I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Priceline.com (Norwalk, CT) in Jan 2012
Interview
Got call from recruiter. Started with a phone interview which was very simple with basic questions about DHTML, Java and Struts and was called for face2face interview in Norwalk. Started with the HR interview with questions like 'why you are leaving?', 'What do u know abt priceline' and went on for about an hour. Then the Director of the group came in for a interview and asked me to explain what I was doing in my previous company and he explained the position details. Then the technical interview for couple of hours. Overall I thought I did pretty well, but for some reason I din get through.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
if there are multiple web servers how do consecutive user requests get the session info?
total 3 to 4 rounds. The initial first round is with Talent Recruiter and expect this also asking technical questions, asked difference between ConcurrentHashMap and Map, which is more thread safe. which situation we should choose set vs list. What is time complexity for different basic data structure. How you go about designing the priceline like system, all these been asked in first Recruiter call. Then second round was with Principal software engineer, it is more like coding problem with real work style, there will be coderpad with imported Java project, having bunch of class, service and unit test already written.
Some unit test is taking time and failing, looking the unit test, class, method, try to figure out why unit test search from Map is taking so much of time, what things you see wrong and how do you improve it ?
It ends up being the Map the registration class hashCode method was overiden and it had bad code returning hascode of static string. What all other things are wrong in code, describe about project , something from resume etc
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Code walkthru and find the issues in code that runs unit test and runs longer
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Priceline.com
Interview
This is the worst interview I have had in recent times. You could get lucky and draw a smart interviewer but
totally the luck of the draw here. I had a great first round. Met with a knowledgeable interviewer and worked on
a medium leet code question. And then there was a take home assignment and several panel interviews. The interviewers in the virtual onsite
are not qualified to be doing interviews. They couldn't understand my solution because they memorized a different one from leetcode.
And if you deviate from their "so-called" solution, you are deemed unfit for the role. They hardly spend any time reviewing your take home assignment,
so have no clue what went into it.
These people act like a FAANG company although they aren't! The company is doing exciting stuff and the
recruiters are easy to work with. But the whole interview process is so biased and unfair that it isn't worth your
time!
First interview is over the phone and includes a leetcode style problem to solve. Second/last round is an in person interview. This includes 3 rounds. First has 3 leetcode style problems to solve. 2nd is to describe an in depth problem you have solved. Last is a culture/tech talk interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode style, describing a problem, what is an a/b test.
We’re sorry your experience with us wasn’t great. We’ll look into this further and take your feedback as a lesson to refresh our interviewers on proper technique.