions, one I could solve about 90% and other one I solved fully. I was positive about interview and expecting positive reply but 2 days later received negative reply from HR with message that said I didn't explain myself properly and exp. Do not match with tools and technology that we use.
In 30 mins trying to solve problems with 2 ppl watching you does not give you ample time to explain what I am doing/thinking. Reviewing candidate just by asking 2 questions and then deciding his/her capabilities is not justified. There is Skype and so many other ways where you could have couple of rounds to actually see if candidate is good or bad!
The only reason exp. Is not negative is because there is always communication from HR to me, which almost 99% companies Dont do!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Simple questions which you could find on many coding sites as codeeval.com, programming language can be of your choice.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com in Feb 2014
Interview
Overall process was interesting. What I liked about this process is that they have different approach than other big companies:
- they ask you to prepare a presentation on some of your past technical challenges
- you may directly talk with CIO directly
I had following questions on phone screening:
- tell the usage of map and grep in Perl
- code function that merges two lists, but removing duplicate ones
- write simple crawler without specifics(just some dfs)
Also, I had onsite interviews with the following questions:
- write code for finding shortest path on the chessboard
- write code for composing cloud of tags from the text. Discussing alternative approaches and scalability issues.
- write code for determining crawler bots by analizing web server logs.
- explain some perl code
Of course they asked to evaluate runtime complexity of the written code.