I got contacted by a recruiter who said they had checked my HackerRank profile. They invited me to an onsite interview in May 2017.

The onsite interview was not very technical. There were some questions about how you plan some daily tasks, etc. They mostly presented the organization and culture of the company, and I had the opportunity to talk with several teams. To be honest, the second part was far more interesting than the interview itself.

First, people emphasized many times that Booking is a business company but not a tech company. I didn't understand it in the beginning, but it became clear after several rounds of talks. So, as a backend developer, whatever you do needs to contribute somehow to the business; otherwise, it's not worth doing. Writing tests or refactoring, for example, is not valued. People also don't like using TDD or CI stuff to manage the 2+ million lines of code and 1700 IT engineers. Booking has its own fast and flexible deployment system, which is to deploy on prod and roll back quickly if you notice any error, with close monitoring. Check well beforehand if this fits with your IT culture.

Second, teams are usually composed of around 8 people of different roles: UX researcher, designer, copywriter, product owner, FE, BE, etc. Most product owners I met do not have a very tech background; some worked before in business consulting companies. But in Booking, they need to define the priority of tasks and organize the whole code production process. Also, almost half of the team does not understand coding. Personally, I don't think this is a very enthusiastic environment for geeks.

Third, I noticed that many IT employees in Booking were foreigners from developing countries (Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, Romania, etc.). They did not study in the Netherlands before but got relocated just because of this job at Booking. And no one I met had worked there for more than two years. I wonder if the turnover rate is quite high there.

How you plan some daily tasks.