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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

Wasn’t there an article, recently, maybe for another website, that these were generated client side with Math.random()?

It was either Math.random or it was a request that always got back the same number. It was posted on here; I remember it clearly.

I've interviewed for Booking.com and even the girl on the phone couldn't make their process appealing (tons of Perl; no plans to migrate to anything not perl, very few tests, very little code review, developers can push straight to production .. seems like a hell shop).

There are currently plans to do new stuff in Java. A rewrite of the old code base is impossible.

Most of your code will be deployed as an experiment, so you are more likely to throw away that code instead of refactoring it.

Developers can push to production, and are expected to be responsible for the results of that push. It works quite well.

That's not what three former Booking.com folks I know have said. There's a striking unanimity to their descriptions: risk-heavy day-to-day work ("experiments" not being nearly as firewalled as you might hope), a consistent level of incuriosity amongst line developers and their leadership (which, not gonna lie, "new stuff will be in Java in TYOOL 2020" does a lot to buttress), and rotgut technical-debt Perl that will never be rehabilitated (ditto). Also an HR department that plays real hardball if you're not an EU citizen.

(I used to work in the travel space, at TripAdvisor, but that was about eight years ago; no other affiliations.)

Well, everyone is of course entitled to her own experience, but for what it's worth I think Booking has been one of the most interesting place I've seen, not in small part because of how data driven they are, as opposed to myth driven like most IT business/people.

One of their mantra was indeed "we are not an IT company", which I came to understand as "we don't want to hear about how things ought to be done. We do not bow to best practices. We rely on measurements not culture".

After a few years in a big corporation where you couldn't change more than 3 lines of code without 2 code reviews and approval from 2 managers, without ever considering the customers or the final product, moving there was such a relief!

Usage of a runtime typed, interpreted language for so many loc in production was of course concerning (esp. Perl which syntax and semantic are sometime surprising), but the attitude considering of caring more about measuring and controlling every possible effect than following the best practices of the day is invaluable.

This is definitively a place I would recommend to any engineer willing to learn.

That was CheapOair, a brand of Fareportal. Different company.

I think it was this series of tweets:

https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201

I remember reading that article at some point in the past. Pretty ridiculous, having a customer lie to themselves. I can’t remember what site that was, either.

I seem to recall this too, as well as others claiming to have worked at booking.com saying these things were knowingly false.

Edit: it's quite possible that I'm mixing up memories of a company other than booking.com

Would love to see an example of a booking employee (current or former) claiming they're false. I looked into a number of them first hand and they weren't (last I did that would've been 2016/2017 and certainly didn't audit the entire code base).

Sorry for the self reply, some context. The reason I looked at a number of these urgency messaging implementations is that we'd gotten a bunch of allegations from legislators that they were wrong. I was in a senior enough position that I would've been able to push back on anything dodgy/outright lying I would've found. I didn't find any that were incorrect.

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