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I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there
by djsumdog 9y ago
I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving."
Like I say with all recruiters, I said I was interested. I thought about it and everything was a red flag. Sure I'd get to live in Amsterdam and stay in Europe with my girlfriend, but ... that sounds like the ultimate shit job. I'd have to endure that until I worked out whatever visa contract they'd have or find someone else to sponsor me with a non-shit job.
So I just ignore the recruiter when he calls .. and ignore him .. and ignore him. Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight; after I had already moved back to America. Most recruiters would take the hint after three failed calls. I can't imagine how desperate they must be. Then I heard from a former co-worker one of our other buddies, a Kiwi, had taken a job with them .. leaving NZ to go work there. He's still there ... hope it's not shit.
- ToxicCorgi 9y agoI saw new job postings from Booking quite frequently in 2013/14 when I was first applying for jobs in Europe. Figured they were growing very quickly and applied for a few but never got a reply from them. And reading this thread and your post today, I'm glad I didn't. I'd be interested to know how your buddy's doing there. Seems like they still post a lot on job websites, and their growth isn't exactly mindboggling, so it would seem they have really high turnover and/or trouble filling positions to begin with.
- icebraining 9y agoDid you ask about the tests and the deployment process? While the answers are certainly not good, I respect the recruiter for even knowing about it. Most I've talked to would have no idea.
- stingraycharles 9y agoThis is true. It might make it a bit better knowing that they’re hiring a few of the top Perl people in the world (Yves, Rafael, Ævar), but indeed, everything is Perl. They’re managing to hire quite a lot of people, by the way, but the compensation is a lot higher than what’s normal in NL. With regards to their testing procedures, the way I understand it is that they’re focusing on mitigation using clever monitoring/automated rollbacks. They pride themselves in their data analytics abilities, and this is part of that. Source: live/work in Amsterdam and know many people that work/worked there.
- davedx 9y agoYeah, they're all about A/B testing, not automated testing. The article shows what you get when you laser focus on CRO. They do very well though, and are probably the top hotel booking site? Definitely a lesson in there somewhere.
- exit 9y agowhat does CRO stand for?
- user5994461 9y agoThey are roughly equals with hotels.com, that is also very strong on AB testing.
- siddharthdeswal 9y agoI'd contend they're a top booking site because of the wide variety of hotels available, not because of the CRO. I'd look for the team that goes and signs hotels up to the platform, they seem to be doing a really good job in all territories.
- davedx 9y ago
- rurban 9y agoThis blog post was quite famous: http://blogs.perl.org/users/bookingemployee/2012/03/truth-about-bookingcom.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/bookingemployee/2012/03/truth-ab... Also booking employers refused to let their YAPC conference talks being recorded. https://web.archive.org/web/20111116162105/http://blogs.perl.org:80/users/andrew_shitov/2011/11/lets-say-no-to-no.html https://web.archive.org/web/20111116162105/http://blogs.perl...
- EasyTiger_ 9y agoHow about being a grownup and actually take the damn call? Could you not just tell him you weren’t interested rather than being so ignorant? For a whole month I mean, really?
- PeachPlum 9y agoMeanwhile in another timeline "All I did was miss three calls because I left my phone at my friend's and when I called they'd given the job to someone else, how unprofessional"
- imron 9y ago> All I did was miss three calls because I left my phone at my friend's and when I called they'd given the job to someone else, how unprofessional" What you have described is very different from: "Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight;" I doubt you'd leave your phone at your friend's for a month, and if you were uncontactable daily for a month then, yeah, I can understand them giving the job to someone else.
- yladiz 9y agoBoth sides are at fault, and the parent should have been more direct with the recruiter, but the parent is also right -- after a few calls, no more than a week of missed calls and no response, the recruiter should have stopped.
- dvt 9y agoPart of being a grownup is doing whatever the hell you want. If you don't want to pick up that phone (and have a potentially awkward conversation with some sleazebag recruiter that's trying to sell you on a shit job you don't want), don't. This reminds me of the people that think women (or men) that don't want to go out with them owe them some kind of explanation. No, dude. Get some social awareness and move the fuck on.
- lambdas 9y agoPart of being a grownup is doing whatever the hell you want. If you want to ring that phone (and have a potentially awkward conversation with some immature developer that's not yet picking up on your opportunity), do it. Goes both ways.
- _jgdh 9y agoIn India Booking is known as the company you want to call when you want to visit Europe. The questions they ask in the phone screen are relatively simple by Indian standards so it's straightforward to get tickets and travel to Amsterdam. They don't seriously consider working there because perl isn't the only thing unappealing about Booking. The pay is so mediocre that Indian devs would prefer to stay in India rather than move. Caveat here is that I'm not referring to all Indian devs, only the few I'm acquainted with.
- fakalaka 9y agoI'm courios about the salary offered. In Amsterdam Booking is known to be paying above the market average. Their salary range is also listed stack overflow careers page. Are salaries really that hight in India?
