Recruiter was excellent and all the people I met were super nice.
But interview process was otherwise a bit unusual compared to other companies:
- only 3 hours of interviews, from which to make a life-changing decision about whether to move around the world for a 70% pay cut vs. SF Bay Area tech companies. I didn't come away with confidence that this would be the right decision.
- no opportunity to meet designers or data scientists (and sadly, the videos Booking has on YouTube did not make a positive impression of the design team's seniority/thought leadership)
- a little concerned that so much of the "selling" process was on Amsterdam and not the quality of the opportunity at Booking. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what Booking really had to offer (vs., say, Spotify, which puts the opportunity first and living in Europe second.)
- felt a little out-of-touch in key ways. No Silicon Valley tech company refers to its engineering team as "IT" - may be a bank would do that. Is Booking a real tech company? I never got an answer.
- hard to gauge what day-to-day life would be at Booking as a researcher. What's a typical project? What interactions besides product owners?
- does upper management care about customer experience beyond short-term metrics?
- case study was a little weird, for asking to do a "blue ocean" assignment in a product space Booking has already taken on and abandoned.
- oddly, they did not cover food or ground transportation while traveling there for interviewing (perhaps this is the norm in Europe?)