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Comment by jmuguy | Hacker News Reader

Booking.com is pretty awful on the backend. For instance they would often have line items in a payment that weren’t attributed to any reservation. Which is a pain in the ass if your accounting system assumes all payments will always be associated with a reservation.

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Aren't they a Perl shop? That shouldn't matter, people can make it rain with, say, TCL in some places, but it must be hard to find engineers if that's the case.

They are Perl and no remote.

Amazing job security really for those that work there

ironic being a travel website.

Google having a competitor for Zoom, FB once being so into meta, Apple promoting Vision pro as game changer yet none of them dogfood their own products, to integrate work from home. I guess building something is not the same as doing what works for them. Yeah, ironic, but that how businesses work, I think.

If you’re working for any of those companies even if you are in the office, more than likely you are working with people in other offices on your team.

But then again, I have no idea about how colocated the teams at Apple and Google are.

The difference is that Google, FB, Meta and Apple all have remote work policies - and depending on your role can be full remote.

Though yes, Apple/Meta as of late are trying to get people back in Office. Google I hear still lets you do full remote.

Full remote at Google is now mostly grandfathered employees. It is basically impossible to transition from in-office to remote.

Source: You made it up

As someone who interviewed for a role last year, they're mostly migrated to Java / Python for backend services, some Go getting introduced as well. And half of my interviewers were working remotely from Spain / France / UK / etc.

Based their recruiters on LinkedIn I'd say they are Python/Django.

They're using Perl for some stuff, at least the first version of the website used Perl. One random example:

https://medium.com/booking-com-development/how-we-spent-two-...

I think you might be right. Their GitHub org [0] has very few Perl repositories now, if that is a useful signal. They don't seem particularly crazy about open source though so I'm not sure how to read that.

0 - https://github.com/bookingcom

Working with Booking.com as an affiliate over the years I have experienced so many broken things and a sheer indifference / ignorance from the company. For instance, their referral program was long abused by scammers who would place a hotel booking using stolen credit card and then claim 5% cashback via numerous online cashback services. Book a €5000 resort stay using someone's else card and get €250 out of it almost risk free. Fraudsters with the IP addresses from Palestine were happily exploiting this and Booking's anti-fraud systems were largely non-existent..

What is an online cashback service?

rakuten

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this type of service. Just so I understand the scam right, it sounds like in the above scenario it would be Rakuten left holding the bag?

Yeah we had a pretty high level of fraud come in from them. They really ought to have better controls on it as its well known that carders test cards by making hotel and STR bookings.

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