- _jgdh 9y agoIn India there are two kinds of software jobs - the ones at outsourcing firms like Infosys and the ones at firms that make their own products like Google, Flipkart, Amazon, Uber, Ola etc. The former pay the minimum possible, of the order of $15-20k a year. A mid-level engineer at the latter can expect to earn $50-60k easily, plus stocks. Booking offers something similar, at a significantly higher cost-of-living. If these engineers want to move abroad, they'd usually prefer the US because salaries there are significantly higher.
- kc10 9y agoDepends on where you are and your skill set. If you are a good engineer (10+ exp.) in Bangalore/Hyderabad and land in a product dev company, you might be looking at INR 40 lakhs (~60k USD). By any standard this is a lot and can lead a fairly luxurious life. Few of my friends are getting paid this kind of salary. But even if you have good skill set, but don't want too much pressure and would like a fairly stable at some Indian consulting company, you might only be drawing around 30k USD. But you get to earn if you are sent for an onsite assignment.
- roel_v 9y agoThere are quite conflicting reports on pay there, and from what I can tell from their stackoverflow job postings, they're above average. What sort of pay would you expect in India for a job like this?
- nnd 9y agoAnecdotally, I’ve recently applied for a full-stack position on their website and got a rejection email a couple of hours later. Maybe because I don’t have Perl on my resume?
- klibertp 9y agoI think this needs to be said: there is literally nothing wrong with using PERL as an implementation language. You might dislike PERL, but simply using it is not a red flag.
- bartread 9y agoAgree. Ditto not having drunk the Kool-aid on automated testing, as long as you have a viable alternative to achieve the same end (although I will admit that I find the idea of great monitoring and automated rollbacks a bit stressful on the face of it; you could mitigate that with good discipline around releases though).
- devdas 9y agoYou instrument your application so you discover failures very quickly. If you do this right, you pretty much get the reporting people want from business intelligence applications, and use that as your core monitoring metric. It's a lot less stressful if something goes wrong, because you can go to a previous release in a couple of minutes.
- aerique 9y agoI wanted to point that out as well. Especially since the OP is familiar with Ruby it's really not a thing to get wound up about. Compared to Python and Ruby, Perl might be getting a little long in the tooth but there's probably stuff that's less of a hassle to in Perl than in any of its decendants. Certainly no red flag.
- avodonosov 9y agoPerl is a bad language suddenly? Pushing to production is a bad practice?
- falsedan 9y ago> Perl is a bad language suddenly? Not suddenly, but when Centos 5 released in 2007 with 5.8.8 (from 2006), and Centos 6 in 2011 with 5.10.1 (2009). That froze the language environment for a lot of people and they couldn't benefit from the new features. Then they would publish posts explaining how to do things that 5.12 onwards had better solutions for, and new devs would get stuck in a whirlpool of trash. Those versions worked fine with '1998 perl' (the year the codebase started & also the last time best practices were checked). Newer versions of perl are way better, but for a lot of devs, that 7 year period of weird perl + the halo around it (search for 'perl hit counter') is what they used to get their impression of perl.
- gpvos 9y agoNo and yes.
- jmlucjav 9y agoThey contacted me to see if I was interested in interviewing some months ago. I rejected cause I didn't intend to move to Amsterdam, and I asked why they were contacting me as I had no Perl experience at all. He said they have more and more java/python lately.
- sAbakumoff 9y agoI live in Amsterdam do not work for booking but constantly discuss them in IT circles. Recently I heard of a guy who spend 0.5 year working on the calendar control that you can see on the main page. Every fucking day he tried to adjust the control to optimise the booking rate. That must be very boring job. Another ex-booker, back-end developer told that he has the PTSD after working with their Perl code base - it was a joke of course but I am pretty sure that it contained traces of truth. However, booking offers great benefits - the amazing office in the centre of Amsterdam - there are multiple of them - but I am referring to the one on Rembrandt square - very good salary, especially if you are a high skilled migrant and have 30% rule, subsiudized meals.
- koyote 9y agoWhat is the 30% rule?
- hof 9y agoforeign (IT) workers pay a max of 30% income tax the first 10 years they work/live in The Netherlands
- atomicstack 9y agoNot quite... the first 30% of your salary is tax-free: https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/belastingdienst/individuals/living_and_working/working_in_another_country_temporarily/you_are_coming_to_work_in_the_netherlands/30_facility_for_incoming_employees/ https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...
- sAbakumoff 9y agoI heard of 8 years. In 5 years you can optionally apply for Dutch citizenship and if it's approved 30% rule is gone.
- mtrimpe 9y agoIt used to be 10 years but was reduced to 8 a few years ago. You keep the 30% rule after you apply for citizenship though. It even applies to native residents who haven't lived in NL for more than 10 or 20 years.