In the first part of my story about the interview on Booking.com, I told only half, namely everything related to remote communication from Moscow. I settled on the fact that I received a letter from a recruiter with a heading that read “Interview Invitation To Amsterdam!”. This meant that I was soon to go to the Netherlands in order to personally meet with someone from the company and talk face to face.

Letter

If you are trying to follow the chronology of events, then it is worth mentioning the date of receipt of this letter - April 14th. That is, less than a month has passed since the first call from them.

The letter said that I had successfully completed the tasks of the telephone interview and now the company wants to invite me to the so-called Face-to-Face interview to get to know each other better and see if I can fit into their dynamic IT department. In addition to the invitation itself, the letter contained a detailed description of the process and what should I expect in the near future.
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It was also said there that I need a visa to visit the Netherlands, and therefore a special person will soon contact me and help me arrange an invitation for the embassy so that it will be easier for me to get the necessary stamp in my passport.

At the end was the most interesting part, namely information about the flight. Moscow will be separated from Amsterdam by about 2000 kilometers - a distance that you will not pass on the metro. And in order for a candidate to attend a Face-to-Face interview on Booking.com, he needs a plane ticket. Fortunately, the company understands that since she herself invites the candidate to her, it is necessary to take care that his journey does not harm his budget. In other words, Booking.com fully pays for round-trip flights and accommodation in Amsterdam.

I was offered a few days to choose from when it would be more convenient for me to come to them. Dates were chosen with sufficient stock to have time to issue a visa and other documents, if required. Therefore, my choice was among May 22, 23 or 26. It turns out that I had more than a month in stock to put myself in shape and prepare even better. After thinking a little over the calendar, I chose May 23.

Training

I will not talk for a long time about the preparation process, since it is very similar to the preparation in Moscow. In order not to limit myself only to the tasks invented out of my head, I became interested in online Olympiad programming. The special site codeforces.ru helped me a lot with this. This is a platform created by my friend Mikhail Mirzayanov (@MikeMirzayanov) from Saratov State University, where people from all over the world are competing with each other, solving algorithmic problems. I strongly recommend to take part in at least one round in order to independently understand what it is.

In addition to the preparation of the brain, I was simultaneously engaged in paperwork. Some time after the invitation, I received a message from a law firm in Holland. A cover letter for the embassy was attached to it, explaining that they were inviting me for an interview and that they would give me a visa without much delay. With this letter, as well as with a standard set of documents (all sorts of certificates from work, bank statements, application form, etc.), I applied to the visa application center and after 4 days I had an annual Schengen visa on my passport.

The last thing I did was agreeing to leave at work so that my absence was legal. All documents were in order, and now it was necessary only to wait.

Trip

Unlike other companies, which, if they bring candidates to themselves at their own expense, they do it for a short period (a day or two), Booking.com acts in a completely different way. Even at the invitation stage, they immediately say that they want to give their candidates an opportunity to get to know Amsterdam, the city in which they are going to live and work, better. Therefore, the company pays up to 4 nights in a hotel so that everyone has enough time not only to calm down and rest after the flight before the interview, but also to calmly wander around the city, look around, absorb mood, smell and color in a calm atmosphere after this event. I think this is very correct and all companies that hire foreign employees should do this. Moving to another country is a very important step, and a person should understand that he is waiting and will like him in a new place. Of course, even four days is not enough to fully understand the situation, but at least give more complete information about the place.

Now back to my story. Immediately after receiving the visa, I was sent another letter in which I was interested in my preferences regarding travel dates and flight details of the plane. In the end, I decided to go to Amsterdam from 22 to 25 May. Just got one day before the interview and two days after. I chose the flights suitable for me on the Internet, so that they were not too early and not too late and were sent to HR specialist. Booked tickets and hotel information came to me in two days!

A few words about what to take on the road. I rarely travel on business trips, and all my main trips abroad were related to vacation and lasted for two weeks. Therefore, when you go only 3-4 days, it can be difficult to give up the habit of stuffing a full suitcase of things. Therefore, especially for this occasion, I went to the store and bought myself a small suitcase, which is allowed to be carried in the cab. First of all, you can’t get a lot of things in this suitcase, which means you won’t take too much. And secondly, traveling lightly gives you more freedom: less weight and the size of a suitcase, which will allow you to walk around the city on foot immediately getting off the train from the airport, rather than rushing headlong to the hotel just to get rid of a huge burden. But even despite the presence of a small suitcase, I still took more things than was necessary. The best set for me is this: clothes for an interview (pants or jeans, shirt / T-shirt, socks, pants, all clean and unworn), plus an additional T-shirt in which to walk around the city, and of pants / socks, at least one set per two days. With this set you can safely live 4 days and look great. I also brought a few more T-shirts with me, which I didn’t even wear at the end.

Another note about the trip, but rather about the arrival in the city. I was lucky and I knew a man who lives in Amsterdam, who agreed to meet me at the airport upon arrival. This turned out to be very useful, since Amsterdam Airport is huge and getting lost in it is easier than ever. What is the fact that it has four runways, to the extreme of which the plane, being ready for takeoff, travels from the terminal for 10-15 minutes on its own. This kind of escort helped me a lot, because I was able to quickly navigate through all the complexities of the terminal, I found where I could take the train to the city.

