Booking.com Software Developer reviews

3.7

74% would recommend to a friend

(260 total reviews)
avatar

Glenn Fogel

45% approve of CEO

50% positive business outlook

Software Developer employees have rated Booking.com with 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 260 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Developer professionals have a good working experience there. Booking.com is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

260 reviews
1.0
Aug 10, 2018

Developer

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good perks, though the company's getting much stingy recently, for example fruits disappear around 1630 in the afternoon - Some good people who really care about their colleagues, who I look up to from the bottom of my heart - One of the company that provides better compensation for core/mid-level devs in Amsterdam - Strong diversity within the tech department

Cons

- You need to be physically in the office from 10 to 17, your manager will lash out on you in your face if you don't. Of course WFH is not permitted by the company (though some managers still allow it). Even taking sick leave is stressful, because your manager will "discuss" your health situation the day after your absence, and claim it's not that serious enough to affect your daily work then threaten to give you bad review scores. - Toxic company culture, management bullying and retaliation is pretty common in the work place due to broken performance review process, where only the decision of your direct manager counts. So you'd better listen to them and do anything they want you to do, or you'll get screwed over your scores. - Promotions ultimately depend on your personal relationship of your direct manager and track manager. - Burnout is quite common in the company, yet management doesn't consider it a mental health issue so people continue to suffer from it. - The lack of proper manager trainings and good promotion reviews cause almost if not all the people problems in the company. Yet HR/People department and even C-level management doesn't care about this at all. - Tech innovations and best practices are not valued within the company. C-level management even states that "we are not a tech company" publicly in all-hands events.

1.0
Aug 5, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Relocation package, fruit and lunch provided on a daily basis

Cons

Bullying in the most of the teams. Some managers are bullying their team members to stay on the positions. Some managers are ignoring everything just as they don't have a team. If you are developer and want to keep your health ok: JUST DON'T go there. It is a real threat there. The management is rotten, they hired the very ignorant and greedy persons who don't manage people. They care about numbers and positions. Some managers call developers: "Livestock". Now in company used a new word: dev livestock. The usual employee is a number or livestock as they say. Just read advice and keep safe! There you can be in a real danger. It is a very toxic place.

1.0
Aug 5, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good relocation and visa support

Cons

- Software Developers are second class citizens, they are seen as 'Developers' not 'Engineers'. - No CTO for more than a year, upper management is not addressing the present issues. They are just keep lying and avoiding challenging questions during AMAs. One example is: someone asked the leadership about why the glassdoor rating is so low? They have answered that the company have a good rating (3.1) and the reason it's not great is other departments. But when you filter reviews with keyword 'Developer' you will see the Development rating is 2.4 and actually this department is having the biggest problems. - Mid level management is terrible, you can find out designers/copy writers/hr people there. There was even a presentation from one of those about how to manage people whom you don't understand work of. They don't understand developers and just make life terrible for developers and during performance reviews you will get a random score thanks to these people. - Senior/principal developers are blocking all the innovation and company is stuck with old tech and a terrible set of tools. Propose a new language or start a new project and Perl dinosaurs will come after you and block your project. - There are no code reviews or unit/integration tests. Deployments are manual you have to spent hours and hours to deploy your changes and test everything manually. Development tools and environment is terrible. Mediocre developers are always there to break the development environment by pushing their codes without testing and they get away with this thanks you mid level management. - This company is not a tech company at all, you will see it's struggling around this all the time. The company tries to build new products and fails miserably. The containers infrastructure is being build for more than two years and they keep revamping it before reaching to the usable state. - Failures are justified with 'Learnings' all the time and there is no accountability. - People are very selfish and only think about their own interests because of broken performance evaluation and reward processes. The management is either failing to see this or they are doing the same thing. Product Owners will justify stupid, broken ideas that will keep them alive or help grow their head count. Manager of software developers will take stupid technical decisions even though they are incompetent just for their own good and result will be very bad for the company and developers working under them. Some developers will keep lying and coasting doing minimum work and their team will not get this, it will only frustrate other developers around. - Developer experience is terrible, no good tools/processes and also they install spyware on your computer to track everything you do. - There are also really good people around but they leave for better opportunities, the company is failing to retain the talent it has, only the worst people or people who are waiting to finish their 5 years to get a european passport will stay. - Most of my colleagues were depressed and I have seen lots of people going to a burnout leave. - There is no clear career opportunities, promotions depend on drinking buddies.

Viewing 217 - 219 of 260 Reviews

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