Pros
Ownership:
All about ownership at Agoda. The management have faith in a bottom-up management style. This means as an engineer I still have the trust and belief from management to suggest and work, and live MY ideas. Not only is this OK - it's actively encouraged. I just cannot see a situation at Amazon where I go to Jeff Bezos - hey jeff, let me rewrite your whole taxation engine. At Agoda - that's nearly the reality; management worked with me on my idea, suggested changes, put me in charge, I chose the team, and... OK I was a little late, but the project was hugely succesful and made us a tonne of money! Really, really satisfying.
Technology:
Agoda surprised me. I didn't think their technology base was that impressive on joining - I quickly found out this isn't true. Kafka, Cassandra, vertica, Hadoop, it's all part of the repetoire. In my time at Agoda not only have I been exposed to a heap of technologies that ordinarily wouldn't come across - but I've done the research and made the suggestions myself. I've learned java, scala, python, R in addition to the tech I already knew.
Business:
I've always worked in small enteprise companies - basically, they pay well. Agoda is the first big company i've worked for. if big companies are like this - i'm not working for a small company ever again. Agoda has exposed me to the business, I make business decisions. Whether to prioritize issue A, or issue B it's actually up to me. Now I'm not making choices like buying companies, or where to create the next datacenter, but... I can decide that working on the maps will increase conversion and create a whole heap of new features about maps and work on them. I just have never had that level of autonomy at another company.
Thailand:
Living in Thailand is awesome. I cannot begin to compare it to my life in London. Everything is cheap, everything is accessible, people are wonderful. This for me is a major bonus.!
Cons
Ordered chaos! Agoda is growing very very aggressively and still growing at a high rate. This means that sometimes we're unable to clean up the code as much as we would like it to. This is kind of frustrating. I do understand it's a function of a succesful company, but at the same time it would be really good to find more time to do some of the clean up work.
Testing
I know I shouldn't say this but... Agoda tests so much. Every line of code we have tests for. Unit tests, javascript tests, system tests, database tests, api tests. Honestly - I don't enjoy testing. I totally see the value in it, and we have way, way less problems when i first joined. But testing is boring - i want to code more.
Communication downwards
Agoda is real big - and I know the bosses they try to make sure there are opporunities to talk with senior management. our CEO Rob will fill a movie theatre and let us know what is happening. but it would be much cooler to have this more often and from other people.
