Booking.com reviews

- This was the company I've been disappointed the fastest in my career, realised it was not a good company after 3 months being in there. - The company embaraces and promotes people that firefights issues in production, the type of people that can find the bug on the spaghetti code put into production and fix it fast. On the other hand, if you are a person that likes to be preventive, tries to push for better coding practices, promotes the development of tests in order to AVOID AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE future issues in production, you will get nothing. I had a manager that told me that "writing tests was slowing us down", and I must stop writing them. - There is a big monolith written in Perl. Having a monolith is not bad per se, coding in Perl is not bad per se. Having a monolith in perl without proper ownership of teams through the code, with people pushing changes without even testing them, with people making deploys and not caring about anything during the process, is horrible and painful. If I had known this before joining, I would have not joined at all. - All the people I referred had a horrible experience on the interview process, which tells me that 1) I was lucky in the recruitment process, and 2) there are a lot of unprofessional people working in HR. - I did not experience it myself, but there are a lot of burnout cases through the company (I personally know 2 cases). Most of them are a consequence of bad managers. There are a lot of good managers but most of them will not shine, as they are not showponies. - There are a lot of retaliation cases, also did not happen to me but it did to a close friend. If you decide to join, do get well with your manager. - If you want to grow in there, you need to have 3 things: - excellent communication skills - excellent commercial awareness. - speed coding and pushing changes fast. Quality of your code is not important at all (unless you get a good manager). - Being a team lead sucks, as you will have way more responsibilities than the developers, but the difference on the payslip is between 0 and 5%. - During the interview process they will tell you that they will support your partner on finding a job. That is a huge lie. The only thing they do is give him/her a couple of CV trainings.

Well, where should I begin? -Very outdated technology. Outdated here doesn't even describe it. If you work on backend for example, if you work long enough in Booking, you may not be hirable anywhere else! -People are nice as long as you don't do or say something against what they religiously believe (and I am not talking about religion), for example, if you ever get into a discussion about why not use Java more instead of Perl (and Java is surprisingly supposed to be an official supported language), someone could ask you to pack your bags and leave in public without any shame about it! -No one really understand what would it take to get promoted or get higher stocks/bonus. Very vague, very politically motivated. You can see people with 20+ years of experience who do most of the work and never get promoted and on the other hand, you can see someone who became a principal just 3 years after getting out of college! So go figure! -No testing and no code reviews. Company stats that we have "monitoring culture" instead of testing culture, which is fine, except that a developer wastes half of his productivity on roll-out and chasing crappy errors forever because of that! -No consistency in anything. You would have products and teams what people are fighting to work for and other products and teams that people are fighting to escape from! -Company thrives on the fact that people in there are free to work on whatever they want, but reality wise, people who are senior to you can shut you down any time, either directly, or by shaming you enough to quit what you are doing!