Booking.com Senior Software Developer reviews

Developer pay isn't bad but it's nowhere near market leading. They're always "benchmarking" but you will get better elsewhere. More disheartening is the pay relativity between different roles; why be a dev when you can earn more facilitating standups for a living. Corporate cargo cult agile in full swing. Metrics which should be team internal only are being used to judge teams across engineering. Of course this leads to teams doing all kinds of crazy things to manipulate the numbers. Teams will just trash tickets to pretend they have a zero-defect backlog. Antiquated team & personal objectives system which is heavily linked to bonuses or promotions. This only leads to everyone going for the "under-promise, over-deliver" strategy. There's no incentive to set risky/hard to achieve goals if failure means financial hurt; it's much wiser to play safe. This contributes to... Stuff moves at glacial speed. Whether it's politics, meetings, lack of resource or just not in the objectives/priorities, things take an age to get done. Everything needs a Jira ticket. If you're looking for a fast paced environment this isn't it. Too many contractors brought in to work on new feature work while existing devs do maintenance and have little to no involvement in what the future looks like. Doesn't matter if you have years of domain experience, contractors will be brought in to rebuild the system you know inside out. Quarterly objectives setting leads to an extremely short-termed vision and a constant shift in direction. Serious lack of long term thinking. More and more red tape being introduced to satisfy an overly-restrictive SOX implementation. You will constantly lose access to the things you need to do the day to day job. Welcome to the world of service desk tickets. Senior management are mostly non-existant apart from the quarterly Q&A appearances. Q&A questions are answered with so much denial they sound like they're from a communist state. Struggled to even accept that having a gate as a meeting room door meant the room was too noisy. High recent turnover of staff

Some confusion in general leadership, otherwise it's quite nice