Booking.com reviews

Other side of the same things. Flat department structure means there's absolutely no plan and no control. Everyone can quietly implement a feature that doesn't fit with the rest of the code. On the other hand, if they get noticed, they are immediately harassed by every other peer developer who has something to say. Getting people to agree on anything is practically impossible, because there's no authority and someone always has an opinion against it. Every code change has to run through time-consuming A/B testing, which creates huge technical debt and makes it really difficult to deal with it. All of this is viewed as a feature, not a bug; the company actually hires even more developers to run as many features as possible.

Hotel Ninjas was acquired by B.com and after 7 months the company was shutdown, mainly because they bought Buuteeq, an US company, that had a similar product. It has a lot to do with politics also. The Hotel Ninja team was the best team of people I have ever worked with, they could of built any product with very high standards. But B.com instead of reusing the team they fired them, only to hire some of them back afterwards. B.com sells itself as a startup spirit company, but in practice it is not. It is a massive company that is only driven by profits and bulling. From a technical point of view the technology is not appealing, the core of the system is written in Perl and MySQL for persistence. The code base is massive, and the only way they can keep it going is by hiring gurus from the Perl and MySQL communities. I was not impressed by what I saw and by how we were treated.