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Comment by sAbakumoff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

What is the 30% rule?

foreign (IT) workers pay a max of 30% income tax the first 10 years they work/live in The Netherlands

Not quite... the first 30% of your salary is tax-free:

https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...

I heard of 8 years. In 5 years you can optionally apply for Dutch citizenship and if it's approved 30% rule is gone.

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.

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.

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