I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Dec 2016
Interview
Applied by solving their problem set at hacker-rank online. Recruiter contacted me within one week. We scheduled a phone call. She missed the time, but it was not that much of pain as our conversation was interesting and I got the good amount of interesting information. Then we scheduled the interview with their "developers". Even after proposing me a list of possible time slots (I picked several) they scheduled this interview into a different time slot, okay. And this technical screen was one of the worst in my life. No introduction, they just pasted simple problem statement into the coding area, denied any discussion around the problem. I didn't have any feeling that they are interested in any kind of discussion, and that made this screening more meaningless as I've already solved much more interesting problems in their HR problem set. Okay. I finished first almost naive solution, then changed it to optimized, with few small bugs (that I discovered later in few minutes after the finish).
The interview was scheduled for 45 minutes, but after 25 minutes of the interview, one of the interviewers started "finishing" interview. Honestly, I agree that it's fine to stop interview earlier but, I don't believe that I was so terrible.
As a cherry on this "cake" is an answer that I received during the session for my questions to them, from the same interviewer that was on rush somewhere.
My question: "What do you do with 'bad' code? How are you improving the quality of your products?"
Answer: "We run bad code in production."
I know what "troll" means, but doing it on the interview with some person that's outside of your company?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We have two words. We need to determine if the second word contains a substring with an anagram of the first word.
ping & jingp -> yes
ping & ijngp -> no
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam)
Interview
Interviewed by phone and needed first to pass HackerRank test (average complexity). You should be focused here at good knowledge of some language (I used c++) and good understanding basic data structures (map/hash_map/vector, etc). After successful passing the test I was invited onsite. There were 3 interviews - coding, system design and free talking about prior experience / booking business awareness. At coding part onsite to be successful you should be aware of basic algorithms and data structures with focus at system scalability. At system design part I was asked to design small feature for Booking portal. It's totally doable if you do what you are asked for and ask questions, e.g. what amount of data you should process, can the processing be background or it should be realtime, etc.
I had great experience and fun, therefore recommend applying to Booking. I had no contract due to not passing system design part.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Sep 2016
Interview
The interview consisted of multiple steps:
1. A first call to assess experience and willingness to work at booking;
2. An HackerRank test with 4 problems to solve in about 75 minutes, you don't need to pass every test to continue, as they thankfully do look at the code instead of just the score;
3. A technical phone screen with 2 engineers, requires writing code on a site without running it, 2 problems were asked, along with time complexity of each solution. Lasts about 1 hour, with 10 minutes dedicated for asking any question to the interviewers;
4. An onsite interview comprised of 4 steps:
- A first short talk with the initial recruiter (20-30 minutes)
- A technical interview with 2 engineers, they ask 1-2 problems and you have to write the solution on a piece of paper (about 1 hour)
- A design interview, they present a general problem and ask to design a possible solution, along with estimates so that you can scale the solution accordingly (about 1 hour)
- A final behavioral interview with a team lead, mostly about the experiences, projects you worked on and some general questions on how you work/relate with coworkers
After each step there was always a call with the initial recruiter to give feedback on how it went, the feedback given is quite detailed, they let you know exactly what they liked/disliked so you can work on improving it.
Overall, a really good experience, I didn't get an offer due to some uncertainties in the last few steps, but was told to try again a few months later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical interviews are about standard algorithmic problems that can be found on leetcode, hackerrank, CtCI, etc.
Some examples:
- a variation of matching parenthesis in a string
- a variation of determining if a string is an anagram of another
- determining if an integer list is sorted
- the 2-sum problem
The onsite interview is generally harder than the previous ones.