Booking.com Software Engineer interview questions

Applied online and got call from HR after 2 weeks, conversation was very good and scheduled interview week later. HR explained me the interview process (online notepad they can see in real time) and conversing over phone. Interview lasted for 30-35 mins and I was asked 2 programming questions, one I could solve about 90% and other one I solved fully. I was positive about interview and expecting positive reply but 2 days later received negative reply from HR with message that said I didn't explain myself properly and exp. Do not match with tools and technology that we use. In 30 mins trying to solve problems with 2 ppl watching you does not give you ample time to explain what I am doing/thinking. Reviewing candidate just by asking 2 questions and then deciding his/her capabilities is not justified. There is Skype and so many other ways where you could have couple of rounds to actually see if candidate is good or bad! The only reason exp. Is not negative is because there is always communication from HR to me, which almost 99% companies Dont do!

Overall process was interesting. What I liked about this process is that they have different approach than other big companies: - they ask you to prepare a presentation on some of your past technical challenges - you may directly talk with CIO directly I had following questions on phone screening: - tell the usage of map and grep in Perl - code function that merges two lists, but removing duplicate ones - write simple crawler without specifics(just some dfs) Also, I had onsite interviews with the following questions: - write code for finding shortest path on the chessboard - write code for composing cloud of tags from the text. Discussing alternative approaches and scalability issues. - write code for determining crawler bots by analizing web server logs. - explain some perl code Of course they asked to evaluate runtime complexity of the written code.