General Interview Questions
On-Site Interview At Amsterdam
1st stage: A talk with HR where we discussed the package, relocation, living in Amsterdam etc.
2nd stage: A tech interview that involved coding, discussing my background, experiences, measures of success etc. I also went through the 3 actionable changes from before.
3rd stage: A design-thinking exercise where they test your problem-solving skills, business strategy, and design process. They will most likely ask you to solve a problem that’s not strictly within the web/tech industry. This shouldn’t scare you. Just follow the same process you would if it were in the web industry. Also, consider how you would test your solution.
4th stage: An informal talk where they would try to gauge my personality, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and cultural fit within the company. They also wanted to know the areas or skills that I would like to develop.
Introduce yourself
First, Thank you for giving me the opportunity.
My name is XXX as you already know. I started learning iOS development when I was still in college. I’ve been a iOS software engineer for over 5 years ever since. During professional career, I’ve got the chance to work on several interesting apps. And I’ve been through the entire app development cycle, from concept design, app development, and app store distribution.
I also developed some games in my spare time. Making games actually taught me lot of things, which had a huge impact on my personal career. I learned that collaboration, communication, and helping your team mate grow are the key to better execution.
Personally I love to share knowledge with my team mates, and I’m also quite interested in learning new things. Not just technical issues, but also how business works.
Now I’m looking to take my career to the next level. I’m love traveling and out door activities. That’s one of the reason I apply for booking.com. Because I’m passionate to work on something that could improve millions of traveller’s experience.
### 2. What is your motivation to join?
1. To be able to work on a product that improves travel experience. I really love traveling myself, and booking app is what I personally use every time I’m traveling. So having the opportunity to be able to improve the product that I really like is a huge motivation for me.
2. The opportunity to keep learning and improving myself. As far as I know, booking.com is a start-up like company, there’s a huge potential to contribute to the product and possibility to learn and improve during that process. Also I read that there’s monthly hackathons in the company. I really like hackathons cause it allows me to extend my knowledge and skills outside of my daily job.
3. Last but not least, I also believe that diversity is important. Because I did my internship in Disney World Florida back in college, where I got the chance to work with people from all over the world. So I think working with great people in a multicultural environment will help me learn new skills and develop my career better.
### 3. Idea about the company product, how booking.com operates, how it monetize through app and website?
Booking is an online travel agency that helps you find the best matching hotel for your budget and preferences, and the website will charge you nothing. As travelers prefer visiting one website to find and compare several hotels instead of opening several hotel websites, B.com specializes in being the “best platform” for finding and booking hotels.
Hotels sign up with booking and set up their properties, then booking will start advertising to the global audience. Once they’ve signed up, they’ll be advertised on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Only when you stay at the hotel, will they pay the commission fee.
In order for B.com to attract more and more customers, they engage heavily in Search Engine Marketing (that is to be in the top results when someone types “Hotel in Los Angeles” in Google), like this when travelers to book through them and generate a commission.
4. Difference between merchant model and agency model ?
Merchant Model : In this model, hotels sell rooms to OTAs in bulk at discounted or wholesale prices. The OTAs then sell them to customers at a markup price. This is the most commonly used model, and it benefits both parties. Like Expedia follows this model. Actually Expedia follows both models.
Agent Model : This is a commission-based model wherein hotels give OTAs commissions based on business bought. In this model, the hotels list their services, and the OTAs don’t have to buy anything up front. This is beneficial for hotels, as it gives them the freedom to price their rooms as per the demand scenario. Booking.com follows this.
### 5. How can you improve the product?
From a traveller’s perspective, there’s one feature that I really like but is currently missing. I first saw this feature on Skyscanner, instead of any specific date, you can choose to see the price for the whole month, and from there you can even choose the cheapest month. As a regular traveller myself, it would be nice to avoid the peak season and keep my budget low. And this is especially useful for weekend getaways.
And I think it’s better to show customized recommendations on the first page after user searched something, right now it will show me popular destinations. So the next time I open the app I can see hotel recommendations for my destination without searching again.
### 6. What’s your previous experience and personal projects?
***MyDoc*** — I’ve been working on this app called MyDoc. Basically it’s like whatsapp for healthcare professionals and patients.
We provide virtual clinic experience, health screening. It brings healthcare services and partners directly to patients.
The problem we are trying to solve is: almost 75 percent of all doctors, urgent care, and ER visits are either unnecessary or could be handled safely and effectively over the phone or video. And patients also prefer to use telehealth service.
***Hong Wei Global*** — I’ve worked on several projects while I was in this company. The biggest project is an emergency training simulation for Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan. It’s quite similar to a multiplayer game, but the goal is to train officer how to handle emergencies. In order to achieve this, we have to simulate email, phone calls, tv news, and all sort of things.
I’ve also worked on a military strategy training project. We use AI to simulate the war fare in real time, depends on the user’s choice of strategy.
***Chinge Design*** — I’ve worked on app called Freshbox. We are trying to solve the problem, usually we share the fridge with other people, once the fridge gets crowded, it’s hard to remember what did you buy and hard to track the expiration date. Therefore will cause lot of food waste. We aim to simplify the process of recording food, you just need to take a picture, and don’t even need to type anything. It will notify you when it’s about to expire. You could better organize your stuff in the fridge.
### 7. Among the applications you developed so far, what application you feel is most complex and why?
I think it’s probably the game I developed, called Scrap Convoy. It’s a local multiplayer co-op game. I’ve been working on for half year, we have a team of 6 people, 2 designers, 2 artists and 2 programers. I think it’s complex in both the technical part and non-technical part.
For the technical part, we are using a game engine called Unreal, and at that time it’s not open sourced and we have to use their own script to do everything. Every time I was stuck with any issue, there are not too many resources and documentations out there. And I also get to implement the AI behaviors in our game, which is a bit hard to debug sometimes, and I have to keep trying and testing to make the AI feel more natural. I think my problem solving skills improved a lot.
For the non-technical part, we’re a team of different personality, so we kind of having some arguments here and there when we first start. But we manage to figure out a way to solve this, and that is honest communication. And that helps a lot with our decisions and execution. I learned a lot about team collaboration and communication from this project.
