TripAdvisor Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I applied for an internship but went through a surprising interview process. I was first given a phone call, the recruiter went through my resume with me. We then scheduled a phone interview with a manager. After a few days I got on the phone with the manager who gave me several problems to solve on the phone. Those problems were mostly math and algorithms related. They were not that difficult but I was not expecting it. I was then given a programming assignment to complete within 48 hours. Even if I gave them calls and sent emails, so far they have never told me what they thought of my program.

Interview Details – My interview experience with TripAdvisor was hands down the worst interview experience I have ever had. I've spoken with others that have interviewed with them and I was probably an anomaly but for me the experience was very negative. I spoke with four different managers and all four interviews were technical in nature. There were no personality interviews asking what I have done or what I was looking for in the company. There was also no portion of the interview process that told me about the company or even gave me a tour around the office. It was basic "build a b-tree" type questions and that was it.

I should have known that it was going to be a bad day when I showed up and my name was misspelled on the folder they gave me. I was escorted to a small office for the interviews. In between interviews I had to sit there for about 20-30 minutes while I waited for the next interviewer. This happened between all four interviews. The HR rep occasionally stopped in and told me "we haven't forgotten about you". One interviewer was very disrespectful because he was playing on his iPhone while I was doing my technical exercises on the whiteboard. I also waited after the fourth interviewer for another half hour while I waited for the last interviewer who never showed up and I was told by the HR person that "he was too busy to do this" and that was it. The interview process started at 9:30 and ended at 4:00 and there was no break for lunch. I know companies don't have to provide lunch but you would think that they would at least give you a half hour to go out and grab a bite. Overall, it was a very disorganized and slightly disrespectful process and had a conveyor belt feel to it.

The technical interviews were very technical and in depth on par with Google or Microsoft. It was what you would expect from a tech start-up (i.e. not a reason for the negative review). Make sure you study up on trees and hash tables.

Interview Details – 6 hour interview process (including free lunch) meeting 1 on 1 with 5 different engineers, each covering work experience and presenting arbitrary puzzles that must be solved and at least partially coded on the whiteboard in the language of your choice. Heavy emphasis on Big O notation. Had to come in for a second in-person interview to separately test on CSS.

Interview Details – I had one phone interview that involved coding up a binary search tree and implementing an insert() and findSumAtLevel(int n) routine. I then went into their Newton office where I was interviewed by three engineers. Questions focussed a lot on binary search trees (so study up on in-order-traversal and other related data structures and algorithms).

Interview Details – Started with a recruiter contacting me for a Software Engineers position.Had a telephonic interview where they asked design pattern.Then asked to write code for Fibonacci for million numbers.This was followed by onsite interview.

The onsite interview started with Hr asking me questions relating to my knowledge about tripadvisor.Basically he wanted to see how much I know about the company and the position.Then a person from software engineering team gave me a coding task of writing web crawler .This led to discussion about various algorithms (dfs, bfs).The coding task involved recursion. We discussed the approach I would be following.He expected write the code with exact syntax for a language.

Interview Details – Phone interview with hiring manager, then visit to their office with in-person interviews with two engineers then the hiring manager.

Interview Details – I got an interview through a recruiter. It was technical. He asked me first to describe and explain my past project. Then we went on to technical questions. Heap, tree, balanced tree,... etc. Big-O complexity questions after each answers. After he was satisfied, he talked about the company. It seems to be a great place to work. Given the intensity of the interview, I assume the technical level there is high.

Interview Details – I emailed my resume to a TripAdvisor technical recruiter near the end of December. I received a response less than a week later and went through 3 phone screens (2 of which were technical). I was asked questions pertaining to basic data structures and algorithms (hash tables, binary trees, sorting). I was then flown out to Boston for an on-site interview, which consisted of 5 1:1 technical interviews, then an HR interview. I was asked to implement common data structures/algorithms on the white board (BST insertion, search, bit vectors). The last technical interview focused on probability teasers. I was given an impromptu tour of the office as well. Overall, all of my interviewers were fairly knowledgeable and were generally easy to talk to. The office space was nice given it's many common rooms (some of which fully stocked with snacks and drinks), game room, and decent size cubicles.

Interview Details – A technical recruiter found my resume on my website, contacted me and set up a phone screen for me. The phone screen lasted one hour, consisting of three algorithm questions, with difficulty level gradually increasing. Then I did two onsite interviews. The first on-site interview round consisted of six 1:1 interviews (five technical interview and one technical-recruiter interview); each lasted about 45 minutes. The second on-site interview round consisted of 3 technical interviews and following the technical interviews on that day I was made an offer.

For all the on-site technical interview questions, about 80% are algorithms/data structures (some interviewer gave a series of questions and asked me to code some of the algorithms I proposed; some interviewer gave one complex problem and asked me to design the algorithm and code); about 10% are OOP principles (e.g., when to use interface and when to use abstract class) and CS domain knowledge (e.g., how does insertion in B+ tree work); the rest are probability analysis and brain teasers. I was also asked to give suggestions to improve the functionalities of TripAdvisor website.

Technical-recruiter interviews are more like happy chatting, letting me know more about the company, than asking me to answer questions.

The people I interviewed with are intelligent and energetic. The work environment is great: spacious work space, huge computer display, free lunch, snackbar. There is chessboard, rockband, wii and ps3 in the entertainment area. They have shuttle buses to connect between the company and Newton Highlands T station.