Booking.com reviews

The way I see it, there are those who work here, and love it. There are those who hate it. It depends upon your core values and belief system. If you are honest/hard working developer, you won't like it here. If you are incompetent, and can BS your way to non technical managers about your "make-believe" technical difficulties, you'll love it. I've seen coders, who have hardly write 10 lines of code in a quarter, and these people have figured a way to game the system, and get promoted. My team lead manages a team of software developers, but does not write a single line of code, never worked as a programmer. Why write clean code, when you slap 2000 lines of Perl and get it done? (About code reviews... if you review code, it's a sure shot way to get kicked out of the team). Promotions are not done on the basis of who works hard, but based on how much you suck upto your bosses. You cannot speak your mind out, without the risk of retaliation. If you read reviews on the internet, you'll hear people say they do monitoring, and that's something Booking does very well. Wrong!! Some teams don't get enough volume of visitors/users to test edge cases on production. We pray things don't break when we release it. Mid management is completely incompetent. If you are thinking of moving from your third world country like how I did, please remember there are tons of great European tech companies that would value your engineering practices, Booking isn't one of them. Amsterdam is a great city, but working for Booking.com hurts your career.

For anyone other than those mentioned above, including those with any measurable work history or those who enjoy building great products consumers love, you will almost certainly find Booking.com to be a nightmare. The company is very political, title-driven, obstinate in its way of operating, and arrogant because of its past success. From a product perspective, Booking.com leadership seems unable to think about doing anything that might take longer than one week to build. Apart from doing A/B tests, the company is also not very data-driven. As a result, people who rise through the ranks are often those most adept at playing politics, who spend a lot of time talking over people’s heads and trying to sound more intelligent and actionable than they actually are. Booking.com doesn’t hire particularly strong, well-rounded people, so many people, when encountered with the show pony, foolishly trust that the show pony knows what he or she is talking about. In the end, nothing of value for the Booking.com consumer gets done, causing great frustration for results-driven employees who genuinely want to build great products consumers will love. Financially, Booking.com employees are highly undervalued. The company pays extremely poorly compared to anywhere considered a major tech hub, but extremely well compared to Eastern Europe, where no significant tech presence exists. As a result, the company relies greatly on the intra-European income disparity (as well as the 30% ruling) in order to be able to say it pays a competitive wage. The reality is that any of the top talent at Booking.com could easily go to the US West Coast and earn at least 3x the salary. The comp structure is also incredibly one-sided (three-year cliff vesting on stocks is the legal maximum, and Booking.com takes full advantage of that).