Pros
Great growth opportunities for soft skills, product management, networking, etc. Great experimentation culture - you always know when some new feature is successful or not, and these things matter during review. Fantastic office & benefits. Carefully built, welcoming culture of learning, experimentation, mentoring, and growth. I've never seen anything like this :) Interesting technical challenges given the high load: *to an extent*. Tech part is not the company's strong suite if you're comparing this to FAANG, but if you're in a team that doesn't actively maintain 20-years-old legacy, it's fine.
Cons
1. Not a tech company at its heart. A lot of things that in Google or Facebook or wherever would be done by dedicated DevOps or infrastructure team, are done by product devs with a bunch of bash scripts/cron jobs. This leads to some frustration and some wasted time. If you have ambitions of making a new programming language, developing the coolest in-house cloud in the world, or something equally risky and large-scale - Booking is probably not the right place. 2. Ancient tech stack that is literally older than me. This is improving, but not as fast as you would hope, partly because of p.1: people are focused on improving the product, and not necessarily streamlining development. I'm working with a relatively modern tech stack (recent Java), and I try to stay away from the legacy code. If you're interviewing for a job - be sure to ask about the tech stack of your specific team.
