I applied online. I interviewed at Booking.com in Aug 2017
Interview
Applied on booking.com website, received email with explanation of the process and link to hackerrank.com website for a test (link valid for a week) with 4 questions. I managed to document 2 of them
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Identify whether four sides (given by four integers) can form a square, a rectangle or neither.
Input:
Each line of the input describes a single polygon, and contains four space-separated integers, which represent the length of the sides of the polygon. The input lines will follow the 'A B C D' order as in the following representation:
A ------|
|
D B
|
c ------|
Output:
A single line which contains 3 space-separated integers, representing the number of squares, number of rectangles and number of other polygons with 4 sides. Note that squares shouldn't be counted as rectangles. Invalid polygons should also be counted as 'other polygons'.
Constraints
The four integers representing the sides will be such that: -2000 <= X <= 2000 (Where X represents the integer)
Given a set of hotels and its guests reviews, sort the hotels based on a list of words specified by a user. The criteria to sort the hotels should be how many times the words specified by the user is mentioned in the hotel reviews.
Input:
The first line contains a space-separated set of words which we want to find mentions in the hotel reviews. The second line contains one integer M, which is the number of reviews.
This is followed by M+M lines, which alternates an hotel ID and a review belonging to that hotel.
Output:
A list of hotel IDs sorted, in descending order, by how many mentions they have of the words specified in the input.
Notes:
* The words to be find will always be single words like 'breakfast' or 'noise*. Never double words like 'swimming pool'.
* Hotel ID is a 4-byte integer
* Words match should be case-insensitive
* Dots and commas should be ignored.
* If a word appears in a review twice, it should count twice.
* If two hotels have the same number of mentions, they should be sorted in the output based on their ID, smallest ID first.
* In case one or more test cases time out, consider revisiting the runtime complexity of your algorithms
Given a list of numbers as input, e.g. :
25626 25757 24367 24267 16 100 2 7277
Output a delta encoding for the sequence. In a delta encoding, the first element is reproduced as-is. Each subsequent element is represented as the numeric difference from the element before it. E.g. for the sequence above, the delta encoding would be:
25626 131 -1390 -100 -24251 84 -98 7275
However, if a difference value does not fit in a single signed byte, i.e. -127 <= x <= 127, then, instead of the difference, we would like to use an escape token, printing it. This will denote that the value following the escape token is a full four-byte difference value, rather than a one-byte difference value.
For this exercise, well declare -128 as the escape token.
Following the same example above, the final output would be:
25626 -128 131 -128 -1390 -100 -128 -24251 84 -98 -128 7275
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com in May 2016
Interview
I applied for the position on their web site. Few days later they sent me a link to an online test at Hackerrank. About 10 days later there was a phone interview with a technical recruiter. A few more days later they said I'm not a match.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The Hackerrank assessment is ridiculously simple. There are 4 problems to solve, but you are super limited in time (just 15 minutes per problem). The most difficult was reading data from the standard input.