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.
How 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?
> 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.
Both 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.
Recruiters are there for a reason. I respect them even when they are a little bit annoying. We as tech industry are so spoiled with jobs looking for us not the other way around that we forget how great it is to have a recruiter that you can call any time and ask for a new job and he will not stop until he will put you in the new position for free (for you of course). Remember they are just doing their job and we should respect that, so be kind to your recruiter, respond to an email, they will remember you as that guy who didn't wasted their time.
> he will not stop until he will put you in the new position for free
Let me tell you about my first experience with a recruiter. I realise this is only one anecdote, but it sums up their usefulness.
As a fresh graduate I sent a recruiter my CV and he sent me two job specs. I applied for one and the company ended up making an offer. The salary was well below normal, the company's office was in the middle of nowhere in another part of the country, and I'd had to have moved out there and bought a car in order to do the commute. The deal was not a good one, but through the recruiter I negotiated higher pay. During this process I was warned about coming across as 'mercenary', and he made real efforts to get me to take the job quickly ('stop delaying', 'this kind of job won't come up again').
At the same time as having this offer on the table, I received a separate offer from a company I'd applied to independently, with a salary ~25% higher, great benefits etc, which I accepted, to the annoyance of my recruiter.
Once you get talking to a recruiter, they really do put you through the booking.com experience.
Unless we are talking about talent agents (which are rare in software engineering), the actual job of a recruiter is to work in the interest of his company. Then there are third-party recruiters and sorcerers who don't represent your interests either.
"They are just doing their job" is a weak excuse. Most of the recruiters are doing such a bad job in matching the workforce with companies that they end up wasting everyone's time. The only reason why these brute-force approaches work is the surplus of demand in the current SE labour market.
Part 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.
Sure, you can do whatever you want. That doesn't change the fact that people will consider u a prick and a coward if you ignore calls for weeks on end without any explanation.
It's not the same thing. You can skip a call out of the blue, but after you have had some kind of interaction, is really good manners to have open and direct discussion. Both professionally and in the example you mention.
Part 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.
The rights come with responsibilities and/or consequences.
Being an adult means you get to own many of your choices, but also their consequences.
Giving the recruiter a direct "no" would be far more professional. OTOH, I've dissed more than my share of recruiters myself, though generally only after an initial clear and unambiguous communication wasn't respected.
This 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.
Yeah, 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.
I'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.
In 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.
I'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?
In 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.
Depends 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.
There 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?
As I explain here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15301468), the Indian devs that Booking targets earn comparable salaries at a lower cost of living. If these devs are willing to move abroad, they'd move to the US.
Market rate in Amsterdam is pretty low compared to the US salaries you see all over the internet.
According to Glassdoor for example the average salaries for Software Engineer are:
- US: $103k
- NL: €45k
For somebody who's moving halfway across the world anyway, I can imagine they'd prefer to look for a job in the US.
Edit: The comments below are all correct. I didn't mention any of the secondary benefits since the internet hardly ever mentions those. To somebody from a country where things like health insurance and paid sick/vacation days hardly exist, there's a much smaller chance they look into those things.
Also in the US a lot is dependent on employer (health care, vacation days, etc.), whereas in the Netherlands many things are set by law.
My point was that people who look at salaries on the internet and compare those, will often choose the highest and dismiss the lowest.
This is a misleading way to compare salaries and cost of life between countries.
A much better metric is to look at net disposable income after tax, if you're focusing on the "making money" aspect.
If you're focusing on the life quality aspect you'll also have to consider mortgage, car ownership and time off.
Example:
- In Netherlands you have 24 business days of time off, where you can take them from the moment your contract begins (not after 1 year working), and you can take them however you want.
- Taking a mortgage in Netherlands is currently cheaper than renting and most houses in the "sweet spot" cost around 300k euros, which is ridiculously cheap. Monthly payments are subsidized by the government (for some years) which makes it cheaper than renting.
To summarise, every country has a lot to offer, and at the end of the day life is not just about money.
while true, this doesn't tell you the whole story. insurance, taxes and pension are calculated way differently from the US. Also prices for those 3 are way different.
I searched for US in general, but I can imagine SV salaries cause the national average to increase a lot. Then again, from my experience, most Dev who want to move to the US want to move to SV or NYC, partially because of the salaries and forget to think about the details. Especially the younger ones.
I 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.
Agree. 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).
You 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.
I 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.
Did 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.
I 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.
Designing good controls for the web is really hard. Spend 10 minutes testing any set of well known components, and you will find multiple bugs (especially if you know how to exercise the parts that are hard to get right).
Virtually every calendar control for booking a date range sucks. Airlines, Airbnb, hotels, whatever.
Having someone work full time on making an intuitive calendar control makes sense to me, and I personally have spent months on single components, and we are just a tiny company...
I understand that it was more like everyday A/B testing of the calendar adjustment because booking seems to be very data-driven - developers work on teams that are assigned to the specific area of the web-site, or even the specific target groups(honey mooners, business traveller, etc.) and try new features/adjustments by using A/B testing.
Not actually foreign, you just have to have lived more than 150 kilometers away (straight line) from Dutch borders for at least 2 years before your employment begins.
It 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.
I 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.
They 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.
Anecdotally, 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?
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.
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.