I will not now describe my first impressions of the city and how I spent my time outside the office. I will talk about this sometime later, but now it is worth going to the main topic - a face-to-face interview on Booking.com.

Interview

I was scheduled to appear for an interview on Friday, May 23, at 12 o'clock. Despite the fact that the previous day I tried as best I could not to think about the upcoming event, on day X my nerves were still tense. I checked the state of my things a hundred times - whether there were any stains on them, whether everything was ironed, because the first impression was made about a person in appearance, and my plans were not to spoil everything with any ridiculous trifle. Time flowed like thick jelly, leisurely, as if it did not at all want noon to ever come. By my punctuality and punctuality, I woke up that day early, probably at 8 or 9, so that I had enough time to check myself. Even in spite of the fact that the hotel was located 200 meters from the office of the company, I still went out in advance, after 20 minutes, to calmly walk, take a breath and look around.

I arrived at the office exactly at the appointed time. A girl at the reception met me with a smile and asked me to sit down to wait for HR. Together with me by the same time one more person came for an interview. He was from Ukraine, it seems from Lviv. I had thought it would be a double interview. I read somewhere that in some companies they practice the approach when several people interview one room at a time in one room and then choose the best one. Fortunately, Booking.com does not apply to these companies, and another guy from HR came to this guy and took her to a separate meeting room. The same girl who I used to communicate by phone and mail came down to me and invited me to go to the room where I had to spend almost half a day.

Stage One (HR)

The interview on Booking.com differs from most Russian companies in that it consists not of one, but of several stages following each other. The first stage is communication with HR. So far, everything is simple - you are once again being told about the company, about the available bonuses, about the working conditions and all that. They ask me to tell a little about myself: why I want to work for them, what I don’t like in my current job, whether I’m ready to move well and everything that is not related to the technical part, but still important.

This stage - it's time for the last time to collect my thoughts, calm down and tune in to the battle mood. My thoughts were simultaneously focused on the girl and her questions, and scattered into a bunch of small thoughts about everything (algorithms, programming languages, etc.). It is important to keep yourself under control and not to be nervous, otherwise the brain will go into a stupor and nothing good will come of it.

Our conversation lasted for about 15 minutes. During this time, the girl told me a rough plan for today. Approximate time - 3-4 hours for everything. “Wow,” I thought. It was hard for me to imagine how I could stand it all the time, because earlier I had no interviews for more than one hour, and even after them I was squeezed like a lemon.

Second phase

As soon as the conversation with the girl from HR ended, two people entered the room. The main idea began - the technical part.

It consists mainly of communication and solving various problems. Their subject and meaning was about the same as in a telephone interview. Only now the task code had to be written on a piece of paper. And this is even worse than on a computer, even without an IDE. As they say, what is written with a pen is not cut down with an ax, so you need to be extremely careful and careful and do not start writing until a clear picture of the decision is formed in your head. Be sure to check your readiness for yourself and your code at critical points before reporting on readiness. For example, what happens if you enter a zero (or something similar) into the program? And what if we introduce an obviously invalid value? Do you have an extra cycle and are all variables set correctly? In general, think about the boundary conditions and the basic sets of input data. So you will show that you can not only write code, but also test it, which is also important.

The main thing in the process of how you think about the task, not to be silent. Even if you are not just staying in a stupor, but really coming up with an algorithm, keep talking your thoughts out loud. So you will let your interlocutors understand that you are not just so stuck, but you have some kind of solution. In addition, before starting to solve a problem, take a couple of minutes to think about the conditions. Surely there will be such moments that are incomprehensible or controversial. In this case, be sure to discuss with the interlocutor what he had in mind and what assumptions are possible. Again, this will put you in a favorable light as a person with an analytical mindset who will not rush to decide what is incomprehensible to him.

I remember that I coped with my task quite well. However, it was not immediately possible for me to reach an acceptable solution. At first, I wrote some kind of algorithm that obviously did not work in the best way. I immediately understood it, but I considered that a bad result is better than its absence. Therefore, after I showed the code to my interlocutors, they made a few comments and suggested reflecting on some more. At the same time, they began to ask leading questions, which helped me in the end to find a more elegant solution. It is important that even if you understand how to solve the puzzle, you still need to write it down on paper, so hurry, again, not worth it. It is also worth remembering that you are expected to be able to assess the complexity of your algorithm (in terms of large O), as well as the approximate amounts of memory consumed. I was also asked to compare what is better - a slow algorithm, but not wasting memory, or a fast, but expensive. I replied that it depends on the application and gave a couple of examples.

My questions

As at the telephone interview stage, I was given time to ask my questions. I decided to find out where these people came from and how they decided to move. It turned out that one of them was from Portugal, and the second from Canada. And if everything is clear with Portugal - Europe is not so big and, going to Holland, you will still be close to home, then here's immigration from Canada is an unusual thing. But this man told me a rather banal, but very correct thing: it is better to move and understand what is bad for you, than not to move and then think all my life, and what would happen if ... Therefore, he collected his things, sold everything else, and together with his wife he moved to Europe and has been living here for 4 years. Later, when making a decision about moving, I was guided precisely by this approach, because you can always return, but you may not be able to leave and learn the culture of another country.

