This was the worst interview process ever. The recruiter was terrible.

It took two weeks to schedule the first round. After ten or more days without an answer, the recruiter scheduled the interview without asking. It then overlapped with another meeting, and I asked to change the time. She agreed, but it never happened.

I spent half an hour waiting and unfortunately had to leave the interview 15 minutes early as I had to run to another meeting. Fortunately, I managed to solve both problems in time. No further optimization was possible as both solutions were O(n).

They asked me some book-name jargon from Software Engineering, which I may not have known.

On the interview itself, there were two engineers:

• Engineer 1:

  • Problem 1: Solution O(n), quite simple. Engineer 2 tried to increase the complexity but provided bad constants and created confusion, which Engineer 1 resolved.

• Engineer 2:

  • Problem 2: Solution O(n), quite simple. He didn't seem like a Python coder, so he wasn't able to understand the solution. Some of his statements didn't make sense at all. I doubted whether binary tree or divide and conquer would be the optimal solution, and opted for divide and conquer.

So far, leads have often been unable to resolve these sorts of quizzes, but I did. In fact, I am not a Software Engineer, and some of the terminology itself is not clear to me, but I do enjoy coding and hold gold HR in 3-4 disciplines.

Notice to Booking.com: The recruiters are the first impression of your brand and the ambassadors of the process. The one I got, E.K., was very unprofessional. One of the interviewers, A., was very good, kind, and thoughtful. The other, M., didn't give me the impression of being capable of leading coding challenges.

I know this company has standards and can do better, but my impression this time was not positive. I hope this feedback helps this beloved organization to improve and make things right internally.

Sort id, hotel, name. This is very easy.

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