I applied online. I interviewed at Booking.com in Nov 2020
Interview
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed online in October - November 2020.
Hiring process divided into 4 steps:
1. Technical test (Hackerrank, 90 minutes)
2. Recruiter phone call (20 minutes)
3. Technical Interview (Hackerrank, 60 minutes)
4. Face-to-Face (3 interviews, 1 hour each)
After each interview you get:
- Time to ask any questions
- Detailed feedback
- A lot of information on how to prepare, what to expect from the next interview
F2F interviews:
Due to coronavirus, all three interviews were online via BlueJeans. After each interview, I got a 30 minutes break.
Interview questions [6]
Question 1
Technical test (Hackerrank, 90 minutes).
It covers the basics of Javascript, HTML, CSS, Problem Solving. It has 18 questions and two coding challenges.
Technical Interview (Hackerrank, 60 minutes)
Two interviewers gave me two tasks (frontend and backend).
Frontend task:
Fetch & render list + same, but with user input.
Backend task:
Given the array of hotels (hotel_id, name) and an array of reviews (hotel_id, score). Return array of hotels with an average review score. Calculate time complexity.
F2F: 1 - Backend + System Design (Two interviewers)
Coding challenge (30 minutes): Create a function to calculate the next state in the Game Of Life (rules provided).
System Design (30 minutes):
Deploy Game of Life (features: calculate next state, show history, user_id)
Follow up: Added a lot of users
Follow up: How to store/process input?
Follow up: Sharding, Load Balancers, LB metrics
F2F: 2 - Frontend (Two interviewers)
Create a function to fetch and render an array of stocks (stock_id, stock_name, price).
Follow up questions:
- Automatically refresh data (your solution must be "user-friendly". ex. re-render every 3 seconds)
- Create an additional list of "3 Favorite stocks" and link it to the bottom of the page. (use "div", use position: fixed; bottom: 0). On this step, they asked a lot about CSS Position (absolute, fixed, etc)
- What if there are 10000+ stocks? Should we render them all? Should we re-fetch them all? (Answer: re-fetch/re-render only first N of stocks + re-fetch/re-render favorite stocks)
The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Feb 2020
Interview
The interview process started with a Hackerrank test. The questions included HTML/CSS/JavaScript, time complexity, and algorithms with average difficulty. The test of the last question that is given by Booking was wrong. I struggled a bit because I did not understand why my results are wrong. Input that was supposed to be correct was wrong. I realized that after 10 minutes. So, be careful with that!
I passed the first part and got an email for the second phone interview with an HR. The interview was via an app called BlueJeans. It was so badly set up that another interviewer of Booking joined first (because HR provided the same link) and the HR was late for 5 minutes. I was so confused, and I thought he is the interviewer, and I started explaining myself. Then the HR woman joined and then we understood there is a problem. The other interviewer left, and I started explaining myself again. I was a bit nervous this time because of the things, and HR did NOTHING to calm me down or say no worries or sorry. She just waited for me to go on. She was so unprofessional and rude. Even though they returned to me, she said I don't have enough experience IN YEARS (She asked nothing technical). I said I still want to try my chance because I trust my knowledge. She just said no and asked me to try again after I get more experience.
TL;DR: Overall, I got a very bad experience from a non-technical HR who did not even read my CV before.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Nov 2019
Interview
Recruiter got in touch via LinkedIn. Used the tactic of saying that the salary was up to a very big amount. Then we had a quick phone call for him to explain a little bit more about the company and the benefits. Next step was a hackerrank test with some theory tests and two of those ridiculous puzzles. Moving on, there was a remote live coding with two developers on hackerrank, with one front-end problem and one back-end problem. Final step was the face-to-face interview on booking headquarters (3 of them). With 2 front-end developers (tooltip), with 2 back-end developers (game of life) and behavioural with a director. I didn't receive a call with feedback. Just a generic/automatic email saying that they decided to not proceed with my application.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Implement a tooltip JavaScript plugin for booking designers. They know HTML, CSS but not JavaScript.