Third stage

The third stage was essentially a copy of the second. Two people also came to my room, but others. One was from Mexico and the second was from India. Both worked in the company for more than a year (which, by the standards of booking, are already old-timers, since the company is growing very fast and is gaining a lot of new people). They also asked me questions, but this time of a more general nature. For example, how would I build the architecture of a certain service. I had to talk about the basic principles of work, which subsystems I would use, how I would organize the interaction between them, and so on. And all this is not judged by any formal criteria, but rather by the way a person is able to think at all.

The communication between the candidate and his interlocutors in booking is basically quite relaxed. That is, no one is trying to put pressure on you, humiliate or show your worthlessness, as is often the case in Russian companies. I used to be at interviews that lasted only an hour, but after them I went out completely lost my strength and with a sense of my own wretchedness. And all because the communication was based on the exam principle: the question is the answer, and the questions are often not related to the direct work (some internal subtleties of the language and their implementation). In a booking, an interview means exactly what this word morphologically implies - conversation. It's as if you were in the company of friends or colleagues and you would compete with each other in solving problems. That is, yes, you understand that if you do not decide, you will not get a job, but in the process it is somehow lost.

They manage to maintain this relaxed mood until the very end. Just at the third stage of interviews, I somehow mentioned that I used Xamarin in one of my projects. After that, we spent another 5-10 minutes discussing its pros and cons only because my interlocutor from Mexico knows the developer Xamarin personally and he is interested in the opinion of people about the product of his friend.

Stage Four (Business)

After two technical interviews, another one was waiting for me, but on business topics. As they like to say, the Booking.com business is booking hotels and not programming at all. Therefore, it is important for them that the developers whom they take to their jobs understand how the company makes money. This is important, because in booking it is very much appreciated the spirit of entrepreneurship among employees. Everyone is free to come up with a new feature and implement it. Therefore, we are looking for people who are able to understand our specifics of work and business as a whole.

Therefore, at the fourth stage, only one person, who works in the company as a product manager, spoke with me. He did not ask me to make up algorithms. He brought me a business case in which a typical booking situation was resolved. And he asked me what I would do. The case was quite unusual, and I could not give the right answer. I tried to suggest some ideas that could work, but they all did not fully fit. But despite the fact that I did not give an answer, I demonstrated the course of my thoughts, which is more important than just the result.

Respite

At the end of all stages, the girl recruiter returned to me and told me to wait a bit in the room. After 5 minutes, to my deep surprise, my acquaintance came to me, whom we met earlier at the Codefest conference (I gave a report, and he organized it) and also has been working in booking since May.This is because I mentioned at the very beginning that partly because of his tip-off, I ended up here, and apparently in that way they decided to make me enjoyable. My friend showed me the office, told me how they work here and took me to a local cafeteria where you can grab a delicious coffee and have something to eat. We spent about 15 minutes together. I managed to take a breath and calm down, because everything complicated is already behind.

At this time, the people who interviewed me, consulted together and made the decision about my hiring ...

Offer

Almost every interview on Booking.com ends with a final conversation with HR. Previously, the company decided not to speak about its decision to hire a candidate on the day of his interview. They took time to think and compare the candidates among themselves. However, now the decision is made on the same day, if you fit the company. There are, however, exceptions, when for one reason or another the final decision cannot be made on the same day. Therefore, if you come to us for an interview and you will not be told the result, this is not a reason to despair :)

I coped with the tasks quite well, so at the last stage of the interview, the girl from HR handed me a set of documents in which was my offer. Offer is essentially a formal contract, according to which the company undertakes to hire you. It also mentions your future salary and other bonuses. You are not required to immediately accept this offer. You are given time to think about it, because it is quite a crucial step. I immediately asked for two weeks to make a decision and they were not opposed. So I also returned to Moscow with a full head of thoughts, but on a different topic.

Conclusion

I do not want to say anything. If she is in general, then she has been debugged so far as possible. I wrote this story so positively not because I work in a company and I have to praise it. It is a great experience.

The company is very loyal to its employees, both current and future. For example, they entered my position, and even after accepting an offer, they gave me another three months to move. And calmly, without problems. It seems to me that if I asked for postpone.

And finally, some formalities. This and the previous article I wanted to tell only about my experience of joining the company and in no way urge you to leave and get here (even if it could seem so). However, we are always actively looking for talented IT people . If you still want to come to us - write in a personal, I will help with advice and I can give your resume directly to HR.

PS I have formed a small FAQ about the work here, moving and other things. If interested - send me a personal email and I'll send it to you. If you are in read-only, then write to me on Facebook (there is a profile), there I also answer.

PPS Both articles (this and the first) written by me at the end of 2014, when I just got settled in a booking. Now, after one and a half years, the process has hardly changed. If you want to know the details - write in a personal.

If you want to learn something else, then leave your questions in the comments, I will definitely answer.